There is quite a bit to my life, and perhaps this is a great place for my class to get an understanding as to why I know what I know in class. Hint: I'm a bit older than the traditional undergrad student.
I was born in Dallas in December of 1986. My family moved around Texas and even up into Virginia until I was 2 years old. At that point my family decided to settle in Harper, TX. Harper is about a 25 minute drive west of Fredericksburg on Highway 290. It's a small town and has a 1A school.
I attended school there with involvement in almost anything I could get into as an honors student. I was in 4H, I was involved with classes to learn basic old school coding known as Q-Basic, played football, basketball and ran on the track team. 2 years after the death of my mother, my freshman year saw my father become ill enough that he could no longer care for me. I then moved in with my brother in Harker Heights, TX, a suburb town of Killeen. I went from a 1A school to a 5A school. I stayed active in as many extracurriculars as I could except sports classes. I was in the German club, Theater Club, AV Club for both the Step Team and varsity women's basketball. I was in advanced placement classes almost the entire time I was in high school.
During my senior year, despite being my own independent household, my brother decided to put my work income on his tax return. It wound up costing me any FAFSA support I could receive because despite my brother being father to 3 kids at the time, his low end middle class wages were about $30 over the limit to receive aid. I had zero intent to take out loans and only a handful of scholarships had been awarded to me despite all the recommendations from teachers and my good grades.
I decided to see what the military recruitment offices had to offer, so that I could get some sort of work experience and receive money to go to college. I went to the Air Force office and they practically put me on a waiting list to even discuss whether they should do paperwork with me. I wasn't about to touch the Army as I lived around Fort Hood and knew that just wasn't for me. Same went for Marines as I already saw them as the Army version of the Navy. The Navy office talked to me the same day, and was concerned that my family was hyping up how smart I was. I scored excellently on a practice ASVAB and they began to rush paperwork to get me into a testing facility and get me processed.
I was given the same spiel after testing I had been given my entire youth: you can be anything you want. Pick the job and it is yours. I initially chose intelligence specialist because advancement looked great and it had an eight thousand dollar sign on bonus. The Discovery Channel convinced me to change my job when I saw a person in that job field having to work with Navy Seals on a sub and being shot out of a special device in a torpedo tube. I decided to change over to a position in the nuclear propulsion sector of the Navy. It offered me 4 grand more on bonus and would make me a rank E-3 from the start of my career.
I shipped out in January of 2006 to Great Lakes, IL to attend 8 weeks of basic training. If you've done sports and athletics like I had done, it was an easy task. It was winter and everything was indoors to make sure nobody got severly hurt. The Navy does recognize that some of their members are going to be in jobs where it is hard to recruit people and a lot of money is spent training them. They are not a "soldier first and whatever your job your coded as comes second," type of organization with their mentality.
I was put into 3 separate sequential schools after that. I was selected to be an electronics technician out of a group of three jobs. The other two jobs are Electricians Mate (Electricians) and Machinist's Mate (Mechanics). The path and education for that selection has the sailor learn a bit of everything to include the electrician's job and mechanic's job more so than those two would learn my job or each other's jobs. The reason being that when the plant is shut down and the commissioned officer in charge leaves the plant, or when the plant is in operation and that officer is incapacitate, the next in line until another senior official arrives is the reactor operator. During operations that will always be an electronics tech. So, over the course of 1.5 years I had 3.5 years of electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering concepts stuffed into my head.
I was shipped off to the USS Enterprise in early 2008 and went into the shipyard with it for a major overhaul and maintenance period. Life was a living hell. To get a better sense of what was going on I have linked an article that speaks of a recent issue with an aircraft carrier in the shipyard and the backlash the Navy received over its response to the situation.
By the end of 2009 my body apparently been through enough. I had been involved in 60-70 work weeks almost non-stop in physically stressful living conditions. I was getting sick on a regular basis, and earlier in the year caught Swine Flu (this was when Swine Flu first appeared in the world) and nearly died from it. Trying to get help medically for everything going on took a toll on my mental health, and I was removed from the ship over the prescription of stimulants. In this job field, no mental health medications are allowed.
I went to a limited duty command where it was discovered over the course of my mental health treatment that I was developing a pulmonary condition. The Navy did numerous tests on me to determine the cause. I was checked for cancer, AIDS, cystic fibrosis, heavy metal poisoning, and more. The Navy finally found out after two separate lung biopsies turning up nothing, that I have rheumatoid arthritis. During this time I brushed up on audio editing skills, basic blogging and photoshop in my off time. And after 6 years and a few months of being in the Navy, I was medically retired from the service. This was eventually labeled a permanent diability by the department of defense a few years later.
When I left the service I went back to a linen processing plant I had worked at in Killeen while in high school before I had left for the Austin area. I lasted one week there because the job I was told I was to take upon return was given to someone else. I was immediately hired to do customer service support over phones and chat at a webhosting company named Hostgator. I had never set up a Wordpress site or had I done HTML to the extent done in this current web publishing class. All I knew was how to set up FTP for access to torrent seedboxes. Never heard of these? Here's a rather recent write-up about what a seedbox is and why one would want to use it. I was told I was the first person they had ever hired with the minimal knowledge of this field. But I had shown so much retrention of information from the intial offer for an interview and the interview itself that they felt I would do great. I took their two week piad training course and was the first to yet again know nothing but yet pass their training test and live floor test.
I lasted roughly 5 months and was terminated. The company was sold to another major webhosting company that owned Bluehost at the time. Because of my quick growth and major attention to detail, it was outlined by a supervisor outside of my chain of command, that I was a job threat to the current supervisors in my chain. I was labeled as being 60% ahead on the training path needed to become a manager and could become one within another 6-7 months. My supervisors had been with the company for over 2 years and were not getting this type of movement. The new owners were looking for areas to cut and make the company more efficient. My name kept popping up in the new owner orientation meetings with the entire staff. I was consistently pointed out as someone that was aware of numerous deficienices with actual methods to solve long time issues. I was consistently kept out of these meetings by my supervisors until my termination.
After this job I worked in a temp position for Tradestar Inc in the Austin area. I was placed as a cabling technician putting ethernet lines into educational buildings. I did this job for about a month. I was responsible for intstalling all of the networking cables for the nursing school college building for the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, TX. I was there for about a month. This was around early October of 2012. At that point I was awarded social secuirty disability insurance and my son was about to be born, so I stepped away from work force.
Fast forward to June of 2014 and my wife and I decided to move to Austin, TX in hopes of getting closer to a workforce area my wife was familiar with: IT work. My wife had been an IT in the Navy Reserves when we met in 2010. Most jobs were in Austin but nobody would hire unless we lived closer to the area. We bought a house in Onion Creek as it was the only thing we could afford at the time. The city hadn't announced it yet, but the house was about to be in a block to be bought by the city over flood zone concerns. That fall I enrolled at Austin Community College with a focus on general studies to get my core classes out of the way at a minimum. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do professionally so that seemed to be the best path at the time.
At one point, I shifted my focus over to motion graphic effects. For one semester I was in this plan, and I left it because I found out that basically none of the credits were going to transfer to a 4-year university. I took digtial imaging (photoshop class), basic graphic design (design but using illustrator), and basic illustration (a class that teaches how to draw and shade correctly) within that degree plan.
In late 2015 my neighborhood flooded and I had approximately 3 feet of water in my home. My family wasn't injured from the flood. We lost everything in our garage at the time, all of our furniture and appliance, and a big chunk of clothes and toys for our son because it was all in a dresser. It was about $25-30 thousand dollars of stuff lost. We couldn't live in our home at the time. We spent roughly 3-4 weeks in a makeshift shelter, and then another month living out of hotel before we could the city to finish the buyout of our home and close on a new home in San Marcos just before Christmas.
My wife and I both enrolled at Texas State University at that time and began class in January of 2016. I was enrolled as a Mass Communications student with a focus on Electronic Media. I found out about the college radio station KTSW and applied to start in the summer. This was back when KTSW was located within Old Main, and the semester before the big move. I started off as a regular DJ and audio production assisstant. By spring of 2017 I was a Custom Show DJ with the new wave show titled Ranch It Up. Summer semester saw me also take on Asisstant Production Director through the end of Fall 2017.
At this point I had switched to Digital Media Innovation in the department after being accepted fully into the Mass Comm major. The amount of time I spent taking care of college and the amount of time I spent taking care of family was taking a toll on my family, so I did not enroll for spring of 2018. I kept using the skills I had picked up over the years in 2019 through today when I started to write and lobby for cannabis reforms in the state of Texas. It eventually blossumed into writing, editing, website managment, speaking at the capitol and events, and even hosting a podcast for the non-profit that I has me now as the Deputy Director.
My writing and advocacy in this field, coupled with my prior experiences has pushed me to get a degree beyond my degree at Texas State. I've been told by attorneys over the past year or so that I should look into goint to law school. Once it was discovered that I was a communications degree student with honors, the push became harder from them. Writing and communications degrees are the top degree programs law schools like to see for applicants looking to enroll. Most law is written in AP style, and communication to more than one person is paramount in that fieldof work.
So, I've decided to return to Texas State now that I can devote more time to it. Get credit for the work I am already doing in the field, and complete my degree.
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