the longer story · 2003–2014
Where the pattern started
The pattern started long before the career did. This is what it looked like.
Before college
I certified as a USSF soccer referee in 2006, and from 2008 I was assistant tournament director and webmaster of my family’s showcase tournament: master schedule, roster book, online registration systems I built myself. I also worked technical production for the high-school theater shows. In 2009 I co-ran a charity soccer tournament that raised $6,000 for the families of an injured classmate and her friend.
Union College, 2010–2014 — all at once
These weren’t sequential. For most of my junior and senior years, I held these roles simultaneously:
- WRUC, Co-General Manager & Technical Director — the entirely student-run FCC radio station that bills itself as “the first station in the nation.” No third-party company, no outside tech support: students keep the transmitter and studios on the air. We grew it to roughly 50 DJs on a ~$14K budget, and I owned FCC compliance and the technical plant.
- Springfest — the campus’s $100K headline concert. The Director of Student Activities hand-selected a three-student team to run it; I was picked on the strength of the Concert Club budget I’d managed well. A larger budget than the club’s, and a smaller team.
- Concert Club, President — artist selection and full concert operations (security, ticketing, hospitality, setup and strike) with ~15 volunteers.
- Green House Council, Chair — ran meetings and allocated a $23,000 residential budget.
- CROCHET robotics lab, Lab Manager — budget, equipment inventory, lab oversight.
- IEEE student chapter, Treasurer — and elected President of IEEE-HKN, the electrical-engineering honor society; inducted into Tau Beta Pi.
I worked throughout: student technical assistant (USTAR), CS help desk teaching classmates, volunteer note-taker for students with special needs, a summer as an electrical engineering intern at Pregis, and a summer of CS department research. The live-production habit continued too — a tech-theatre class turned into volunteer set-build crew, and summers with Adirondack Sound mixing an outdoor drama on thirteen wireless microphones. My senior thesis was a dual EE/CS project: I designed and built a wireless strut for Union’s tensegrity robots and hand-wrote a spiking neural network in C++ for its embedded processor — hands-on with neural networks in 2013, a decade before I started directing LLM-built software.
The academics underneath it
Five years’ worth of credits in four: the full degree requirements for both Computer Science and Electrical Engineering — two complete degrees, not a combined program — plus a mathematics minor, cum laude, in Union’s Scholars honors program as an NSF-STEM scholar. My sophomore research project attacked the family tournament’s scheduling problem in C++ with the GECODE constraint-programming library: it solved small instances, identified the real 99-team problem as NP-complete — intractable on 2012 compute — and proposed in its future-work section the matchup-first architecture that, thirteen years later, became MadDogScheduler.
Junior year, the college awarded me the Albert Hill Recognition Award: “To the student who has held leadership positions and demonstrated exceptional commitment to enhancing the College community.”
The thread since
Every June through all of it, I went home to run the tournament — sole director of our eight-field Gavin Park venue since 2013 — and I now keep the business’s books. The pattern carried straight into the career — software engineer to engineering manager — and into a family tournament that now runs on software I directed an AI to build.