Michele received her Bachelor’s degree in 2003 in Environmental Chemistry and Geology from Hampshire College, a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts. After college, she returned to her home state of New Jersey to work as a technician in the marine geochemistry lab at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University, where she began working on trace elements in corals. She decided to continue working on the project for her Ph.D. dissertation. She started diving in 2006, and used this award towards her Rescue Diver certification that she needed to conduct field research on corals in the Florida Keys.