At the age of sixteen, she entered Reed College with to study language and literature, but soon became interested in chemistry and biology.
After that, she did a six-year graduate study at the University of Washington, spending summers and Fridays at Harbor Biological Station.
[2] In 1936, Exline earned her PhD at the University of Washington and was awarded the Sterning Fellowship at Yale for postdoctoral studies in arachnological research with Professor Alexander Petrunkevitch.
In September 1943, they went to Seattle where she stayed until the end of World War II working as an instructor in the zoology department at the University of Washington.
[3] Exline also completed large amounts of work within her own home laboratory, in which she had personally curated a sizeable collection of spiders.