I grew up in a town of about 7,000 people in the woods of central Massachusetts, the kind of place where my first jobs were about as unglamorous as they come: painting tiny wooden "honey dipper jars" for my mom's craft-show business, running a cash register in exchange for fair tickets, driving a landscaping truck at 16, running the teleprompter at a public-access news station, tearing pages out of the local newspaper as proof-of-run for my mom's ad sales job. My dad went to a trade high school for welding and spent his career as a project manager building vans for TV news crews; my mom worked her way from typist to small business owner and ad salesperson. I had jobs. I had responsibility. What I didn't have was anyone around to help me translate any of it into a future I could actually name — "small business owner," "project manager," "media," none of it registered as a career path. It was just work.

That gap didn't close until I visited a college campus for the first time; first briefly at my older sister's family weekend, then for real at Roger Williams University, where something clicked enough that I ran for freshman class president. A mentor named Chuck, from the Inter-Class Council, was the first person who looked at an unremarkable kid from a small town and saw someone worth investing in. That's the moment I'm trying to hand forward to every student who comes through this program: not just access, but someone who helps you see what's possible and believes you can get there.

After a Master’s degree from Educational Administration from Texas A&M, I've spent the fifteen years since building exactly that kind of infrastructure, at very different scales.

At Intuit, I designed a Career Growth Sprint for 6,000+ employees worldwide as part of an internal consulting team supporting learning and workforce development globally. Before that, I built youth leadership programs at Kennesaw State University and served as a national lead facilitator for Kiwanis Key Leader Retreats.

Today, in San Diego, I'm Executive in Residence at the CSU San Marcos College of Business, coaching business students directly in career prep, sit on the executive board of Project Next, and spent a year and a half as Designer-in-Residence at the UC San Diego Design Lab. I also founded the San Diego Service Jam, a multi-day community design weekend that's the exact format this camp is built on: convene people, hand them a real problem, get them to something real in days.

And when I care about something, I tend to put my body where my mouth is — I've run the Rock 'n' Roll San Diego Marathon for Project Next and rappelled 29 stories down a downtown high-rise for Reality Changers, both in support of the same first-gen students this camp exists for. This is the next chapter of that same commitment, brought home to CSUSM.