I recently came back from a whirlwind college tour with my son Maxwell. Fortunately, my wife works in the airline industry, so visiting an astonishing eight colleges in just a few days wasn’t as insane as it could have been.
Checking the Boxes
Before the trip, we sat down and identified what criteria would help Maxwell pick a good school for engineering. After our visit at each campus, we’d sit down and see which boxes were checked. Besides having a good program, it was important that the kids looked like they were having fun. At one school, it seemed the young people were grinding all day. No fun. In the end, he picked Cal Poly.
When I talked with many people from Ashby Village before joining the Board of Directors, one thing I mentioned was that I would like to help develop a road map for the Village and its future efforts. Here’s how I came to that approach.
You Can’t Do It All
Over the years, I’ve worked with a lot of nonprofit organizations. And what I have noticed is that with mission driven work, everything is interesting, everything is important and should be done. The fact is, sometimes you need a strategy about the direction you are trying to head toward. It’s nice to have a road map to know what the most important things are coming up.
You could say that the road map of my professional career might have a few detours and byways on it. In high school in San Francisco where I grew up, I took an aptitude test that said clearly I should be an engineer. That sounded dorky to me. I didn’t want to be a nerdy engineer.
Maybe my father’s career path had a role in my not feeling I had to choose something and stick to it for a lifetime. He went to Harvard, studied microbiology and decided to open an antique bookstore. Now retired, he still does the Dickens Fair at the Cow Palace, something involving (me) dragging boxes and boxes of books.
I got a B.S. at San Francisco State and in the1990s started working at the University of California, San Francisco. I planned to go into administration and was getting a master’s in public administration. I was interested in technology and was asked to join a team that was putting various systems online. I was dissatisfied with the results the programmers were getting and began reading the same books they did. I discovered I really enjoyed data mining.
Back to the Beginning
That led me eventually to several decades of high-level Information Technology and Security jobs with a series of non-profits, including On Lok, the California Academy of Sciences, Edgewater Center for Children and Families, the Fine Arts Museums and others. Recently, I’ve made the decision to return to programming, data and Artificial Intelligence. I work for a company called Better Age and the two people are work most closely with are 84 and 74 years old.
I really value aging well, both mentally and physically, and I run and surf and try to keep active – although not as active as I once was. I played basketball for 40 years. All the time I played with my son, I never “let” him win but I did tell him that when he beat me legitimately, I’d quit playing and become his biggest fan. Two years ago, when I was 53, that’s what happened. I was ready. It wasn’t even close. The day he beat me, it was fantastic. I told him we would never go back, and we haven’t.
Now I am looking forward to working with Ashby Village and taking on new challenges as a Board member.