For the First 3 Years of High School, My Experience Was Pretty Typical. I Was Active In
For the first 3 ½ years of high school, my experience was pretty typical. I was active in sports year-round, I was a member of the chess team and several scholastic clubs, and I maintained a solid GPA of 3.5. It was the final semester of my senior year that my home life began tounravel— my parents started divorce proceedings, and due to the choices that one of my parents made I was unable to apply for financial aid. Seemingly overnight my future options changed. There was no college fund waiting for me, and my other parent couldn’t afford to send me to the state school that I had planned to attend. Thus, my only remaining choice was community college courses that I would pay for myself.
Initially I tried to put on a fake smile and make the best of a challenging situation, but in reality I was crestfallen. I had always strived for more, and attending community college felt like I was settling for less. These feelings, coupled with the acrimonious divorce that I and my younger siblings were caught in the middle of, really affected me. My grades were average at best, I was working a menial job, and I was living at home. Not quite the grand vision I had dreamt for myself.
This stagnant situation continued for a few years, although at the end I was only attending one or two classes a semester. Finally, on July 8, 2005, my birthday, in fact, everything came crashing down. I lost the job where I had been working full time, and my company car. I now had no job and no car, and I still lived at home. I didn’t sleep much that night. I couldn’t shake the harsh reality of my life. I decided that this was NOT how my life was going to go and I decided that I needed a major change. I looked up the nearest United States Marine Corps recruiter and I went there the next day. I shipped out to San Diego for boot camp 5 weeks later, ready to start the next chapter in my life.
//talk about Marine Corps here
The Marine Corps taught me how to be a leader, the value of hard work, and that you’re only as good as the weakest cog in the machine. I had the opportunity to be a platoon and duty section leader, and I participated in Habitat for Humanity and Toys for Tots. Serving in the military provided me with a breadth of experience and shaped my personal qualities into who I am today.
Following my Honorable Discharge from the military I felt reinvigorated and ready to take on the world. I enrolled at Southern Illinois University- Edwardsville full time while working for the Department of Homeland Security. I had never programmed before, but I enjoy problem-solving and logic-based problems, so a degree in Computer Science seemed like a great fit. I was also able to finish a minor in philosophy, which is my first academic love. I joined the student government and implemented SIUE’s first online Student Government election. This project saved the school thousands of dollars and increased voter count by 150% from theprior year.
Looking back on my time at SIUE I can see theindelible values that the Marine Corps instilled in me. I never stopped trying to improve myself personally and professionally, I realized that there was no alternative to hard work, and I found myself naturally takingon leadership roles in group projects. One such group project was my Senior Project, a year-long endeavor where a small team of students had to design and implement a solution to a problem posed by an external client. My team consisted of myself and two other individuals, and our project revolved around making programming accessible to blind students. One of my teammates had an issue with meeting deadlines for his work, so together we created smaller tasks for him with clear milestones and delivery dates. These clear directives, coupled with the support of myselfour other teammate, helped him become a valuable member of the team, and we ultimately met every goal the client laid out for us, culminating in an A for both semesters.
Following graduation in December of 2012, I found employment with Enterprise Holdings as a software engineer. My initial project with them was a rewrite of a major application for tracking claims for rental cars. During the early phases of the project, the vision that the architects had was similar to the vision of the outgoing system, replete with the same tech stack. When I saw the architecture I asked the simple question “Why are we doing it this way?” Web technology had come a long way since the outgoing application’s inception, so naturally I suggested leveraging new technologies like JSON, HTML5, responsive layouts, and Single-Page-Application frameworks like Angular. Some of these recommendations were received well and were included in the project.
After spending 18 months working on corporate software I felt that my skills were plateauing. I decided that I wanted to solve new, unique problems. I was recruited by a local consulting firm to lead their custom development and customer relationship management and back-end accounting software. Crafting solutions from scratch and being responsible for implementing them really changed my understanding of software engineering and architecture. Any developer can define a solution to a clear problem, but when the question is open-ended, for example “How do we improve performance?” or “How can we scale if we need to manage 300% more active connections,”it takes an approach that has holistic knowledge of the entire technology landscape.
It was with this new-found knowledge that I moved into my next role, leading the development and architecture from the ground up for the Department of Justice. My key project during this time was creating a website for the DOJ’s Body-Worn Camera initiative for Law Enforcement Officers. This project was a large undertaking for several reasons: an accelerated timeline with no ability to miss the deadline (the President was giving a speech on it on the day it was to be unveiled), key personnel from the White House having to vet everything, and a constantly evolving vision from the client.. This was a high-visibility project within the DOJ, and everyone wanted to have a hand in it. This led to my team and I having to give demos to large groups of people several times a week. In the end, though, the vision was executed on budget and on time, and the site went live on June 1st, 2015, the same day President Obama gave a speech in Newark, NJ, about his Body-Worn Camera initiative.
When I look back at how far I’ve come since I walked into the Marine Corps Recruiters office,I feel proud, but I am careful to not “rest on my laurels.” My motto is “Never Settle,” so I have identified my next career challenge and the steps that I need to take to achieve it. I want my next role to be in Product Ownership for a major tech firm like Google or Apple. I have identified a few weaknesses in my current skillset and I believe that a PSM of Technology Management will fill those knowledge and skill gaps and prepare me to accomplish my goal. I look forward to using the training and education that I receive at Georgetown to make an even greater impact on the technology landscape.