As a child, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. The best I could come up with was to be an inventor. I was fascinated with how everything worked and wanted to understand it all from machines to how people interacted with each other. In my childhood, I moved every three years. That resulted in me knowing a lot of people and watching my relationships with them shift around as I got to know yet another culture. It also meant that I was in many different school systems from a PreK-12 school with 21 students to an East Coast independent school (Moses Brown) to a large public California school (Redwood High School).
In college, the dot-com bubble was building. I was fascinated with the possibilities of the world wide web and the companies that were being formed in that space. I lived near San Francisco at that time and began interning at the Red Herring Communications Company which put out a monthly magazine and web postings reporting on 6-month – 2-year-old companies. The positioning at the time was, we report on the companies when they are being built, Wired magazine reports on them after they get traction.
During my first summer interning in tech and marketing, I completed all the work they wanted me to do in about half the time. The work was really boring and I just wanted it done. For tech, I was normalizing the date format across all the web pages (they had switched date formats twice). For marketing, I was filling out a competition matrix between us and the other magazines in our space.
This was before there were content management systems, each web page was essentially its own page and even the ads were tied to the pages, not served by ad servers. For both tasks, I grew bored of the repetitive nature and started figuring out how to write regular expressions in BBedit to find the pages that needed fixing and update their dates. Likewise, there were some similarities between magazines that made building a competitive matrix faster than expected. With the extra time in the summer, the tech folks taught me to do some web programming and marketing had me join the events team for the Herring on Hollywood conference.
The next summer, I joined marketing and business development for my internship. They allowed me to participate in the website and magazine redesign process with one of the top design firms. It was a fascinating process that is still useful today as we talk about design decisions for www.eastsideprep.org.
Rounding out my tour of corporate roles, the following summer I interned with business development and sales. I went into my senior year of college feeling like I had quality experience, a good shot at landing a job with Red Herring if needed but also the flexibility to shop around for a web start-up company.
In my final summer at Red Herring, I was working in the online division and we were 135 people. The following summer, post dot-com, they were six. Literally, a few tech folks to keep things running. You can also see the rapid decline in tech stocks which meant no one was hiring. Our graduating class was the least employed in the colleges history and those who had already landed jobs at consulting firms and investment banks were getting paid up to $20,000 to not take the job (its the only time I wish I had landed an i-banking job). Even going to Germany (my mother is from Cologne) was not an option as the recent forming of the EU meant that labor laws required that you had to hire Brits over Americans for translation work.
Given those constraints, I turned to teaching which previously was an easy career for me to rule out. At the time, it seemed like an easy way to buy myself time to figure things out or for the economy to recover. The prospect of continuing to get paid in June while having the freedom to job search made a lot of sense.
I wanted to teach physics but did not get those job offers. The catch-22 of needing experience to be hired but having no way of gaining experience was vexing. About to move on to a different plan, a job opened up at the Bentley school in early August (the same school that passed on me for the physics position). I was too naive to question what might have a teacher leave so suddenly. The school, thrilled that they had already interviewed me and desperate to fill the spot hired me over the phone to teach math.
In that first year, I dove deep into the job. Relearning a ton of math far better, figuring out how to motivate students, manage classrooms, and saying yes to everything that they needed (which was quite extensive at this start-up school, coaching, student activities, advising, course scheduling). At the same time, the physics teacher, that they hired over me, was not working out and they asked if I would be up for teaching physics next year if he was unable to complete his improvement plan (that way they could post a math position which would avoid publically announcing that he was under review).
The physics teacher was let go and I signed on for physics, still not inclined to stay in education but excited to teach the subject that I had the most passion for. Additional roles continued to pile up, the school hired a tech director and I started shadowing him out of curiosity. Later I would take over as chair of the science department, end up on hiring committees, and admissions committees. I ended up having lots of access to learn about the background functioning of schools.
Phebe, who I would end up marrying, went to UW for graduate school starting in 2004. That would bring me to the Seattle area as soon as possible, which happened to be the summer of 2005. That was the first recommitment to education. At the time, I was on the fence about it but the opportunity to try out being a tech director at Eastside Prep drew me back in.
Over the last 18 years, there have been moments where I was unsure as to whether this was the best choice. Those moments have come less often over the years as I reflect on how great this job fits me. Learning, teaching, solving problems, engaging and empowering others – those are the things I love to do. I feel lucky that circumstances conspired to bring me into the independent school world. If it wasn’t for that dot-com crash, I’d be wealthier but also less fulfilled, bored and who knows what deleterious effects that would have on the rest of my life.