Prelude to New Beginnings

One thing I love to notice in life are all the little and big parallels that remind me of happy memories. It's like a for-sure sign of reference, a "check-in" to my past that I'm still having fun; a kid in a larger backyard.

This parallel really doesn't stretch back that far, just to January, 2009. I was only in my second semester of college, ever. You bet I was homesick. Displaced of my own choosing, fulfilling an expectation, lonely and living alone.

I had had a job in the summer before I began school in August, 2008, but it wasn't anything more than fast food. Oh, yes, it was always something new and not always work-related either. Drama and grease after hours of shifts. I spent a long four months working there until one day I found myself packing my room up to go away to college.

For this part in the story I need to repost and refer. Repost the yards of paragraphs written during those first two years. Refer from here back to there; I'll give you a portal through which to arrive at the first word on the first page of Age 19.

Seek when you can.

Don't get lost. You're here already. You've made it to the other side. You want to guess where you're at? A present day reflection on the opposite piece of the parallel memory. I'm about to take my first job as a student assistant to the Vice President for University Advancement's Department of Advancement Services, Database Administrators team.

Fast forward two weeks. We're already moving out. Leaving the sleepy fourth floor of the John Peace Library. Edging on an outsource and relocating to a nearby business park we step up shop for the next three years. All throughout that Spring semester I worked hard, harder even than I did in class. I was doing stuff I had always enjoyed. Installing RAM, running Windows Updates, entering data, learning to manipulate it, importing records, building relationships, becoming a database administrator.

But all that didn't happen over just that first semester. Two weeks into that summer my family and I were up in East Texas visiting relatives for mother's day. While I was there the then-secretary of the office called and asked if I wanted to work during the summer. "Of course!" I said enthusiastically. They were going to scale my hours up to full time and even pay me out of the department's budget. This was going to work out very well.

Over the next two summers and six semesters I worked for The University of Texas at San Antonio Advancement Services department. I learned how to handle data and treat it right. How to deploy enterprise-grade software packages and being a project from conception to production. I did these things because I truly enjoyed working with information. Leveraging the classes that fell under the Information Systems degree, I sought to apply the knowledge learned about database theory. How to manage data in an efficient way requires that I think in an efficient way.

This efficiency has lead me to believe that memories can be related in a parallel fashion. Because of our history as humans I have understood that things really do go in cycles. If I pay attention to the past the future never seems so uncertain. This girder in my platform is just one of those beliefs a person has to have.