Name: Bill
Location: Midwest
My school had a lot of problems.
When I was in 8th or 9th grade, they went into receivership — a treasurer had stolen a large percentage of the school’s budget. So, the state took over running the school. A bunch of programs had to get cut. Most of the best teachers were the most experienced ones. They got cut or they got asked for early retirement. Things very quickly went downhill in my little suburban school, and, alongside of that, I was not having a good time. I was not enjoying myself. I was not liking my own life. I was not enjoying anything. I was not doing very well in school. I remember walking around my science class trying to get kicked out by throwing a bouncy ball off the wall while the teacher was going over her slides. There was this sort of nonsense where I thought it wasn’t a good use of my time and it wasn’t a good use of their time, and so I was arguing with my guidance counselor and the principal, trying to get early release or early dismissal.
In 11th grade, I took physics. It was just what was on the schedule. I had a teacher, she was a former nun. Whether she left by choice or not by choice, I don’t know, because she was gay. She was an accomplished guitar player. She had over 200 credit hours in the sciences and in education. She was absolutely incredible. She had a master’s degree, she probably could have had 2 more if she would have just, you know, taken 1 class in the field. She was amazing. I describe her as, like, a Hallmark Movie of the Week. She had the right mixture of challenging you and asking you to look at things in a different way. I was blown away, I had never had a love of learning like this. I would go see her when I was supposed to be in other classes. I was asking her questions that were far outside the realm of what we were covering, because I was curious and she was willing to go there.
By the end of it, I asked her, “Hey, our school doesn’t offer Physics II. Is there anything that we can do about this?” She went to her partner, the principal, and I was able to take independent study with her. This involves things that aren’t typically covered in high school classes like cosmology and quantum mechanics. I learned about the light slit experiment.
You familiar with this at all?
This is the Level 1 way to demonstrate that light acts both as a wave and as a particle, it is both continuous, and discrete. You can’t have both at the same time. Yet, light seems to do that. We can prove it pretty easily. The idea is that you cut some slits in a piece of paper, and you shine a light, and you see an interference pattern where the waves are bouncing against each other. Sometimes they bounce against each other and reinforce, and sometimes they cancel out. So you see this series of light and dark patterns, and you do some tricks to prove that there’s nothing up this sleeve and nothing up that sleeve, and, yes, light is a wave. You can see it right there.
However, if you send one photon at a time through, which means there’s nothing to interfere if there’s only one, right? You still get an interference pattern of light and dark. So somehow the light is interfering with itself like a wave, even when you’re doing it one piece at a time.
It’s basically this idea where you have these two things that are very obviously true, and at the same time, judging by how we interact with the world, cannot be true at the same time.
This physics teacher, I could not be more thankful to her. I went back after I had gotten my double major on the Dean’s list, and graduated summa cum laude and went and, you know, said, “Thank you”. I don’t know what she’s up to or or where she is at this point, but, I mean, she absolutely changed my life. If I would have taken biology instead of taking physics, I wouldn’t have had her as a teacher. Everything would have been different for me.
I went to college initially for physics, and I was enjoying my math classes a heck of a lot more than a lot of my other stuff. You don’t really get into physics your freshman year, that started your sophomore year. I was having a lot of fun with math and I went to my advisor and said, “I’m thinking about picking up a math major to double major, I’m really having fun.” He looked at my schedule and my classes, and I hadn’t done any post-secondary, I hadn’t done anything special when graduating high school. I didn’t have a great high school experience. My guidance counselor in my senior year of high school told me to drop out. My advisor, he’s like, “You can’t do it in four years if you can’t take summer classes.”
I went to school entirely on loans. Summer classes were a lot more money. I would have had to stay on campus for the summers instead of going back home, I couldn’t afford it. I said that wasn’t possible, and he was like, “Well, you just can’t do it”. I went to my math teacher and he said, “Yes you can, you just need to get special dispensation to take extra hours during the semester”. At that time, they had a limit of 18. I took 21 and 20 my freshman year, after having a conversation with the Dean, he gave me a thumbs up, and I did pretty well. I continued taking a lot of classes to finish the double major, but it was mostly because my advisor told me there was no way that I could do it without taking summer classes. I was like, “If you’re going to challenge me, then I’m going to go see what I can do about this”. It worked out extremely well because at the end of it, I went to grad school for math instead of physics.
My initial plan had always been… the reason I went to college was for physics, but in the end, I enjoyed the math more. It was more suitable for my temperament.
There’s a well-known quantum mechanics textbook for undergraduates. It’s by an author, David Griffiths. He’s pretty well known. He’s got an electricity and magnetism book that’s widely used, and he’s a pretty popular guy. In his quantum mechanics textbook, he writes something that’s not true. It’s a mathematical statement. He has an asterisk by it, and at the bottom of the page it says, “If you’re thinking of pathological counterexamples like: counterexample to the thing he just said was true, then maybe math is for you”. The situation that he was describing doesn’t come up in the real world, so the fact that it’s not mathematically true didn’t bother him. But it did bother me. It’s a good example of why I preferred math. I went to grad school for math and ended up staying at the same university. I got a master’s along the way, because in math grad school, you might as well, you just have to fill out a paper, everything else you do is the same, and so I got a PhD in mathematics.
There are different angles that I appreciate about math. One is pattern recognition and abstraction. You do something for the first couple of cases, and say, “I wonder if it always works like that?”, you do it for a couple more cases and you’re like, “Now I’ve got to see if I can prove this”. Extrapolating and saying, “What are the weird situations that can happen? What do we have to investigate? What are the corner cases?” It’s the same sort of nonsense people have fun discussing, you know, “Is a hotdog a sandwich?” type questions. This is the same sort of thing except with numbers, right? You say “Here’s a pattern, it seems to hold. Let me see how I can twist it. Let me see how I can turn it and make it so that it’s not true.”
When you’re doing math in primary school, middle school, elementary school, it’s arithmetic, right? Numbers and fractions. Maybe you’re trying to pull out some stuff from word problems. When you get to high school, you start putting letters in there. Now you’ve got to solve for X, you’ve got algebra, maybe trigonometry. You deal with shapes. If you’re a particular kind of student, you see calculus and, now, you start seeing some weird stuff, weird techniques, you see things that don’t obviously connect to the arithmetic you started with. It seems like a different discipline. I didn’t find math interesting until I got to college. They have a different perspective because college math teachers are not coming at it from, “Hey, I want to teach you how to solve a problem”. They’re coming at it from, “Hey, I want to teach you this idea”. It’s explained in words. Ideas are explained in patterns and logic. It’s not about following the same steps over and over again to get the result.
There’s an element of creativity that comes in, and an element of lawyer-like logic and precision that comes in. You have this perspective of people who have to prove things, it rarely involves numbers, and, at least in the kinds of math that I was interested in, it’s descriptions and explanations. There are certainly equations involved, but you’re really arguing from logic rather than playing with numbers. and so it’s a very different feeling. That’s what I fell in love with, this idea that, “Hey, I think this thing is true and I want to try to prove that, and then I want to try to convince other people that it’s true”. What appealed to me was trying to prove things, much more than trying to solve problems.
I thought I was going to work for the government. That didn’t work out. This was in 2014. In 2008, the world collapsed and nobody could find a job for people in higher education. This became a problem a couple of years later. You’ve got people graduating in 2008, you’ve got hiring freezes going into place. ‘09 or ‘10 and then you’ve got postdocs looking for jobs, you’ve got people graduating who aren’t where they want to be. By 2014, there’s this giant backlog in academia of people who want either a different job or a new job, or in some cases, like me, a first job. A position opened up in a school close to me where my advisor knew somebody that worked there. It was in my specialty, which is neither the most niche nor the brightest area of mathematics, but it was my area, and I thought I had a pretty good shot at it. They had a position open. They had 230 applicants. Another university had 2 positions open, over 700 applicants. You had all these people applying, and all of these people are math PhDs. I was not having a lot of success.
I finally had an opportunity to teach and to be either a professor at an HBCU, or to teach at a private, all-girls high school, so my wife and I went to work at the HBCU. They had a hiring freeze, separate from, you know, the 2008 thing, and, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but HBCUs are occasionally underfunded. Everybody was down to their shoe strings as much as they could be.
We were doing everything on a challenging budget and my student loan bills came due. Comparing them to my salary, the numbers were not pretty. A third of my post-tax salary was being sent out to public and private loans. I expected to have a big bill, and I did.
I did not have a gift as a teacher. I was not extraordinary at it, and it wasn’t my favorite thing to do. But at the same time, I felt good about being a teacher, I was competent, you know, the students came out doing what they’re supposed to do.
There was a group working on a NASA grant out of… I don’t remember if it was Houston, or a different NASA in Texas, but they were working with an interdisciplinary group, doing biology work. They were trying to determine how different kinds of microbes survived — or didn’t — in space. They said, “Why don’t you teach yourself some coding? I don’t know how much math we’re going to have to do, but we’re definitely gonna need scripting”. So, I started learning Python, and I was having a really good time with it. I enjoyed coding a heck of a lot more than I enjoyed teaching my fourth remedial algebra class of the day. So I started interviewing at some tech places.
Eventually I caught on with a consulting firm. They place new grads in a bootcamp, and then they place them at a location, typically in finance, for a couple of years. I had a head start on the coding. They placed me at the Options Clearing Corporation, in Chicago. Setting up their internal issue tracking software, migrating their HR system, helping the accounting team get their new printer set up. It was a really good first job in the industry, and my wife had a ready-made community. We knew people in Chicago already. I served it out, it went well, I learned a ton. In the end, they were eliminating my position, so I was looking elsewhere when I applied to and got the job that I have now. I had 2 offers at that time, and I went with this one because of sustainability, social conscience, and with all other things being equal, I’m going with the one that makes me feel better to work at.
I am the Chief Technology Officer for a small company. We are startup-like, but we’ve been around for about 10 or 12 years. The company has changed directions a couple of times, but I will focus on what I do today.
We take in institutional food purchasing data — think, like, a hospital or a university — food and beverages and disposables, things like that. They or their distributors collect that data, and they send it to us. We standardize it, clean it, and we tag it for sustainable attribution.
What we’re looking for is: what did they purchase that’s USDA Certified Organic? What was bought within 250 miles? What was within the state that the institution is located in? We return the data to them in the form of reports.
There’s an organization called the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability and Higher Education, and a lot of schools belong to this organization. They have a program called STARS. STARS ranks schools on how they’re doing in terms of sustainability. Not just with food, but with energy use and similar things, and the schools get ranked on that. This feeds into US News and World Report rankings. Some institutions have public ESG or DEI commitments they’ve made, and they have to report to their boards. Occasionally, state governments will give kickbacks just to institutions for purchasing things locally — there’s a program called Kentucky Proud that’s a good example of this. If a university buys something that was involved in some way with a Kentucky business, locally grown or produced, or even if it’s just the distributors being located in Kentucky, they still get credit for that in some fashion.
The company started off sourcing local produce for Chicago Public Schools. They were a kitchen table business, the founder of the company was connecting local Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois farmers with Chicago Public Schools. They were taking the food, getting the trucks to bring it to food prep locations and they were doing things like “Bring a farmer to the classroom!” events.
At some point they got involved with a big food service management company that services CPS, and the food service management company said, “Can you tell us about your local sourcing?” Not necessarily where they were getting the stuff, but, in terms of money, and in terms of percentages, and CPS were interested in getting all the stuff we report on. The company said, “This platform you built for reporting to collect this information and to disseminate it, it’s pretty good, could you do this if we gave you other data?” and so, from that point, I’ve been involved. I’ve been with the company for about six years. There were a couple of us hired at the same time that set up initial processing and databases and reporting and all that. I was hired as, I think, a senior manager. At some point, I got a promotion to director, and then somebody left, and in order to make sure that I didn’t also leave, I got a promotion to VP, and then last year, I got a promotion to CTO.
My boss is the founder of the company. She’s the CEO, the one doing the initial kitchen table work, boxing up the potatoes and putting them on a truck. She’s still with the company, but she’s started to think about retirement. So, we’re looking at maybe getting acquired or maybe getting funding, with the possibility that I may take over her role in the next few years or something along those lines. We’re pretty sure that things won’t continue this way indefinitely in a tiny company, it can’t because we’re too dependent on the individuals involved.
We are 80% remote at this point. We were partially remote prior to Covid, and then after Covid, we started doing 1 day in the office after things loosened up a little. Most of our folks are not local to Chicago, so every day, you’re talking with somebody in Spain, somebody in Argentina, somebody in California. One of the things that’s been difficult for vacations and for holidays is that our biggest customer has a deadline where we need to have a particular data set ready on the first of the month. The world doesn’t fall down if it’s not. But a lot of people get a lot of headaches. It’s pretty important, which means somebody has to be in charge of it. Initially, it was me and a couple other people all working together to hash out the process and make sure that we could meet that deadline. Some of the folks got bored and wanted to move on. Eventually it got to the point where it was faster for me to do it myself than to try to train somebody, and then have to worry about it and look over their shoulder, so I just took it on myself. The biggest client and the biggest, most important deadline for them, I’ve shouldered that.
My job is partially management, partially making sure workflows are appropriate, partially making sure nobody is too stumped, making sure people are asking questions when they’re supposed to, making sure everyone’s workload is appropriate. The other part is actual hands-on tech work, shepherding files through our process and making sure the output makes sense compared to the input. I would say that I now take a lot more ownership, in the sense that this is now my process, and I’m both responsible for making sure that it works when it’s supposed to, and deciding how it’s supposed to go. Initially it was sort of, like, “Well, you tell me what this is supposed to look like, and I will do my best to sort of implement what you think”.
You know, if you bang your head against the wall enough times, you will, in fact, make a hole in it, and that’s sort of what I think the primary responsibility of the job is, we have a nice head-shaped hole in the wall where I fit comfortably.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE 