Shiri Spear ’07 took “the scenic route” to her career as a television meteorologist at Fox 25 in Boston, but she always kept her eye on the goal.
“I remember thinking as a kid, ‘I want to bottle up everything there is to know about weather and drink it,’” she says. “But I never told anyone in high school, because who does that?”
High school was in Hollis, New Hampshire, and Spear went from there to McGill University in Montreal to study atmospheric science. Secretly, she wanted to become a TV meteorologist, but she had no idea how to go about it.
After two years, she left McGill to marry her high school sweetheart, who was in the Marine Corps. She studied math and science at a community college while he was stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina; when he was deployed to Iraq, she moved home again and completed a B.A. in math education at Rivier University in Nashua, New Hampshire.
And then she went straight to UMass Lowell for a master’s degree in environmental studies with a concentration in atmospheric science. Here, she found advice on how to pursue television forecasting – and she found encouragement.
“UMass Lowell was like a family; there were 10 of us in that grad program,” she says. “I can’t tell you how much UML got me where I am today.”
Spear gave birth to her first child after buying her books at the beginning of her second year. But that barely slowed her down, even though she missed a week of classes and sometimes had to bring her daughter to campus.
“I was a TA, and I remember (Emeritus Prof.) Arnold O’Brien burping the baby when I was grading papers,” she says. “The program was so much more than just learning about atmospheric science; it was about learning how to treat people.”
She pursued an internship at WBZ-TV, where alumni Terry Eliasen ’97 and Sarah Wroblewski ’05 both worked. They and another mentor at the station “taught me everything I know,” she says.
Right after graduating, Spear “walked into” a forecasting job at WWLP-TV in Springfield, Massachusetts. She worked there for three years and at WTVJ-TV in Miami for two years before “coming home” to WFXT.
Spear loves staying involved with the meteorology program at UMass Lowell. She and Wroblewski, who worked together at WFXT for five years, taught a class together on broadcast meteorology. She regularly speaks to the campus chapter of the American Meteorological Society, and her virtual door is open to students seeking advice on how to break into the field.
She says that even though people can get instant weather updates on their phones, there will always be a role for television meteorologists, especially when severe weather is approaching.
“People aren’t always accurately interpreting the information from an app,” she says. “When a tornado warning goes up, people turn on the TV.”