Julie Fogerson, assistant vice president, Idaho Regional Communications, Wells Fargo Bank in Boise

When Julie Fogerson chose communications as her college major, she thought it would let her try things out to see what she liked. She never expected she would use her degree, but she was right about it letting her explore her passions, whether it is making movies, living in Antarctica, traveling the world, learning multiple languages or working toward a doctorate in leadership.

“It’s ironic I ended up using my actual degree,” she says with a laugh.

But that degree led her from college at the Hawaii Pacific University to jobs in public relations in Seattle and New York City. It was while living in the Big Apple that she went back to school as part of a program offered by her employer, earning her master’s degree in negotiation and dispute resolution at Creighton University.

As with many things in Fogerson’s life, she may not have planned on pursing mediation, but she followed an interest that became a passion.

“Dispute resolution techniques help us in our daily lives,” she says. “As a society, I feel we’ve become so sue happy, and there’s an alternative.”

Her lifelong desire to learn and study led this Northwestern native who grew up largely in Ontario, Ore., and Pocatello, Idaho, to set out to travel the world – literally.

“I had a goal to hit every single continent and Antarctica is the hardest one,” she says of her wanderlust and eventual job on the bottom of the world. (She checked off her final continent last year with a trip to Columbia.)

She had toyed with the idea for years, since learning of programs to work there from a college friend. When her life in New York City reached a changing point, she entered the extremely competitive pool for one of a handful of office jobs at McMurdo Base.

As she waited to see if she was hired, she visited her family in Idaho. It was during that trip that she started a conversation with the brother of her sister’s husband, and the two hit it off. She got the job and headed south for a summer season, doing scheduling in the vehicle maintenance facility.

After that first season, she and her now-husband, Adam Chitwood, got married, and this time both of them were able to spend another season in Antarctica.

For Fogerson, it was about more than adventure. “Antarctica made me think about what I like to do in a way I hadn’t been able to in a long time,” she says.

And what she loves are what she calls her passion areas, and she stays involved by volunteering with theater groups and joining the Idaho Writers’ Guild. They are pursuits she doesn’t take for granted. “Experience has taught me to really think about what I love and hold that present.”

It’s this approach that earned her honors as diverse as having a short film screened at the Seattle Film Festival, to receiving an Antarctic Service Medal from the National Science Foundation, to now working on her doctorate in leadership from Creighton University.

Her new field of study falls in line with her job with Wells Fargo Bank.

It’s a job she never expected, but one she has jumped into with everything she has. “It’s the most amazing thing I never would have anticipated. It’s the best crew all in one place that I’ve ever gotten to work with,” Fogerson said. “I’m in awe of how it all came together.”

While her daily life is in Boise with her husband and stepson, Taylor, 14, she’s always looking for where opportunity will take her.

“I loved choose your own adventure books as a kid. I think of my life like that,” she says.