About

My “About” Essay.

Points to make:  Professionally, educationally, recreationally, bio/geographically.

Professionally:  What I like doing; what I’m good at doing; what I’d plan on doing.  Mention everything I’ve ever done, from catering to TV to parcel servicing to High-End Audio to Product Engineering and Design.  Mention your involvement in INCOSE.

Educationally:  Briefly list your educational background.

Recreationally:  Here’s a big one – list off everything you want to do, and then everything you’d want to do.  Let’s Start a Small List Now:  SCUBA, Rock Climbing, Drumming, Massage Therapy, Strength Training for Joint Health, DJ-ing, oral histories.  “I recently bought a VW GTI.  That car is the only nice thing I’ve ever owned, and if I wasn’t petrified by the thought of damaging it, I would be wasting thousands of dollars on making it go pointlessly fast”.

Short Biography, including geographic information.

I was born in Modesto, California in early 1987.  My first memory is sitting in our TV Room, on our corduroy L-couch, when the Loma Prieta earthquake rattled our dishes and lights.  I grew up on a ranch outside of Modesto as well as in Modesto proper.  I attended high school at the midpoint of those two places, in Ceres, at Ceres High School.   I was always a curious kid, but I gained my topical [? I mean like “I learned to love everything”] wanderlust while at CHS – I was in marching band, jazz band, drum line, played water polo, swam, competed in speech and debate, mock trial and science bowl.  That was about half of what I wanted to do.

I went to college at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and I savored every minute of it.  UCSC is the most beautiful and inspiring campus I’ve set foot on, and I feel honored to have been able to attend such a place.  [I learned to SCUBA dive and massage/healing].

After college, I had a major surgery of my face [click here if you want to get an under-the-skin look at the results].  It took about 4 months to recover and then I was back to Santa Cruz because I loved it there and my friends had found an old bed and breakfast for rent in Felton, an old-west redwood-town above Santa Cruz.  I got a job working as a Procurement Manager at a local High-End Audio manufacturer, and quickly moved up the ranks to Production Manager, when my girlfriend was accepted into a MFA program at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.  Knowing that I had reached my ceiling in High-End Audio Manufacturing, I followed her to the Neon Oasis.

I only lived in Vegas for three months before I got a call from a startup in LA.  A good friend of mine had been working for them and they were growing.  I loved living in Vegas (and living with my girlfriend), but it was an interesting professional opportunity.

I worked as an R&D Engineer for about three months before I seized the opportunity of getting in so far over my head that I can now hold my breath for longer than it takes to bake potatoes.  I was made “Project Manager”, a title not quite fitting to my responsibilities, which were to find a market for a product that I also had to design and build, and make sure that the product worked well for that market.  Also, we had to use the proprietary technology that nobody else had ever used.  At this point, I was neither an engineer nor had I ever even witnessed a product development cycle.

Luckily I had a great mentor who guided me through the first few months and taught me lessons that I still hold in high regard, such as [in order to get things done you need to work your ass off] and [when you do good work, you’ll either get it stolen or make someone upset somewhere, so just be ready].  I learned more than I wish to know about office politics and internecine conflict, but I also learned how to make a product.

During this time, I was also able to expand my interests into Dj-ing and advocacy.  I also starting falling harder and harder for psychology, especially that which related to issues that anyone might face in long-term spaceflight.