For this talk, I will recount some of my experiences as an undergraduate physics and astronomy student at the University of Georgia, including challenges I faced and (sometimes) overcame, and lessons learned from such experiences. I will also describe how my experiences as an undergraduate helped prepare for and shape some of my future career decisions. I will then describe some of my research accomplishments after my time as an undergraduate, and how I entered into the research world of brown dwarfs and exoplanets. I will then discuss in detail one of my current projects that I'm most passionate about -- the citizen science project BackyardWorlds.org -- which engages layperson volunteers to examine infrared images to look for nearby substellar objects in the vicinity of the Sun, and has the potential to discover new planets within our own solar system.