My Career Path

I was born and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, and my career ambitions began with music. I began playing the saxophone at the age of 14, found I was talented at it and enjoyed it so much that I intended to become a professional musician. I initially attended Virginia Commonwealth University, which had the top-rated school of the arts in the country at the time.

While still attending VCU, I had taken an interest in the German language. This interest was initially inspired by the German band Rammstein, whose songs are sung almost entirely in German. I found lyrics of several of the band's songs posted online alongside English translations and found the similarities and differences between the English and the German fascinating. I was able to listen to several of the band's albums, which allowed me to absorb German pronunciation rules and vocabulary terms. Inspired by this, I took a first-semester German class during my last semester at VCU. Since then, I have dedicated varying degrees of time and effort to studying European languages such as Russian and Italian. German, though, continues to be my favorite and most fluent language.

At some point during my attendance at VCU, I became acquainted with a student attending the College of William and Mary, a higher-tier Virginia university which I investigated and found interesting. This eventually led to my being accepted at William and Mary, where I chose German as a major. I was and continue to be very impressed by the aesthetics of the written and spoken language as well as its grammatical structure, and also appreciated its place in Western cultural heritage.

After some difficulty with health problems which extended the time it took to finish the German program, I graduated and moved back to Charlottesville again. I volunteered in three of the University of Virginia libraries, where I asked the librarians about the prospects for working in a library in a paid capacity. I was consistently informed that I would need a master's degree in order to do this. I knew that I was interested in language and books, that I had found it very energizing to work in this type of environment, and that I felt libraries were providing an important service to society, which I had benefited from personally. I decided, then, to go to graduate school for a library science degree.

After settling on the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and beginning the master's program there, I soon concluded from the course material that I was not cut out to be a librarian. Fortunately, though, I found that I could easily switch to information science, another program within the same School of Information and Library Science.

From my experience in this program, I found front-end web development and programming particularly interesting, and I include work samples originally begun as projects for this type of courses on the curriculum vitae page here. I have particularly enjoyed the similarities between the experience of learning languages such as Python, PHP, and Javascript and learning a natural language. It is especially interesting to see how when dealing with computers, minor changes in language can immediately cause or solve practical problems.

Immediately before moving to Chapel Hill, I found employment with Amara, a project of a nonprofit called the Participatory Culture Foundation. My ability with languages has come in handy here, as it is an organization dedicated to producing subtitles for videos. These include not only same-language English subtitles but a variety of German material as well, including some translations between German and English. I found this work rewarding and did it as an independent contractor according to my own schedule.

I later had a part-time trial position as a testing, documentation and support project manager for the same organization. This trial position was ultimately cancelled, but what work I completed involved providing suggestions to improve the site's documentation.

I completed my final requirement for the information science program, the master's project, in early August of 2015. In my case this involved part-of-speech tagging, a natural language processing technique, as applied to a particular chronological division of a period of historical German text. The project was challenging yet rewarding, not least because it has given me more experience with Microsoft Excel, which I used for in-depth analysis of the results, as well as with Python, which I used for preprocessing of the text. I also enjoyed the connection to Western cultural heritage, and to the historical German language in particular.

From September through November of 2015 I was a temporary web developer for WorldStrides, an educational travel organization which organizes trips for student groups. I mainly assisted with moving an old set of websites to a new server and writing the redirect rules necessary to direct web traffic to the sites' new locations. The redirects involved regular expressions, an interesting sort of language which I have enjoyed studying and using. I also made limited use of Python for cross-browser testing. This work was interesting to me not only because of the development of redirect rules but again because of the connection to Western cultural heritage; the organization's trips mostly take place around the Western world.

From April of 2016 to May of 2017 I worked as a temporary web developer with the Environmental Protection Agency. This involved working with a small team on a website called AOPWiki, a wiki presenting information about adverse outcome pathways. These are chains of events, often starting with some type of chemical exposure, which lead to some kind of undesirable outcome in a living thing, such as a person getting cancer. My role in this project focused on front-end development, including some data visualization, and I employed Ruby on Rails, HTML, Javascript, Coffeescript, and jQuery to this end, while also working on user testing. I was proud to be contributing something to preserving our nation's natural heritage.

From July 2019 to February 2020 I worked as an IT intern with the Jefferson Area Board for Aging, and since February I have been a project assistant. This has included various tasks such as developing online community surveys, analyzing demographic data and developing a website for the Louisa County Commission on Aging.

Considering my experience with music, language, and web development, I would say I have been particularly motivated by aesthetics. Front-end web development in particular interests me, partly because of its connection with the visual appearance of a site. The programming and markup languages I have been employing in connection with web development are also relevant to my continuing interest in language, and like natural languages they have a certain aesthetic appeal. I hope that I can continue to contribute to web development and improve my skills in this area throughout my life.