By Khalida Sarwari
A favorite fantasy among many working people is the day they get to hang up the old hat and retire, with only days of leisure and relaxation ahead.
That’s what Anne Sanquini figured was in store for her once she retired from a 30-year career in high tech 13 years ago. What she didn’t count on happening was her email no longer pinging, no one calling to see why she hadn’t reported to work, no more demands.
“Nobody cares if you get out of bed; it is the weirdest feeling,” she said. “It just stops.”
With all the extra time on her hands, Sanquini signed up to serve on the trails committee of Saratoga’s parks and recreation commission. Around this time, she also enrolled in a few classes at West Valley College in the fall of 2003. She took a CPR class, not knowing exactly what she’d do with it but figuring it would be a useful skill to know; a German class “to figure out if my brain still works”; and a geology class with a focus on California, which appealed to the Minnesota girl in her who was fascinated by the landscape of her second home state.
CPR was great and German was fine, but it was the geology class that stuck.
“I was completely hooked,” Sanquini said. “I thought, this is amazing; you can learn how the Earth works.”
Thus, what started off as a fulfillment of an idle interest and hobby turned into a second career for the 63-year-old Sanquini, a career that today has her working for GeoHazards International in Menlo Park, an organization that goes into developing countries that are prone to calamities such as earthquakes, tsunamis and landslides, and works with them to design solutions.
“I always felt high tech was so fulfilling because it’s so exciting, but what I’m doing now, I get to save lives, and that’s just amazing,” she said. “And if I do it right, I get to do it on a large scale. I can so I really have to try.”
As the saying goes, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” and that was certainly true for Sanquini. She said she was dealt “a big shock” in the beginning when she learned that in order to get a degree in geology, she’d need to know a whole lot of chemistry, physics and calculus. Chalking this up to a challenge that was simply a part of the journey, she enrolled in the classes at West Valley. She said she expected to have classmates much younger than her, but what she didn’t expect was having younger teachers. But “that was OK,” she said, because she’d gotten used to that in high tech.
“I went to all their office hours, and they started treating me almost like a colleague because I was so interested in what I was learning,” she said.
In 2007 she headed to San Jose State University, where she signed up for specialized courses in her field of study. Three years later, she graduated with a master’s degree after completing a thesis project on the origin of rocks at the Pigeon Point Formation.
Realizing she really enjoyed the research aspect of school more than anything, she decided to continue her studies at Stanford University. That, and she was just having too much fun to stop at this point.
“In geology, if you want to potentially teach it’s very helpful to have a Ph.D., and I thought, ‘What the heck, I think I can and I’m just going to try,'” she said. “I didn’t have a vision of what I’d do with it.”
The Stanford part of her journey lasted another four years, during which she tutored at West Valley College and worked on her dissertation, part of which focused on how landscapes respond to multiple earthquakes. Her research led her to Kathmandu, Nepal, where over the course of five trips in three years, she had the onerous task of making Nepali citizens realize the importance of earthquake safety in schools. Her tool was a film she made in which she interviewed teachers and local masons who worked on making schools safe.
Incidentally, she was knee-deep in this work when the big 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook the country on April 25, 2015.
“That was terrifying, because I knew what was going to happen,” Sanquini said. “The shaking was like the worst I’ve ever felt. I was in Loma Prieta, but it was nothing like this. I thought that the floor below us was going to collapse and we were going into freefall.”
Fortunately, the hotel she was staying in did not collapse. Still, she had to cut her trip short and come home to a worried family. A few months later, Sanquini went on to graduate with a Ph.D. and in the fall was hired by GeoHazards.
While Sanquini’s story of swinging from the world of computers and data to one of rocks and tectonics may seem unusual, it’s more common than some may think. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2010 that the average U.S. worker will have seven careers in his or her lifetime. For Sanquini, the challenge was that every time she started becoming good at something, she found herself getting bored.
When she set out to pursue her second career, she said she came up with a list of five criteria to help her narrow down potential fields. Her new job would have to allow her to work outdoors sometimes, be challenging, give her the opportunity to work with people she likes and respects, be a job she could continue to do as she gets older and have flexible hours. Her current job, she said, fulfills all of those requirements.
Still, she realizes she’s more fortunate than most in the opportunities she’s had, in terms of having the financial means and a supportive family to help her make a big career transition.
“I think that, for me, I don’t think I would have quit unless I was financially ready to do it,” she said.
After graduating with a journalism and mass communications degree from the University of Minnesota, Sanquini held product marketing positions at various companies, including 3M in Minnesota, Syntex, National Semiconductor, Sun Microsystems and Mentor Graphics.
Sanquini is married to Richard Sanquini, an investor in high-tech companies. The couple has lived in Saratoga for more than 20 years.
To learn more about GeoHazards and the work they do, visit geohaz.org. To donate to the organization through Silicon Valley Gives, visit geohaz.org/svgives.
