04-24-2017, 10:51 AM
Another (old) outsider here, 2001 graduate of Messiah College, Business Administration with a concentration in Business Information Systems. My roommate in school was from this area so after graduation I said goodbye to upstate NY in pursuit of that good sweet tea.
First job was at an antique & sterling silverware place as a one-man show building out their computer network and developing an online sales division. Nothing existed when I started, so it was a good crash course in all things IT. Owner was happy as my work selling/promoting them online was grossing about 1.5M annually. I guess technically I achieved my goal of making my first million by the time I was 25, it just wasn’t my money to keep. =( Let this be a lesson, always be specific when writing your goals.
Wife is from upstate NY also and around 05 we got the itch to move back closer to family and start our own, so I took a job with Lockheed Martin for the DoE at a nuclear propulsion development site doing….things, lots of things. I started a consulting company on the side with a co-worker at LM and we had enough clients for him to jump full time to that, As we were getting close to supporting both of us FT, I found out my daughter was coming and chickened out, but kept on PT while still at LM. After a few years, I ended up being picked off by a recruiter that waved lots of green under my nose to switch to health care insurance at CDPHP. Fairly stressful but rewarding career there as their Chief Engineer and then Technical Architect. Too much to cram into this post, but a lot of technical and business system design, security, performance tuning, project mgmt., overseeing teams of system engineers, dba’s, programmers, etc.
Living in NY as an adult wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, long cold winters, high taxes, etc so we took aim back here circa 2011 and decided to plop roots down with hope the grandparents would move south after retirement. Not much in the area for tech work but ended up at JMU as the endpoint mgmt. lead. It’s a lot of client/application management for pc and macs, mixed with my own personal quest to unify Information Technology at a University level. It is such a redundant environment of isolated pockets doing whatever; it drives me insane. This was several steps backwards in every facet as far as career tracking goes, but the job serves its purpose and I have not had my phone ring once after hours for work related issues, so there is something to be said for that.
As far as the other side of the coin goes, my wife has a masters in early childhood education and is Montessori certified. She started her own program here, <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.ValleyMontessori.School">http://www.ValleyMontessori.School</a><!-- m --> and has continued to grow to the point she bought/remodeled her own building. I do a lot of behind the scenes/office stuff for that, but if any of you have friends/significant others that want classroom time/experience, let me know. (or if you need to satisfy community service hours…for some reason…there’s always stuff to do at the school)
Future: I knocked out the CISSP cert after meaning to do so for years, so I might start looking around soon for other opportunities. Not planning to leave the area, so something remote with a couple days travel to nova/Richmond if needed might be the ticket.
Well, this turned into more of a mini-biography than a ‘what can I offer graduates’ but I have enjoyed reading through the posts, great to get a sense of the people behind the cars. Happy to answer any questions or give unsolicited career advice, i.e if you're in a technical field, grab whatever certs are related. Lockheed and CDPHP both footed the bill for a ton of good training, but their policy was not to pay for cert tests and I figured I didn't need those, so no need to pay out of pocket. I now see how useful they are to demonstrate proof of knowledge for future employment opportunities, and sometimes are a pre-req for certain positions. I missed out on a CISO position because the CISSP was required.
First job was at an antique & sterling silverware place as a one-man show building out their computer network and developing an online sales division. Nothing existed when I started, so it was a good crash course in all things IT. Owner was happy as my work selling/promoting them online was grossing about 1.5M annually. I guess technically I achieved my goal of making my first million by the time I was 25, it just wasn’t my money to keep. =( Let this be a lesson, always be specific when writing your goals.
Wife is from upstate NY also and around 05 we got the itch to move back closer to family and start our own, so I took a job with Lockheed Martin for the DoE at a nuclear propulsion development site doing….things, lots of things. I started a consulting company on the side with a co-worker at LM and we had enough clients for him to jump full time to that, As we were getting close to supporting both of us FT, I found out my daughter was coming and chickened out, but kept on PT while still at LM. After a few years, I ended up being picked off by a recruiter that waved lots of green under my nose to switch to health care insurance at CDPHP. Fairly stressful but rewarding career there as their Chief Engineer and then Technical Architect. Too much to cram into this post, but a lot of technical and business system design, security, performance tuning, project mgmt., overseeing teams of system engineers, dba’s, programmers, etc.
Living in NY as an adult wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, long cold winters, high taxes, etc so we took aim back here circa 2011 and decided to plop roots down with hope the grandparents would move south after retirement. Not much in the area for tech work but ended up at JMU as the endpoint mgmt. lead. It’s a lot of client/application management for pc and macs, mixed with my own personal quest to unify Information Technology at a University level. It is such a redundant environment of isolated pockets doing whatever; it drives me insane. This was several steps backwards in every facet as far as career tracking goes, but the job serves its purpose and I have not had my phone ring once after hours for work related issues, so there is something to be said for that.
As far as the other side of the coin goes, my wife has a masters in early childhood education and is Montessori certified. She started her own program here, <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.ValleyMontessori.School">http://www.ValleyMontessori.School</a><!-- m --> and has continued to grow to the point she bought/remodeled her own building. I do a lot of behind the scenes/office stuff for that, but if any of you have friends/significant others that want classroom time/experience, let me know. (or if you need to satisfy community service hours…for some reason…there’s always stuff to do at the school)
Future: I knocked out the CISSP cert after meaning to do so for years, so I might start looking around soon for other opportunities. Not planning to leave the area, so something remote with a couple days travel to nova/Richmond if needed might be the ticket.
Well, this turned into more of a mini-biography than a ‘what can I offer graduates’ but I have enjoyed reading through the posts, great to get a sense of the people behind the cars. Happy to answer any questions or give unsolicited career advice, i.e if you're in a technical field, grab whatever certs are related. Lockheed and CDPHP both footed the bill for a ton of good training, but their policy was not to pay for cert tests and I figured I didn't need those, so no need to pay out of pocket. I now see how useful they are to demonstrate proof of knowledge for future employment opportunities, and sometimes are a pre-req for certain positions. I missed out on a CISO position because the CISSP was required.