A Journey Into WordPress… and life
January 10, 2024
You would think that a CS student who prides themselves on their javascript skills could figure out wordpress….
TLDR: FSU Jazz -> Music and Band Teacher in Florida -> Covid Teaching -> Travel Nursing and Seattle -> OSU -> Texas -> Visa
I’m a little embarrassed to admit that this took me quite some time to figure out. In fact, if you are reading this, my homepage is still probably messed up with just a funny picture of my cat Dexter and the standard template text. I think this struggle with wordpress perfectly encapsulates my journey since graduating from my first degree in 2016.
I originally studied Jazz Saxophone at Florida State University. I had the honor of meeting and performing with many modern jazz greats like Wynton Marsalis, Scotty Barnhart, and Marcus Roberts. If that isn’t cool enough, my friend also let me wear his National Championship ring (Go Noles).
Anyway, I met my now wife Aleks half way through school and we moved back to my hometown in South Florida. She became an ICU nurse and I went on to earn my temporary Florida K-12 educator certificate. I landed a job teaching elementary music alongside one of my friends from school who was already teaching the middle school band program (This was a k-8 school). Remember how I struggled with wordpress? Well, that pales in comparison to my first day in the classroom. Every 45 minutes I had 35 new elementary school students just blankly staring at me while I read my chicken scratch “lesson plan” off of my clipboard and broke into song on the piano (The itsy bitsy spider is forever burned into my muscle memory on the piano).
Long story short, my jazz degree was good enough to get my foot in the door, but I had to attend two more years of night school to earn my full professional teaching certification. I had the help of a wonderful community of mentors that cared about my success and success of my students. I’ve always wondered if it would have been easier had I studied music ed instead of jazz saxophone, but I wouldn’t trade my experience. I’ve been blessed to be able to perform with various ensembles all around Florida.
I eventually earned my full certification and learned how to handle my classroom management, and just how to teach music. I started multiple ensembles including the elementary chorus, middle school jazz band (this one was fun, it never felt like work), and the keyboard ensemble. My coworker friend who ran the band program eventually left to join the Army band and I took over as Director of Bands too. Like this wordpress blog, I learned as I went. I was constantly bugging my mentors and assistant principal. New and novel problems came up every day like: What do you do when there is a cockroach in the trombone? How do I fix the half ton steinway that got knocked over by a sixth grader? Do I know how to run the soundboard for the superintendent’s speech and how to mic up the High School Chorus? I had to figure everything out on the fly even if I’d never experienced it.
Covid came, and my wife and I longed for something different with more adventure, but first we needed to make a plan. In the meantime we eventually returned from remote teaching to a hybrid model in the 2020-2021 school year. Nothing in my prior four years had prepared me for teaching in-person band students with a yeti mic and robot ipad that followed me around live streaming my conducting and the in-person band to the remote band students on Teams. We had our first ever in history hybrid concert where I recorded the in-person band students and overlayed the submitted recordings of the remote students.
Prior to Covid I had been learning html and javascript for fun via freecodecamp. I used my newfound skills to create websites for my band class and I also developed a jazz setlist creation algorithm to help with my side gig in the community jazz band. Through covid teaching I saw that skills in technology were more important than ever and I developed this itch to keep learning and building. When my band budget got cut in half, that was the sign for my wife and I to move out of Florida. We both resigned from our jobs after five years of ICU nursing and Teaching and packed up our small townhome, cat, and pug and hit the road to Seattle. No regrets.
My wife supported us with travel nursing (crazy contracts in 2021) while I applied to software jobs. I eventually landed at OSU with a goal of learning the fundamentals and finding an internship before graduation and becoming a TA. Seattle was and still is our dream city, but it was getting quite expensive and we could only stay for one year due to complex IRS travel nursing rules (technically we still rented a place in Florida, yay double rent). We settled on Austin and hit the road a year later (and a year smarter). That was one of the best years of our lives though, so much adventure and exploration. I’m so glad we took the leap and left Florida.
We arrived in Austin at the start of application season Fall 2022 with no jobs and an apartment site unseen. Every day we sat in either Starbucks or Panera to apply to nursing jobs and software internships. On top of that we had to transfer all of our documents and become “Texas Citizens”. My wife is smarter than I am and she landed a job within a week of applying, working as a hospice nurse case manager. This was a great opportunity for her to help her patients die with dignity, something that she did not experience the prior years working covid ICU. I eventually landed a ULA position for CS340 Intro to Databases. I could finally combine my teaching skills and my newfound dev skills.
Then, I got a call back…
Well it was an email, but a recruiter from Visa wanted to set up a meeting. I was stoked. All of my dreams and goals since 2019 were starting to be accomplished. I passed the codesignal assessment and both interviews, they wanted me to be a cybersecurity intern! This started me down the path of becoming a glorified script kiddie. Daily leetcode was replaced with daily hackthebox, I solidified my linux knowledge, and constantly badgered my uncle who also works in this field. Again, following my struggles with wordpress, I had to learn it on my own time in my own way. The summer was packed full of meetings, seminars, standups, intern events (try being the 30 year old intern in a room full of 22 year olds), and lots and lots of hacking. Androids, iPhones, browsers, Macs, Oculus, and IoT devices were not safe from my team. I learned so much about security and how to break things. I even broke my terminal for a couple weeks, but just like this wordpress, I figured out how to fix it.
I eventually landed the return offer, and now here I am in my last semester at OSU. This has been quite the journey these last few years, and I’m forever grateful for the opportunities I’ve been afforded through my time at OSU. Last step, fix this wordpress blog!
Zac
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