I am a professor of web design and development at the University of Rochester. Before that I was an adjunct instructor at places like: the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT); Monroe Community College (MCC); and a few other local colleges. Before that I made my living as a contract consultant in the Update New York area, working at companies like Kodak, First Niagara Bank, Cornell University, the UR Medical Center, and several others. And before that I had an 18-year career at as a marketing executive at Xerox.
Early Days
I am a native of Rochester, New York, although I haven’t lived here all my life. In the 1980s I played in various rock ‘n roll bands and traveled around the Northeast United States and parts of Canada. When that career lost its luster, I went back to college at Syracuse University and earned a degree in Library Sciences. After moving back to Rochester, getting married and having kids, I started working my way through Xerox management. In the early 2000s I began the Master of Business Administration (MBA) program at RIT. I only made it half way through the MBA program before I dropped-out to attend RIT’s new School of Information Technology, which is where I learned to love the Web. Upon completing the Master of Information Technology program (paid for by Xerox!) I left the company to pursue my new dream of Web development.
Contract Consultant
Fresh out of school (and out of Xerox) I started my new career as a freelancer, working alone, and then later teaming up with other freelancers to build a portfolio of websites. Based on my portfolio I was able to start my contract consulting career. At that time (late 2000s), mobile Web development was becoming a thing, so I taught myself as much as I could in that area of the industry and billed myself as a mobile development expert. That helped me get my first few contracts, which led to more contracts. Soon I had a lucrative second career that made me much happier (and better off) than my previous corporate marketing career.
Professor
Around 2010, I picked-up a night course to teach entry-level web development. The pay was not great, and it took up way more time than it should have, but I suppose I wanted to do it because it was my way of giving back to the community. For reasons – I’m not sure why – I kept teaching night courses semester after semester, and I started doing fewer and fewer contract jobs. By 2013, when I started as an adjunct at UR, I was teaching at four colleges at once, and I had (almost) stopped working as a consultant entirely.
Adjunct pay is not very good and running between colleges is stressful (and expensive! …lots of gas). When an opportunity at UR came up to become a full-time lecturer for the new Digital Media Studies program, I dropped all my other adjunct positions at the other colleges and stopped my contract consulting jobs entirely to devote myself to my new, third career: teaching.