From Parts to Places

I have been stymied by my own resume, to be honest. For the past several years I have struggled to explain how a resume containing machining, then industrial design, then university administration, ministry, and now architecture fits together. This essay has been useful in helping me connect them.

I grew up on a ranch. This is how I usually find myself beginning to answer the inevitable interview question, “tell me a little bit about yourself”. It is by no means the end of my answer, but I find it an unshakable part of my identity that, I think increasingly, informs the patterns and familiar furrows that I want my “grown-up” life to follow. It is also the source of most of the interests, hobbies, and outlets that shaped my childhood. Many of these tend to resurface when I find myself considering future lifestyles, careers, and/or educational opportunities. Looking back, the ranch taught me two things that continue to shape my professional interests today. First, I learned the satisfaction that comes from stewarding a place over time. Second, I learned that to belong somewhere is to contribute to something beyond yourself. I find it unsurprising that the lessons I took from this place so deeply characterize the person I am becoming even now. 

Due in large part to the never ending string of projects that appeared on the property, I quickly became quite proficient at building and repairing everything from doghouses, to barbed wire fences, to chainsaws, to tractors, to hay equipment that was older than my grandparents, etc. Before I was any good at fixing things I was mostly just a menace to my mother though, disassembling bathroom faucets, wall clocks, light switches, and anything I could get my hands on, but that is her story to tell. To put anything back together was a skill that, in many cases, was learned too late. 

In high school, after 16 years of fairly regular exposure to the woodshop and the underside of various automobiles, I was presented with an opportunity/faced with a difficult decision - it depends on how you look at it. I could continue in my traditional academics alongside my close friends, or apply to attend trade school and study precision machining technology. Well, as you can imagine, one step inside the Warren Tech machine shop was enough to convince me that I didn’t need to know any more about AP Chemistry or Calculus II. So that became a piece of my emerging identity as a 16-19 year old. “I do machining”. A few years later, I even did machining as a profession. I worked as a CNC programmer for two years after I graduated high school.

The machining job - my first big boy job as I call it - taught me a tremendous amount. It taught me about tolerances and Design for Manufacturing practices, but more crucially than any of that it taught me so much about myself. What I am capable of learning, how to apply my work ethic to the corporate world, and how to earn the respect of coworkers - especially coworkers like Randy, the 68-year-old grizzled machinist who surely met me on day one and thought, “what the hell does this kid know about anything?” It taught me something else though. It taught me that I will not be as satisfied as I thought just producing the correct thing and shipping it away, never to be seen again. I was proud of the work I did, yes, but boy I struggled with the final product disappearing into the supply chain and with the endless stream of similarly specced parts rolling into my inbox and out a few hours later. It was hard to make anything and have no idea how it fit into “normal” people’s lives. I missed the joy of living with the tangible result. The ranch comes up again. Though it wasn’t a profession, it often felt like a full-time job in itself, and the outcome of every project, repair, and piece of routine maintenance had immediate, tangible results that I and my family lived with for years… Or until the same part broke again for the fifth time.

After a brief period of exploration in both transfer admissions offices and other job interviews, I made the decision to return to University to study Industrial Product Design. I did not set out in my research to find a Product Design degree in particular, I just wanted to study something that would eventually enable me to work more closely with the end-user, and closer to the front end of a product’s life cycle. I am fortunate to have stumbled across the Product Design major while reading about programs at MSU Denver. Over the course of my three years there, I gradually became more and more exposed to that exact ecosystem, and had a really fantastic opportunity to explore the wider world of product development, user testing, trend forecasting, and empathic design. During my time at MSU Denver, I also worked in university administration. Watching leaders wrestle with questions of budgets, facilities, campus growth, and institutional priorities gave me a perspective I couldn't have gained in the classroom. For the first time I began to appreciate how much intentional thought and planning lies behind places that most people experience every day. I think I will look back on this time at MSU as a very pivotal couple of years in which the trajectory of my life was very much changed. 

One notable part of my life that has been surprisingly transformed, renewed, and reinvigorated during this period has been my Christian faith. I must say something about it in any writing that speaks to the nature of my person or to my hopes and dreams for the future because otherwise I am telling only partial truths and claiming to be much more than I could ever be on my own. During my years following high school and into college, I spent two summers (nonconsecutive) working at Rainbow Trail Lutheran Camp, carrying out youth ministry in one of the most beautiful parts of Colorado. Those summers deepened my appreciation for community, but beyond just causing me to become more extroverted they fundamentally changed how I think about vocation in a communal context. For the first time, I began viewing work not merely as a means of earning a living, but as an opportunity to serve people and contribute to something larger than myself, larger even than the institution or corporation. Many of the community values I began to learn and believe at RTLC have taken a step towards being lived out in my everyday through my increasing integration and involvement in the college ministry of Salt Co. I am committed to carrying these values forward into adulthood and my early professional life, and will be profoundly saddened and dissatisfied if I find myself grasping for connections. 

So campus planning and municipal development? Where did that come from? It seemingly came out of nowhere if I am being honest. Yet in retrospect I can see exactly how my particular and unusual path still led me to this field and why the idea sticks so firmly in my mind. During my final year at MSU Denver, I completed a submission for an international architectural competition and began interning with an architectural firm. I sought out conversations with university administrators overseeing capital improvements and facilities management and was able to begin formulating a vision of my own future. For the first time in a professional setting, I found myself exposed to projects measured not in inches, and deadlines measured in weeks, but to buildings, sites, and projects that are planned for years, even generations. Conversations shifted from manufacturing constraints and user testing to stakeholders, facilities, long-term planning, and how people experience places over time. I noticed myself becoming increasingly interested in the systems surrounding a project rather than any individual object within it. Really, it is the first career path I have ever considered that draws a thorough line across all of my prior experiences including my young adulthood on the ranch, my young career in manufacturing, the ministry experiences, and the Christian life I want to remain immersed in. A role that is outwardly and fundamentally concerned with stewardship of a place unifies elements of my character that I didn’t know could be professionally related.

As mentioned, in machining I became somewhat demoralized because I could never see the end of the larger project. I was the smallest cog in what felt like the world's largest machine, and the end product that anybody would actually buy or use was so many steps removed from my contribution that it was easy to feel that way. Conversely, growing up on the ranch even the smallest victories were meaningful at least to the rest of my family, and I got to observe and participate in the gradual change that came over the place through the day-in and day-out labor. Similarly, I have enjoyed my studies at MSU and find myself consistently drawn towards the systems and programs that people interact with over any individual product. I am leaning farther and farther away from designing the next revolutionary (fill in the blank), not because that isn’t a noble pursuit, but because I have learned how much it means to me personally that my work be invested in one thing, one place, one community. 

Looking back I can clearly see how the scale of the problems that interest me has gradually expanded, from parts, to products, to places, and ultimately to people and the communities shaped by them.

I am ever hesitant to use the word calling in its most Christian sense, but I certainly feel an upwelling of ambition towards this future unlike anything I have felt before. I have found myself totally enthralled by the possibility of building a life and a livelihood that support each other in more ways than just financially. I want my time, talents, and effort to support a community, not just a paycheck. Whether that be the community of a university campus, a small municipality, or even a city, I am inspired by the possibility of seeing the fruits of a long term investment in a place and the people who live their lives there. In one sentence, I am consciously aiming towards an outcome where my children will know my coworkers.