I've spent a lot of time avoiding and half-assing college. I had a hard time finding fields of study that made me even want to enroll, and more often than not once I started on the classes the path wasn't interesting or valuable enough to make me want to work through the grind towards the almighty piece of paper at the end of the tunnel.
So let's montage through a series of ups and downs we can call my career--from making change in a Wendy's drive thru to writing the schedule and ordering thousands of dollars of food every week. From delivering pizzas up to hiring and firing delivery drivers. From driving a forklift and tossing cartons on conveyors to building a 15-person department from scratch. Finally, learning how to use MS Access to merge three very complicated international shipping data processes into a push-button system even our high school drop out temps could use to get their work done faster.
That last one is important, because when that piece was taken over by the "professionals," I knew I was done in operations. I had seen what could be accomplished by a guy at a keyboard with a schema map and the right network permissions. There was no way I could go back to motivating underpaid temps to work harder to make up for the fact some guy at the keyboard with no domain knowledge kept getting use cases wrong.
Fast forward almost three years. I've managed to stick it out through an entire associates degree. I'm within 4 courses of graduating. I know a lot more than I did when I was massaging data in a warehouse half-cubicle...but only enough to be dangerous. you can't learn some of this stuff in a classroom or from a power point slide on an online Blackboard link. That's where the internship comes in...
So let's montage through a series of ups and downs we can call my career--from making change in a Wendy's drive thru to writing the schedule and ordering thousands of dollars of food every week. From delivering pizzas up to hiring and firing delivery drivers. From driving a forklift and tossing cartons on conveyors to building a 15-person department from scratch. Finally, learning how to use MS Access to merge three very complicated international shipping data processes into a push-button system even our high school drop out temps could use to get their work done faster.
That last one is important, because when that piece was taken over by the "professionals," I knew I was done in operations. I had seen what could be accomplished by a guy at a keyboard with a schema map and the right network permissions. There was no way I could go back to motivating underpaid temps to work harder to make up for the fact some guy at the keyboard with no domain knowledge kept getting use cases wrong.
Fast forward almost three years. I've managed to stick it out through an entire associates degree. I'm within 4 courses of graduating. I know a lot more than I did when I was massaging data in a warehouse half-cubicle...but only enough to be dangerous. you can't learn some of this stuff in a classroom or from a power point slide on an online Blackboard link. That's where the internship comes in...