I am an aspiring theoretical ecologist working on developing and improving tools for characterizing communities and their dynamics. 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?”.