What area do you work in within the VPFA portfolio?
I work in Administrative Services.
What is your current position, and what are your job responsibilities?
I am currently a Program Representative, and much of what I do involves working with the partner units who receive IT, HR, and Biz Ops services from FASS, FASS IT, and PAST. This includes the triage and dispatching of service requests, administering client satisfaction surveys, data collection and reporting, and helping with the transition to a new enterprise service management system.
What is your work history and education that enabled you to attain your current position?
I started working while in the 7th grade, stocking shelves and cleaning floors at our neighborhood market after school and have been working ever since. Post high school, I was a supervisor at a local compound bow manufacturer, then a supervisor at an asset recovery firm. Before joining the UO in 2023, I spent 15 years working for a local electric and water utility company in various roles. Much of my experience involved working with internal and external stakeholders to implement and manage accounts and programs offered by the utility. This experience primed me to be a Program Rep on the Service Team in Admin Services. While balancing work and life, I recently graduated from Bushnell University with a B.S. in Business Administration with a focus on management.
How has working at UO enabled your professional goals and interests?
I truly appreciate how my role at UO utilizes my strengths and stretches my abilities. Feeling utilized while developing new competencies in a healthy work environment is quite a blessing.
What do you like about your current position?
I like that it is so dynamic. On any given day, I can be doing transactional, project-based, or collaborative types of work. It keeps things interesting and allows me to use my brain in different ways!
What advice do you have for someone thinking of applying to the UO?
Talk to someone who currently works at UO! It’s hard to get a feel for the culture/landscape without talking to someone, especially if you’ve never worked in higher ed before.
Share a little about yourself personally:
I was born and raised in the Eugene/Springfield area, so it’s fun to look back at how things were then and now: Which restaurants used to be something else, or when a housing development used to be a field. My father worked in the utility industry and mother was in banking. They are now retired and take great joy in spending more time with their grandkids.
My wife, Ally, and I have two kids: Cainen, who’s 17, Grace who’s 3, and our third, a baby boy, is due to be born in a couple weeks on 3/31! Ally and I met through a mutual friend 9 years ago and have been married 6. Just three months after we met, she was scheduled to move to Siem Reap Cambodia on a one-year service commitment, so we packed in as many dates as possible before she left. I visited her halfway through her stay and proposed while we were catching a sunset at the Angkor Wat temples. Now, we are growing our family with kids and a corgi named Dovahkiin.
Favorite food: My favorite food is, without a doubt, tacos. I especially like a good street taco with meat, onions, cilantro, topped off with a habanero red sauce. I’m fairly certain I could live off tacos and all its variation possibilities.
Best Movie I’ve seen: Answering which movie is the best I’ve seen is very hard to do for a movie buff! Without categories or time periods, I’ll say any of the Lord of the Rings movies. They are cinematic perfection. Honorable mention to There Will Be Blood, Shawshank Redemption, Goonies, La La Land, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, Cold Mountain, The Holdovers, and Heavyweights. See, there’s just too many great options to pick one.
How I want to be remembered: I hope my actions will allow me to be remembered as someone who loved others more than myself. Someone who was trustworthy, reliable, sarcastic, and would run through a wall for my family and friends. If this proves untrue, just lie at my funeral.
If you could only take three items with you to a deserted island, what would they be?
If survival tools were useless, and I couldn’t bring people, I’d want two asada tacos and something written by Steinbeck.
What are some of your hobbies?
I am a huge proponent of having hobbies. I think it’s so healthy to have something outside of work that you’re passionate about pursuing. I have many hobbies, including classic cars, reading, cooking, flying RC planes, drumming, and target shooting. My biggest hobby is clay trap shooting. When the weather is decent, I practice a few times a month and compete in tournaments throughout the year. I’ve never hunted a day in my life, but target shooting is something I have been drawn to nearly my whole life. Something about achieving extreme levels of precision and accuracy through trial-and-error scratches a part of my brain nothing else can.
If you could have the answer to one question, what would it be?
What is the cure for cancer?
(March 2025)