I am currently a web developer at a non-profit in the Washington DC area, where I work in the Center for Sustainability creating web-based sustainable solutions for the federal government. To date I've worked on projects using PHP/Postgres and ASP.NET MVC with C#, and am looking forward to learning new technologies as my career progresses. I love the fact that my job combines technical complexity with providing social value, and I want those ideas to be core characteristics of all of my future career choices.

UPenn

After graduating high school in 2004, I attended the University of Pennsylvania to begin my undergraduate degree in Electrical Systems Engineering. Penn was great for a number of reasons: exceptionally accomplished and intelligent classmates, the awesomely fattening and cheap food1 that Philadelphia has to offer, and the suburban-comfort-zone-destroying opportunity to engage with the residents of West Philadelphia. However, there were a few things I didn't enjoy: the terrible quality of instruction in the lower level engineering math/science courses, the pervasive social pressure to pursue soul-sucking jobs on Wall Street, and the immobilizing debt that results from a massive annual tuition. The biggest value I gained from my time at Penn was how to work hard. Sounds cliche, I know, but I often tell my friends that if you can manage your workload at Penn, you can manage your workload anywhere.

Illness

Unfortunately I didn't end up graduating from Penn. In December of 2006, a week before the first semester finals of my junior year, I was diagnosed with Acute Mylogenous Leukemia.2 There's a lot I can say (and have said) about being diagnosed with cancer as a 20/21 year old (my 21st birthday was actually celebrated on the cancer wing of the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania), but there are better places for that than here. I will say that my time with cancer has been the single most formative experience of my life thus far. It continues to redefine my understandings of maturity, responsibility, health, love, God, purpose, opportunity, education, and work. I've had a clean bill of health for 4 years now, and every day is a great day to be alive.

UVA

Upon completing several rounds of chemotherapy over the course of 6 months and taking a year off from school to recover physically/emotionally/mentally, I applied for transfer to the University of Virginia for the fall 2008 semester. Not only was UVA an excellent academic institution with very reasonable in-state tuition rates, it was an opportunity to start fresh. My academic experience as a UVA undergraduate Systems Engineering student was really, really great; the professors were helpful/available, the courseload was pragmatic and interesting, and I felt like I graduated with knowledge and skills that would translate to a work environment. I graduated Summa Cum Laude from UVA in May 2010 with a degree in Systems Engineering and Management Information Systems.

Footnotes

[1] Pat's Cheesesteaks is better than Geno's, but if you go with friends, a hack is to get one of each and split them.

[2] I was previously unsure of how to approach the disclosure of my illness professionally, but I came to the realization that I refuse to view my survival as a liability. If anything, it'll help to vet out superficial/worthless employers.

Systems Engineering

I think Systems/Industrial Engineering/Operations Research as a major gets a bad rap, since it's largely considered "fake engineering" by other engineering majors. This is probably a result of a couple factors: first, the solutions to Systems Engineering problems rarely result in the fabrication of tangible products similar to other engineering disciplines, and second almost nobody has a legitimate understanding of what "Systems Engineering" even means. Admittedly it's a terribly vague term ("Operations Research" being even worse), so I commonly explain it with an example along the lines of the following:

Let's say you have an office building of n floors, with x number of total occupants. However, the occupants aren't evenly distributed across all n floors, so some floors are more populous than others. There are y elevators in this building used to accommodate all occupants. Given data (i.e. a probability distribution) that mimics the elevator button push data of the n floors within the building, how would you program the controller of the y elevators to minimize waiting times for elevator users?

Constraints include the maximum occupancy of an elevator as dictated by the fire code and the maximum safe operating speed of an elevator as a function of occupants. What about peak (9am, 12pm, 6pm) hours vs non-peak hours? What if you were willing to trade-off some wait time for electricity conservation?

The problem is clearly complex. Yes, it's a lot of math, but it's also physics/mechanics (weight vs. speed), programming (controller), human interaction/psychology (waiting and occupancy), etc. The moving parts constitute the "system," and the problem solving reflects the "engineering." And voila, Systems Engineering is born.

I love the challenge of solving complex problems, and that's what UVA taught me Systems Engineering was. Breaking up difficult problems into their subcomponents, and breaking those subcomponents into their subcomponents. Reducing complexity to its intelligible parts, and integrating disparate solutions into a cohesive solution.

Coding

I didn't go through school explicitly preparing to work as a coder, but programming appeals to me for the same reasons that Systems Engineering does -- I love the challenge. I took programming courses during my time at Penn/UVA in various languages (Java/C#/PHP) and learned enough to work professionally as a web developer, but I do wish I knew more about the theoretical/mathematical foundations of CS. While I'm doing the best I can by making my way through books/projects outside of work, I'm also increasingly entertaining the idea of going back to school in some capacity for formal CS training.

Business

I'm also interested in learning more about business. I think the future (present?) of business is data-driven, metric-based decisions, and Systems Engineering provides a great framework/skillset for making such decisions. And again, I think at its purest business boils down to solving hard problems.

  • I'm a pretty voracious consumer of Google Reader. I started following RSS feeds via Google Reader about a year ago, and it's really transformed my ability to stay informed of current events, both politically/socially and in the technical community. Coupling Google Reader with Instapaper or Flipboard/Reeder on the iPad is a really incredible experience. The internet is amazing.
  • I've been a diehard Washington Wizards fan since 2000. Woe is me.
  • Three of the most inspiring videos I've seen on the internet: Salman Khan's presentation at TED, Steve Jobs' 2005 Commencement Speech at Stanford, and the Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.
  • I prefer non-fiction to fiction. And real books to e-books. The collapse of Borders makes me immeasurably sad (I liked my neighborhood Borders much more than the local B&N), but it's hard to say they didn't have it coming.
  • Two of the best written pieces I've ever read are David Foster Wallace's Commencement Speech at Kenyon College in 2005, and Pearls Before Breakfast (it won the Pulitzer).
  • I don't believe career advancement/fulfillment/success is a zero-sum game, and I don't think money is worth sacrificing your moral code. Your soul should not have a price.
  • I'm a Mac user. While the increasingly closed environment surrounding Apple is starting to annoy me, it's hard to beat the usability/durability/aesthetics of everything Apple. Strangely in an impulsive act of computing sacrilege I bought an Android phone, but I'm actually really pleased with it. It'll be interesting to see where the evolution of the Android/iOS battle takes personal computing products, and I think it's an enormously positive thing that Apple has some legitimate competition for a change.
  • My favorite food is Korean BBQ, my favorite movie is Good Will Hunting, and my niece is completely adorable. Her interests include Elmo and Ernie.

* I apologize in advance for the borderline indecipherable CAPTCHAs. SPAM has doomed us all.