Jewelry designer Ninaki Priddy went from pre-med to architecture to jewelry design. She explains why the three are very similar.

Tell me about your background. How did you get into jewelry design?

My mom is quite the sentimentalist, so our family heirlooms were always fun for dress-up when I was a little girl. Gold medallions and badges from uncles who were in the army, gem encrusted brooches, and crucifixes. There was always a narrative behind every token, but once playtime was done, she would neatly place them back in the jewelry case and up on the shelf out of reach.

I remember wearing a ring on every finger when I was fifteen. That lasted for about a year because I couldn't stand the tan lines anymore. Then I became very particular about accessorizing - looking for statement pieces only, the cocktail ring you could flash from across the room — the bigger, the better — but I could never find it, or afford it when I actually stumbled across it in Vogue.

It wasn't until I had decided to drop out as a biology major that I became fascinated with creating form, for the body, from the body. I had been interning at the UCLA med center in Santa Monica, doing rotations in Postpartum, NICU, and Labor and Delivery. I wanted to be a pediatrician, but I realized that I may not be capable of being a doctor. I found it very difficult to separate patient and science, to be in an environment that is concentrated on procedures and protocols. There is no room to be emotional and empathetic. That was fall 2001.

In limbo between majors, I decided to take a sculpture class, where I met an architect, Steffen Leisner, who began to mentor me. Sitting with a 70 lb chunk of Pink Utah Alabaster, I would carve a few snips over here, we would talk, carve a bit more on the other corner, begin a dialog of form. It was very casual. Steffen had previously worked under Frank Gehry, so I was in awe of his design sensibility. I became very curious of this world he called architecture. He had done his masters at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, SCI Arc (in 2003 I applied to the undergraduate program, and got in.)