Amy Sweezey: Multi-Tasking Mom and Meteorologist

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Amy Sweezey: Multi-Tasking Mom and Meteorologist

As the WESH 2 News Sunrise meteorologist, you may wake up with her every morning.She’s been forecasting the weather at WESH for the last 16 years and recently received theNational Weather Association Broadcaster of the Year Award. But Amy Sweezey is alsoa mother of three, part-time homeschooler, author and advocate for STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) careers.

by Kate Slentz

She landed in her career “on accident” as she studied to be a journalist at Loyola University in Chicago. “I thought I would do newspaper or radio. I thought maybe TV but that wasn’t necessarily my ultimate goal. I just wanted to tell stories and be a journalist,” she says.

But after graduation she had a difficult time finding a job. She did various freelance and part-time work just to pay her rent in Chicago. “I went all over the country doing interviews just trying to get a job. And I had lots of people tell me, ‘You look too young, you sound too young, you’ll never make in television.’ It didn’t really discourage me. I felt like this is what I wanted to do so I just kept going until I got a job,” she reveals.

She eventually landed a position in South Bend, Indiana, and would drive two and a half hours from Chicago. “I only did it for three months, but it was still a haul. I would drive back to Chicago to sleep and do my radio job,” she says. But when she was in South Bend, she started training with the meteorologist there and he was the one that inspired her to pursue weather. She went back to school for training in meteorology at Mississippi State University.

Her next move led her to Western Michigan for a weekend weather job in

Kalamazoo. She was there for seven years and that’s where she met her husband. “I thought I would stay there forever and then I realized it’s cold and snowy. I had been a Midwestern girl my whole life and I was sick of being cold. So, I started looking for jobs in warm places. We moved here and now I’m warm and sunny most

of the time,” Amy explains.

A member of the National Weather Association (NWA), Amy was presented with the Broadcaster of the Year Award at the NWA’s national conference this past August. The NWA is a member-led professional association supporting and promoting excellence in operational meteorology, and the award is presented to an NWA member whose activities have significantly contributed to the development and presentation of weather information for public service.

She is still among the minority in weather forecasting as about 29% of females make up all weathercaster positions, according to a study by the American Meteorological Society. “I think for a long time, women had to work harder than men; they had to prove themselves more. I still think we do have to work harder to overcome some of those stereotypes out there,” Amy says of the statistics of women in meteorology.

And technology has made it even easier for people to comment or complain on Amy’s appearance and weather forecasting. “When I first got in the business we didn’t have social media so if someone wanted to complain to me, they had to get out a piece of paper and pen, write it down, put it in an envelope, pay for a stamp, and

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then mail it. I didn’t get as much criticism, but nowadays it’s so easy for people to sit behind their computers or phones. You develop a tough skin, but I will say 90% of the people are great. I also think that because I’m in people’s living rooms every morning, they feel like we’re friends, so they feel comfortable to say, ‘Hey, your hair looks terrible.’” she explains.

She wants to be a role model for other women and is passionate about getting young girls into STEM by conducting school visits and teaching students about weather. “They’re a lot of work and they’re on my own time, but there’s the personal benefit of knowing I may impact or influence others to go into this,” she says.

These visits inspired her book Let’s Talk Weather, a non-fiction book where she explains the science behind the forecast and the tools she uses for predicting

weather change. “I had the concept for this book for years, but I just didn’t know how to make it happen,” Amy explains. She self-published a fiction book first, It Never, Ever Snows in Florida. “At the time, my children were in kindergarten, first and second grades. I was part-time homeschooling them and we would talk about the seasons, winter and snow. My kids, who were born in Florida, had no concept of that. So, an idea was born,” she adds.

She still part-time homeschools her children, who are now in ninth, seventh and fifth grades, on Monday and Wednesday afternoons. This way she gets to spend quality time with them because her morning newscast schedule requires her to wake at 2am.

“We’ve had to adjust our lives around it for sure,” she says of her unique schedule. “My husband, fortunately, is self-employed, so he can work his schedule around mine. He takes the kids to school in the mornings while I’m at work.”

She does her best to participate in her children’s after-school activities — her eldest daughter dances, her son plays basketball and her youngest daughter plays volleyball — but with a 7pm bedtime it is challenge. “Because we homeschool, we will try and get all our work done and do special things on Mondays and Wednesdays. Instead of going to family dinners, we’ll go out to lunch on Wednesday afternoons,” she says.

Amy also tries to carve out family time and quiet time on the weekends and is constantly re-evaluating the family’s schedule. “There’s pros and cons to every job. Maybe this won’t be worth it for me forever. We sit down and have those kinds of talks as a family. I think being flexible is important. I’m not a very flexible person but my husband and kids have taught me to go with the flow,” she says.

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