Life Since High School
This year is my 20th high school reunion. I was looking forward to this, and had been searching the internet for when it was going to happen all last fall and winter. Late this spring a postcard arrived with the date, which I looked at and to quote Han Solo “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”. The date was August 9th, and my kids head back to school on August 13th. To top it off, this was one of three black belt testing dates per year for our school, and I am ready to test, and my best friend from high school already had plans to see a Cubs game in Chicago on that date, and to stop here and visit afterwards. All in all, the stars seem to have aligned against me attending the reunion.
None the less, the spirit to reconnect is in me as it is with many others. Facebook has turned out to be a blessing in this way, allowing me to reconnect with some of those long lost souls by reaching out across the internet. If you have a facebook account, look me up.
These blog posts are a summary of twenty years of my life since high school, for anyone who cares. It may be mostly boring drivel that nobody is interested in reading, but that is what blogs on the internet are for, right 😉 This will of course be the “resume” version of my life, I won’t subject you to the real crappy parts you don’t want to read anyway, just the highlights to give you a flavor.
Part 1 of 4 – The College Years
After high school, I attended Colordao State University. I graduated in four years with a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration. I had concentrations in Finance & Real Estate, and Computer Information Systems, and I had a minor in Mathematics. I was in the University Honors Program, and I did a Senior Honors Thesis titled “The Application of Neural Networks to the Forecasting of Economic Time Series Data”.
I spent two years in the dorms at CSU, and two more years in apartments there. Some people from Coronado who attended CSU with me were Teresa Parker (lived in the same dorm I did the first two years), Lisa Bailey (married Allen Wagner), Mark Stallings (roommate with me my second year in the dorms and first year of apartments) and Jeff Whitt (my roommate the last year of college).
I did funded undergraduate research on the same topic as my honors thesis, and the professor I did research with was Dr. John Snyder. He has a cabin up on a lake in Montana on Swan Lake, near the town of Big Fork; about 45 minutes drive south of the west entrance to Glacier National Park. He spent summers there, eventually retiring to the cabin, and I went to visit him there several times.
In addition to class work, I participated in numerous extracurricular activities. Besides the usual bar hopping, I was in a group called the Society for Creative Anachronism which did recreation of the medieval times including fighting, dancing and feasting. Four all four years at CSU, I was in the CSU Ki – Aikido Club, studying the Japanese martial art of Aikido. I liked this, and took both levels of introduction to Self-Defense courses offered as PE credits as well. I joined Alpha Kappa Psi, a co-ed professional business fraternity.