I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin’ on the porch with my family, singin’ and dancin’ down in Mississippi… Then one day I woke up white, well off, and going to private school in Miami, Florida. It was a very traumatic time for me, and I don’t think I’ve ever fully adjusted to upper-middle-class life.
In the Spring of 1984, I traveled to New York City for the first time in my life to watch my half-sister graduate with a degree in theater from NYU. As one of the few sort-of adults I could understand at that tender young age, I thought she was pretty neat stuff, and the following school year I set about preparing for my own theatrical career by making one of my first freely-chosen elective courses Drama I. Four years later I left middle school with four sizeable roles in musicals under my belt and countless other stage endeavors, but I had also been convinced by that point that, while a fun creative outlet, acting “wasn’t a real job,” and that I ought set my sights on something more economically fruitful.
In high school, I changed gears rather significantly and tried my hand at the jock side of extracurricular activities — or at least, as jock-like as I could get for a guy with minimal hand-eye-ball coordination skills who, as one of only three non-hispanics to try out for soccer in 8th grade, didn’t stand a chance of making the team. I was scrawny and tenacious, though, so cross-country and track it was. I eventually unleashed my stifled creative energy on the student newspaper, writing snarky social commentary under a pen name that only those dumb enough to be upset by what I wrote didn’t see through. Lucky me.
At some point in high school — I can’t for the life of me figure out when, though it was definitely well after freshman year when I thought I wanted to be a biomedical engineer — I decided that aerospace engineering was my future, and I made up a short list of colleges that could offer it to me. Through a series of coincidences during my visit that I can’t rule out as the influence of the Holy Spirit (and I’m really not that kind of guy), I realized that Notre Dame was the place for me, and I headed off to the tundra with an L.L. Bean toggle coat and an innate Polish-Catholic tolerance for alcohol.
A brief stint in the Navy ROTC resulted in the permanent scrambling of my class schedule and the unavoidable commitment to the dual-degree Arts & Letters/Engineering program, so by the time I finished five years at ND I had a BA in Philosophy to round out my BS in Aero Engineering. When asked what the heck his boy was going to do with such an odd combination, my father was fond of saying things like, “I don’t know, I think he’s going to fly up into space and then contemplate what he’s doing there.” Little did he know that I left NROTC in large part because I’m too much of a pussy to strap myself into anything with that kind of horsepower and explosive potential and try to land it on a boat at night; I’d much rather design, build, and admire such things from safely on the ground.
In spite of what I thought was a pretty impressive academic resume, I faced the end of my college career with but one job offer to bite on — a fact that will forever make me suspicious of “recruitment targets” and the like. As it turned out, though, winding up in Phoenix, AZ to work in advanced technology development for AlliedSignal Engines was one of the best career moves I could have made. I had a lot of fun doing everything from subcomponent-level lab testing to making Powerpoint presentations for the Vice President of Aerospace, and for a while I even got to kick tin with the accident investigation group.
That latter assignment helped me decide that a PhD in Materials Science & Engineering was the next logical career move, thinking it would land me a cool CSI-like forensic engineering job with the National Transportation Safety Board. It only took about three years of research for me to realize how much this materials science crap sucks, and that I was a double-major in liberal arts for a reason: I am not a lab geek at heart. So I juggled my curriculum once more, changed to Mechanical Engineering with a minor in International Affairs after I tucked away a Master’s in MS&E, and have spent the pointless months ever since trying to find funding and experimental materials in the nooks, crannies, sofa cushions, and linty navels of the aerospace industry so I can write a dissertation on a subject that makes me choke back vomit at every conference. You can bet your ass I’m going to make you call me “Doctor.”
In the meantime, I’ve gotten wrapped up in local politics to get a taste of how an engineer will need to speak if he’s to pursue a career in public policy without a degree in Public Policy. I am often assumed to be dead-set on making you all broke, gay, terrorist-loving socialists because I work for Democrats, but I really just want to make sure all of our politicians weigh scientific evidence and use rational deductive principles when buying the weapon systems, homeland security devices, and energy sources we need to remain the global superpower. Though I am an imperfectly practicing Catholic, I have little patience for administrations who circular-file scientific research and base technical decisions on the book of Deuteronomy.
That’s damn near everything you needed to know, and a whole lotta stuff you didn’t. Still unsatisfied? See the FAQ.
