User:RovingLibrarianSam/sandbox

Born in Rockville, Connecticut in 1993, Samantha is a librarian, political activist, proud wife-mother-sister-daughter-cousin-niece-etc. Her mother, Anna - now retired for health reasons - was a bus driver and nail technician. Her father is a technician who specializes in gas pump repair.

Mairson loves book club meetings, Anne of Green Gables, discussing the merits of higher education, organizing, managing her finances, and getting in a good workout. She still dreams of touching The Great Wall of China, painting a room orange, and helping build the world's Great Gaming Library. For misbehavior, Sam looks to ice cream, sex, and day-to-day miscommunications.

Mairson briefly attended Elon University in North Carolina after graduating high school, where she dropped out in Spring of 2011 for financial reasons. She took two gap years in which she traveled the country visiting friends, began couchsurfing in Asheville, NC, and joined 2 back-to-back AmeriCorps programs. From May 2012 to September 2012, Samantha worked in the California Conservation Corps Backcountry Trails Program. She was the only 18-year-old woman admitted to the program at the time. Sam described this experience as one of the "best and most formative of her life". She learned to backpack and live in backcountry wilderness settings, skills which she would later use to hike the North Carolina-to-Connecticut section of the Appalachian Trail. Her trail name was "Connecticut Girl" and later, "Noodles".

After the Backcountry Trails Program, Mairson served on a wildland firefighting team in the AmeriCorps NCCC program based out of Denver, Colorado. During her stint in NCCC, Mairson also worked at a Boys and Girls Club and public library in Farmington, New Mexico, and at 2 state parks in Arkansas.

At the end of her AmeriCorps service, she backpacked through Europe with her older brother, Zachary. When she returned to the states, she applied and was admitted to Black Mountain SOLE (BMS). BMS was an experimental "Self-Organized Learning Environment" that promoted MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) learning. It was a YMCA campus-based higher education collective in Asheville, North Carolina. When it disbanded in April of the year Samantha arrived, she decided to hike back to Connecticut where she had been admitted to the University of Connecticut. "Noodles" walked a portion of the Appalachian Trail from May - August 2014 with Allie "David Bowie" MacDonald, her close friend from Elon.

"Connecticut Girl" graduated in May 2017 with a Bachelor of Arts in Digital Media and Design. She minored in Spanish and concentrated in Digital Humanities (what she liked to call "Digital Tools Applied to Research"). Mairson graduated from the Honors Program. She was particularly influenced by Assistant Professor Clarissa Ceglio, her thesis and research adviser. While going to school, Mairson worked for the UConn Library as a staff assistant and web development researcher. She also worked as a trip leader and marketing coordinator for UConn Recreation Outdoors Program. She interned for Hartford Public Library's YouMedia space, the Charter Oak Cultural Center, and the American Antiquarian Society. She remains an active supporter of her hometown Tolland Public Library, where she first volunteered as an eighth grader. With the guidance of children's librarian, Ginny, and the staff at TPL, Mairson discovered and fell in love with librarianship.

In August 2017, Mairson began her graduate studies in Library and Information Science at Syracuse University. She concentrated her electives and also earned a certificate in Information Security Management. She is currently finishing her last 6 credits online, and moved from Syracuse to New York City to start building a life with her husband, David.

Samantha and David met at the University of Connecticut in October of 2014 at Peter Singer philosophy lecture on food ethics. They married in Vergennes, Vermont on September 15, 2018.

Mairson currently works for EveryLibrary, a national political action committee (PAC) that fights for voter support of libraries throughout the country. Mairson began work there as an intern in August 2018. She is a web developer, social media manager, campaign assistant and, perhaps above all - political librarian.