Born and raised in a small midwestern town (pop. 360), books and video games were my portals to adventure. I fell in love with creative writing from an early age, developing the understanding of storytelling critical for data analytics. I bounced between computer-centric jobs ranging from support technician to software developer to I.T. director but never found a role that was fulfilling. In 2023, however, I discovered data analysis, the nexus between technical know-how and creative drive. I quickly earned my Google Data Analytics Professional and Google Advanced Data Analytics Professional certifications and am now seeking to put those skills to use in the real world.

Reading and video games still play an important role in my personal life. Many of the things I have accomplished in recent years, including having over two dozen articles appear in print in an alt-weekly publication, organizing a music festival with 15 local bands, and returning to college, can be directly attributed to my decision to attend an open mic poetry night in 2011. I've also been involved in fan translation of retro video games, a hobby that involves a lot of data mining and pattern recognition, skill that are also integral to data analysis. And though I'm not currently in college, I continue my study of anthropology in order to continue expanding my worldview.

I have been technologically inclined my entire life. My family obtained our first computer when I was 11-years-old, a rarity in the late '80s, and I soon taught myself BASIC programming with nothing more than a manual that showed the proper syntax for commands with no explanation of what the commands actually did. Upon graduating high school in 1994, I received my own computer, an IBM PS/2 486SX with 4MB of RAM, running Windows 3.1. It also came with a modem and the Prodigy online system, which gave me my first taste of the World Wide Web. I taught myself HTML through Prodigy's web hosting tools. It was around this time that I gained access to Visual Basic and began learning Windows programming.

In 1998, I enrolled at Vatterott College and obtained my A.O.S. in Computer Programming and Network Management in December of 1999. During that time, I bolstered my Q-BASIC and Visual Basic skills, while also learning C, C++, and COBOL. Upon graduating, I accepted a position as a Network Operations Center Technician where I added Perl and SQL to my ever expanding repertoire of skills. Over the next two decades, I worked a variety of tech jobs, ranging from technical support to software developer to IT Director, but never found a niche that was fulfilling. I continued to build my skills, however, picking up PHP and dabbling in Python, Javascript, and Kotlin.

In 2015, while playing in a Dungeons & Dragons group consisting primarily of professors and grad students, I caught the academic bug and enrolled at Kansas State University. The initial plan was to pursue a degree in Social Work, but I fell in love with Anthropology during my first semester, causing my path to take an ethnographic turn. As part of the required curriculum, I also learned Java. My academic pursuits were cut short by COVID-19, but I will complete my degree as soon as doing so is financially viable.

In 2023, I encountered the Merit America program and the Google Data Analytics Certification. I quickly recognized that data analysis was the technological path that I would not only be good at but also find fulfilling. Through this program, I bolstered my knowledge of SQL and Excel while learning Tableau and R. I obtained my Google Data Analysis Certification in November of 2023, followed by the Google Advanced Data Analytics Certificate in March. As I pursue a career in data analytics, I intend to continue building my R & Tableau skills while learning to use Looker and Power BI and studying the data analysis aspects of Python.