Mentors
Tags: mentorship, reflection, career
Published: 2023-03-08 16:28:57

My oldest daughter is months away from graduating from college.  She and I have had lots of discussions about where she should apply for jobs and what attributes she should seek in an ideal employer.  I have thought about what was most valuable for me early in my career, and if I really boil it down, it is mentorship.

In this blog, I want to talk about my early education and jobs and talk about how mentorship impacted me.

Early in my college years at NLU (later to be renamed ULM), I met a professor named Ron Berry.  From the get-go, I knew that Dr. Berry was special.  He was the faculty sponsor for the DPMA (the student organization for Computer Information Systems students), and I remember interacting with him at a club event and realizing that he really cared about connecting with the students.  I later got a student job working in the CIS department, and Dr. Berry was assigned to be my supervisor.  He gave me some great tasks, including going through all the computers in an old computer lab and to try to make some working units out of the pile of computer parts.  Later, he taught me how to make ethernet cables (cutting, crimping, testing) and tasked me with wiring up a new computer lab.  What amazing tasks for a kid just learning how to use computers!  He also taught several of my classes and was my advisor.  Nearly 25 years later, Ron Berry is now the President of ULM and is continuing to impact the lives of students.

In the summer between my junior and senior years, my longtime girlfriend and I got married.  When I returned to school in the fall, I realized that I needed more income to afford my newlywed life.  I decided to do classes part-time and I took a full-time job at the College of Business doing tech support for faculty.  Dr. Berry was my supervisor and encouraged me to write a system to track the issues that people called me about and to track what the solutions were.  I learned many things in my time with Dr. Berry -- including basic computer repair skills, networking, troubleshooting, systems analysis, but the main thing I took away from Dr. Berry is that a good man who cares about his community and his students can have an enormous impact.

Roughly a year later, Dr. Berry called me and told me that there was a job opening at Chase Manhattan Mortgage Company and suggested that it might be a good fit for me.  I did accept this new role at CMMC and became a junior programmer working for a guy named Ken Robertson.  Ken taught me a lot about writing database queries and basic programming.  He also taught me what it looked like to be an IT professional -- including taking responsibility, acting with integrity, and how to interact with other departments effectively.  Ken had a way of demonstrating things without you even knowing he was teaching you -- he just modeled professionalism in his every day routines, and you couldn't help but learn from his example.

A few years later, my family and I had moved to Colorado and I took at job at First Data Corporation as a full-stack developer.  One of my teammates was a guy named Mike Barlow.  It was quickly apparent to me that Mike was a really sharp guy, and that there were things I could learn from Mike.  To this point in my career, I had worked a lot with databases and had done a lot of programming in languages that used top-down programming in Visual Basic and (what is now called "classic") ASP.  Mike liked to challenge his teammates to always learn new techniques and technologies, and I remember a day where he took me and another gal on our team to a conference room and taught us the basics of object-oriented programming.  This was an eye opener for me, and I quickly started to adopt new languages and new object-oriented techniques.  Mike was always pushing those around him to do better, and he taught me that you could have teachers in your life who weren't your bosses or formally assigned mentors.  My relationship with Mike was one of the best things that ever happened to me -- we worked together at many companies over the next 15-20 years and pushed each other to be better.  Our relationship was often described by others as a "husband and wife" because we knew how to work together and be effective while challenging and even arguing with each other.  Mike passed away recently, and I think about and miss him daily.

I am now 25 years into my IT career.  I have worked in a variety of companies in various roles and have worked on many different systems.  When I look back on my early career as a newly minted college graudate, I realize how little I actually knew about how to write code and interact with data.  I had learned some basic skills and knew _about_ the things one did to work on computer systems, but I had very little actual experience.  What I did have was a desire to learn. I managed to work at positions which were a series of stepping stones, picking up real-world skills.  Another realization was that I was supported and encouraged each step of the way by mentors who had seen things, knew things, and saw something in me,  leading them to believe that I had promise and was worth investing in.  I am thankful for the mentors described here and for others who had a hand in helping me.  Given the chance to take on mentoring opportunities in my current role, I jump at the chance as a way to honor those who pumped time and wisdom into me.

So, when my daughter asks me, "Dad, where should I apply?," I tell her that she needs to seek out roles with good bosses, good teammates, and a culture of teamwork.  This is a hard thing to find in a job -- you certainly can't filter a list of job openings for these traits! -- but I believe that if you enter into an interview process with these goals in mind that you can discern which roles are going to provide these benefits and will therefore act as a springboard to launch you into a successful career.

Here's to the mentors out there -- thank you!