Education

University of Wisconsin – Whitewater Whitewater, WI
September, 1993 – May, 1997
Bachelor of Science in Management Computer Systems

• Graduated Cum Laude
• Active member of AITP and the Honor Student Association.
  I served as a board member multiple times in both organizations.

What Have I Been Learning Since Graduating College?

Since college, I’ve continued to investigate and learn new technologies.

When the water ski show team I was a member of needed to setup a good website, I went out and investigated several popular blogging platforms and finally settled on WordPress because it offered a lot more functionality that the typically blogging platforms at the time and seemed like it could easily be used to host a full fledged website. The team’s website has been transformed into a great resource for people to find out about the team and has lead to several paid road shows for the team and many international trips for the team to compete around the world.

To stay up to date on WordPress, I now follow a variety of WordPress related website to learn how to make better use of the powerful tool that WordPress has become.

My curiosity into WordPress isn’t the lone example. The ski team’s tournament show videos and end of year highlight videos have also benefited from my curiosity and now look like they were professionally produced since I investigated both how to master DVDs and create and edit videos. The same process I used to look into blogging platforms went into this process. I cast a wide net and looked at the available software tools to use and finally settled on one that both met my needs to create the DVDs and videos and was also affordable.

While working at Epic, the server side programming language they use for their software (called Cache or MUMPS) is one that isn’t widely used or even taught, but over the course of a few weeks I learned the language and was able to start programming in it.

While at CUNA Mutual Group, one of the routine tasks my programming group had to do was daily builds of the software we were developing. The daily builds were taking someone several hours each day to perform. I looked into the scripting options available for the version control software the team was using, wrote a small VB programming to read a configuration file and create the necessary script commands to automatically compile the projects each day. What use to take someone several hours each day to do, could now be kicked off, left unattended, and barring any compilation errors, a new daily build would be created over the course of about 30 minutes.

These are just a few examples of how I’ve continued my education since college and use my curiosity to figure out how to solve a wide variety of problems.