I am an aspiring theoretical ecologist in both the Environmental Studies and Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology programs working on theory and algorithms to infer causality in dynamic ecosystems from observational data. What does that actually mean? Well, I spend my time buried in equations and code, trying to improve the ways ecologists answer questions like “What role does the structure of a food web play in its stability and persistence?”, “What structures of competitive interactions best support restoration efforts?”, “In what ways can we infer dynamics of an unknown community from a heavily studied one?”, “What is the impact of species aggregation on predictions of community stability?”, “Do communities develop in predictable ways with regard to the way they are structured?”, and most importantly, “What are ecological interactions, and how can we realistically and usefully describe them?”. Answering these questions would not be possible without the collaborations and methodological exposure I have found in the IQ Biology program.