Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, playing with the newly revealed college degree value calculator and researching the best paying degrees available. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.
She studied English and music at Elon University, developing interests in professional writing, rhetoric, poetry, and classical piano performance. She conducted undergraduate research on Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) in the music department, as well as the role of classical Spanish music in collegiate piano instruction. Maria tries to keep her Spanish fluency by Skyping with friends in Spain and Brazil and continues to follow her favorite contemporary Spanish composers. She has worked as a writer, editor, consultant, and piano teacher, and still enjoys spending her free time playing Brahms, listening to classical music, and figuring out the logistics of an MFA in Creative Writing. Maria loves to design new origami models, do yoga, go running, and try to keep her patience while learning to play tennis.
