Prior to my sophomore year in high school, I was given the opportunity to be part of a
4-H summer youth exchange program to Germany. I stayed in a little village named Moosen for about a month, where I learned a great deal about cultural diversity and self-sufficiency.

This sparked an interest in cultures and people. I decided to major in Psychology at Lyon College. In the meantime, I continued to develop my interest in people by taking summer jobs at youth camps and working during the school year for the APPLE project, an after-school program for at-risk high school students.

I decided to continue my education at Clemson University in the Industrial/Organizational Psychology program, where I took a position as a graduate assistant in the animal laboratory (skinner boxes and such). During this time, the internet began to show it's promise, and my interest in computers was sparked again. I decided to do a thesis on the efficacy of computer based training programs.

I began learning about HTML in my spare time, using my favorite childhood cartoon show as subject matter. The web site is still up and running today, and making enough money to pay for itself and a few extra goodies for myself each year. It also serves as a way to learn about new programming languages, such as PHP. The site was included as an example of good web design in a book, and has won several awards.

My thesis research brought me into contact with a company based out of Dallas, TX, which makes educational CD-ROMs for students, Zane Interactive Publishing. I was offered a position with them as a Multimedia Engineer. I took the job, and learned about image, audio, and video editing, the editorial process, user interface design, quality assurance, and visual basic programming.

I moved from Clemson before completing my master's degree, so I continued my degree work at the University of North Texas in the Computer Education and Cognitive Systems program, which specializes in the use of computers as an educational tool. Right on target for me.

Meanwhile, the internet continued to grow, but the CD-ROM arena started to shrink. Zane Publishing stopped all production on new CDs, but kept me on staff to close out the production department. My boss opened his own business, taking on clients that Zane had dropped, and hired me as Production Manager.

I began working for Larson Multimedia, and took on a lot more responsibilities than I had ever imagined possible. I learned about product pitching, client communications, project management, and code standardization. To keep the company diversified, we began taking on web clients as well, so my web development skills were put to good use. I learned about Active Server Pages and database driven web sites, as well as advanced digital video editing.

I graduated from the University of North Texas in January of 2001, and soon afterwards moved from Larson Multimedia to work at Healthaxis, where I continue to work on new applications, improving my skill sets, and adding to my programming toolkit with XSLT, Visual Basic COM development, client management, and database administration.