My background includes a variety of different things, however, I have known from early on I always wanted to be involved in Information Technology. I graduated from Oklahoma State University in 2009 with a Bachelors degree in Management Information Systems. The Army paid my way with a 4-year scholarship, so I also received a commission as in officer in the US Army. I chose to go in the reserves so I could pursue a career in IT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My first job out of school was landed in Oklahoma City. I started out as a entry level NOC engineer working 12 hours a night monitoring bank servers, firewall, and networks. This job entailed great attention to detail but wasn’t where I wanted to stay. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A colleague and I decided we wanted to try and go into business for ourselves, so we opened a computer shop in Broken Arrow, OK in 2011. We were doing in-shop PC and laptop repair as well as in-home\/business work. We soon learned why a lot of small businesses don’t survive. We started with $5000 and it ran dry pretty quickly. We had to take on side work and I eventually took on a part time job to keep the lights on. My partner stepped out leaving the shop in my hands. I ran the shop with the help of family for the rest of the lease on our space and closed the doors in 2012. Running your own business takes a lot of patience and hard work. I learned a lot from this experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The part time job I took on in the winter of 2011 turned into a full time gig pretty quickly. I was hired as part-time help setting up PCs in a local small school district. They promoted me to full time once I shut down the shop as well as eventually to the network administrator of the entire district. I was responsible for monitoring and maintaining the districts 12 locations as well as their entire server infrastructure. I also assisted with normal day to day help desk work. The network consisted of layer 2 connectivity between sites. Once I took ownership of the network, we began upgrading and optimizing the network. What started out as a messy network with some poor design choices ended up as a multi-gig network consisting of wireless, access control, hvac automation, security, and VoIP. By the time I moved on, the district was up to the 21st century in technology and running smoothly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Moving on, I accepted a position in tribal government as a Network Engineer. Again, overseeing all server administration as well. This time the network was quite a bit larger however. I managed a network covering about 1\/5 the state of Oklahoma and assisted with other tribal departments with network decisions. This position was a turning point in my career. I realized I wasn’t small time and I understood concepts required to run an entire organization. While working in this position, I was approached by the hiring team of Cerner Corporation and accepted a position as a System Engineer in 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Working as a system engineer in a Fortune 500 company was quite a bit different than my positions prior to this. I moved from what felt like small to medium size businesses where I made the decisions to a huge company where I was a cog in the machine. I didn’t let that stop me from excelling however. I was hired to solve a problem. What was taking a team of engineers weeks to keep up with, I managed to condense down to 4 hours a week. The task was IP address management and assignment. I ultimately also assisted my team with deploying thousands of servers, hundreds of racks, as well as assisted other teams with SAN infrastructure upgrades. While this job was enjoyable, I missed the feel of my previous positions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This story will continue….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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