Employee Feature: From quartz to queries — Carrie Felton finds patterns in minerals and Salesforce

Carrie Felton has “always been drawn to systems and structures and patterns.” The affinity shows up everywhere — in her day job designing Salesforce solutions, in the genealogical database she built to track the lineage of her extended family of 200, and in the geometric lattices of her rock and gem collection.

“I never go anywhere without at least some of my rocks,” she said.

Felton, a senior Salesforce system administrator for UIT’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) team for University Connected Learning (UCL) and adjunct instructor who teaches Operations and Information Systems in the David Eccles School of Business, grew up with a father whose love of geology shaped family life.

Her dad, Lloyd, worked as a wellsite geologist in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wyoming before settling in Utah. Felton said her father was an expert in Utah geology, “particularly around oil formations in the 1980s.”

Between high school and college (she earned her Honors Bachelor of Arts in history and communication, Bachelor of Science in mathematics with a statistics emphasis, Master of Science in Information Systems, and graduate certificate in Cybersecurity Management from the U), she joined him at wellsite surveys to “look at all the rocks under the microscope.”

That early exposure made rock hunting feel as natural as a walk on the beach.

“To this day, we trade rocks back and forth like a love language,” Felton said.

She brings back raw finds scooped up on hikes or coastline rambles for their texture and history, and polished ones bought at gem faires for their color and geometry. Felton is especially drawn to quartz — amethyst, citrine, and iron-stained varieties that reveal how elements and environment give each mineral a unique character.

When a layered rock is quarried and cut into blocks, its layers look like stripes that can be subtle, vivid, straight, wavy, or chaotic. Bringing a stone with striped patterns into your home is not just a stunning piece of décor, it’s a reminder that much of earth’s history is recorded in layers of sediment accumulated over time. If you’ve ever stood on the rim of a rocky canyon, you’ve witnessed the progression of rock layers laid down by former beaches, tropical coral atolls, sweeping rivers, and muddy floodplains.

Felton grins while holding up two specimens — a purple amethyst and pale yellow citrine “as big as my head” that anchor a shelf in her home office. “You wouldn’t know it to look at them, but these both have the same chemical structure.”

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Felton’s desire to study structures started after taking a job at a local law office (early on, she wanted to be lawyer). Serendipitously, the firm was switching software, and Felton stepped in.

“I went into their office to learn about law, and I ended up learning about systems,” she said. “I transitioned their software, set up in a new database, and became their database administrator.”

After an injury sidelined her law school plans, she followed the systems breadcrumb trail — various database administration roles, then a position in University Connected Learning, which joined UIT last August.

“Now I get to be the architect for our team and design our solutions,” she said. “We get to do fun things like automate 100,000 emails in a year and reduce manual workload for folks so they can focus on improving the lives of students.”

Satisfaction is in the structure — seeing a complex process, mapping it cleanly, and empowering people with the result.

If Salesforce workflows and database schemas represent one kind of logic, quartz is another. Felton delights in the ways small changes in an environment sculpt dramatically different outcomes. Lifting an oblong amethyst, she says, “I just really enjoy that nature came up with this shape.”

Her collection is a mix of raw pieces with visible growth lines, polished cabochons she imagines cutting herself (someday she’d like to get into lapidary — the art of cutting, grinding, and polishing stones — and return to jewelry-making), and larger statement pieces from the Gem Faire.

While quipping about her collection containing “limited editions” as quarries tap out, the real value is personal: “When people don’t know what to give me for a holiday or a birthday, it’s like, ‘Here’s a rock,’ and I’m always like, I love it. Legitimately. Every rock is beautiful.”

Ask Carrie what ties it all together and she doesn’t hesitate.

“Whether it’s rocks and the way that they grow or legal precedents or database systems — structures just click in my brain.”

It’s why she can spend an hour configuring a Salesforce automation in the morning and an hour studying crystal growth lines at night, with the same deliberate focus.

“When it makes sense, it makes sense.”

Between teaching business analysis on campus or photographing “moody winter skies” from the Rice-Eccles Stadium-adjacent Ken Garff University Club, Felton has crafted a life that honors order and wonder. For her, it all connects.

 

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