TOWAMENCIN – Fourteen years ago, North Penn Class of 2002 graduate Danielle Vollmar sat in the North Penn High School auditorium as a senior with only a dream to become a renowned meteorologist.

This past Friday, Vollmar returned to that auditorium to talk to North Penn students about the journey she endured to become an Emmy nominated meteorologist.

“[The great tornado outbreak of 1985] is one of the reasons I’m interested in severe weather,” Vollmar began, capturing the audience’s attention with an enthralling story about her first experience with tornadoes. “[Its] why my career took me where it did.”

Vollmar went on, telling stories about all of the different severe storms she experienced over the next decade. She then talked about the day Glenn “Hurricane” Schwartz came to visit, and he put her class on television during a live noon broadcast.

“That was the day I said I wanted to be a meteorologist,” said Vollmar “I went home and told my parents. My parents said ‘why don’t you write him a letter’? So, I wrote him a handwritten letter and I left my home telephone line. He then called me, and he invited me to come up to the station. That’s where I did my senior graduation project. [Schwartz] pushed me to do well.”

Aside from Schwartz, Vollmar attributed a lot of her success to her mother, who also pushed her to do well in everything she did – in and out of school.

“My mom didn’t let me go to the mall during the week,” Vollmar told the students. Her mom, she added, would not let her go out during the week unless it was school related, so Vollmar joined the field hockey, winter track, and lacrosse team. That proved to be more beneficial to her than she ever thought.

“The more involved you are, the more you learn time management,” shared Vollmar “You learn how to get your tasks done, and that will help you further your career down the road.”

The lessons Vollmar learned in high school, she added, carried over to her collegiate career at Cornell University. While there, she had a weather column in the Cornell Daily Sun, and much to her surprise, she was the first female meteorologist the paper had ever had since its start up in 1880. It was at that time Vollmar realized that “we’re finally starting to get women into the meteorology and math and science field.”

Her time on her school’s newspaper led Vollmar to her first on-air job at ABC when she was only 20 years old. She described it as a shaky start, for she remembers herself being a “deer in headlights”, but she was actually grateful for that opportunity.

“All of that helped me grow and get to where I am. You’re going to have to make mistakes in order to get to where you are,” Vollmar emphasized to the students. That led her into her talk about the non-glamorous moments of her career.

“I wish I could say my whole career was perfect and everything was happy, but obviously bad things happen and you go through challenges.”

Vollmar told the story of a male co-worker that questioned her legitimacy in the meteorology career. He doubted her, and one day he forced her to try a newscast on the spot. Vollmar asked for a quick practice before doing it in front of everybody.

“There are two types of people,” the man told Vollmar “ones who jump in a pool and drown and those that swim. I think I know who you are.” At that moment, Vollmar wanted to prove him wrong, and that was exactly what she did. When he returned, she did a near perfect newscast, and he then turned to her and said “Oh, maybe you will swim.”

“I remember how he made me feel, [but] he actually helped me. He actually helped me [because] he lit my fire,” explained Vollmar “You can take a negative experience and let it ruin you, or you can take a negative experience and make it positive.”

Vollmar applied this quote further, for she applied it to the severity of her job as a meteorologist. She tied it specifically to a time when she was working in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and tornadoes had just ripped through the area. After the storm, her station asked her to go out and report on the damage.

“In the worst of times, you saw neighbors coming together. When you go out and see people searching for stuff, it gives you a new perspective,” described Vollmar “It showed me why I was doing what I was doing.”

After that experience, however, despite the reassurance of her job, Vollmar decided to shake everything up, and she hosted a morning show in Dallas, Texas. It was a fun part of her career because “you name it, [she] probably did it.” One night her station asked her to report on the weather, and that opened her eyes up to what she left behind.

“In the fall, there was a tornado outbreak, and they asked me to go out. [While out there,] I realized I was getting antsy and I was missing weather. After that night, I said that I wanted to go back to weather.”

Sure enough, Vollmar found herself in Boston, Massachusetts back in a newsroom as a meteorologist.

“At 28 years old, I felt like my career was finally coming to where I wanted it to be,” Vollmar said, while still emphasizing her long journey and persistence to the students. She explained that “It took me a lot of years. I had to try different things and wear different hats before I got to where I was.”

To finish the presentation, Vollmar detailed her time working as a Hazardous Weather Test Bed Researcher two years ago and her time presenting her and her intern’s research on the Revere Tornado at the National Weather Association Conference this past fall.

These stories helped her stress the importance of “never stop educating yourself” because “we can always learn something new every day of our lives.”

Vollmar ultimately left the students with the message never give up on your dreams. Despite how cliché the message sounded, Vollmar was excited to share it, especially with her own high school.

“It’s really neat to see it come full circle and come back to my hometown,” remarked Vollmar “I’m hoping somebody in this room catches the bug that math or science is cool. I want everybody to see, reach for your dreams and anything can happen.”