Back to Growing Up
After getting my BS in Physics, I went searching for a job. The first full-time job I found was as a child-care counselor at Kemmerer Village, a residential treatment facility for behaviorally troubled teens. When I started at Kemmere Village, I also bought a house for $16,500. I spent my nights working at Kemmerer Village, and my days re-modeling my house. I replaced wiring, siding, and trim, and I refinished the floors, repainted, and added walls, air conditioning, and a porch.
After I had been at Kemmerer Village for awhile, I got an offer from the border patrol. The border patrol agreed to take me on as an agent, and placed my name in the queue. They said that I would be called within the next couple of months. In order to finish re-modeling my house more quickly I quit my job at Kemmerer Village and concentrated on my house. However, at this time, the border patrol implemented a hiring freeze while the federal government examined how they would update this agency in light of 9/11. So, I never did get the call and told them to take my name off the list a year later.
Instead I held jobs including pole-barn construction and CNC programming. Eventually I ended up as an over the road driver for USA Truck. In my time since graduation, I had not used my degree in any way, so I thought maybe I would go back to school and get an advanced degree. I suspect that I was the only one sitting in the back of my truck at night proving the basics of calculus just to try to remember how it worked. But, I found that I was enjoying the math more now that I was concentrating on proving aspects of it than I ever had when I went through school. I also felt like, even though I was pretty far removed from my studies, that I was understanding why it worked for the first time.
So, when I went back to school I got my masters degree in mathematics1 instead of physics. When I got my masters degree, I applied for, and was accepted to the Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado Denver. In 2014 I finished my Ph.D.2 in Applied Discrete Mathematics and accepted an assistant professor position at Sacramento State University3.