Life Update

Howdy!

That’s a greeting I am starting to get used to, and it seemed appropriate for my first blog entry from the state of Texas and as we are going into the new year. 

A lot has happened over the last few months. In June, we moved from Illinois to College Station, Texas, where I found a new job as the Creative Manager embedded in the Department of Residence Life at Texas A&M University. This is a major change for me. Other than a brief stint at HP, I have worked at the Carson College of Business for my entire professional life. After working there as a student, I started full-time in 2003 as the IT Help Desk Manager. From there my position evolved and grew for nearly 20 years.

During that time, I let the needs of the organization dictate my career path. I evolved through different IT specializations, and then began adding design job duties and skills when the supervision of the college's in-house design team basically fell in my lap. The evolution worked out well. I had the opportunity to continually do new things, broaden my skill set, and advance in position and pay, all while staying in the same tight-knit office. I liked my work, I liked my co-workers, it was good.

Part of what had been making it good was that for the last several years, more and more of my duties had been shifting from IT to design. I was enjoying this. It was fulfilling a creative need that I had long wanted in my work. I wanted to keep going in this direction.

However, no matter how much design work I did, I had a hard time shaking the label as "the IT guy." I'd design and produce whole creative campaigns and people would still refer to my employees as design and me as IT. Then, a few months ago, I noticed that I was getting pulled back into the IT portion of my job. I also realized that this was going to end up being a permanent redirect if I wanted to continue to grow my career in the same organization. This time, however, I didn't want to change directions. I liked where I was going.

So, after a lot of thought and consideration, I decided it was time to move on. I was able to find my new position at Texas A&M and started officially on September 1. Now, I've shed that IT persona and  I'm up to my neck in creative and marketing initiatives and am really enjoying it.

What does that mean for this site? Initially, probably not a lot of change in direction, but hopefully more content. I'm ready to start moving forward again with my art and fiction, such as the Naturalist's Journal. To help build skills, I've decided I need a bit of a creative reboot. I'll give details of that and share the results. Then, as things develop, this blog will be a place to share my experience working in design and marketing. From there, we'll see where it goes. I've also created new Instagram and Twitter accounts as part of my reboot, so look for more on those channels.

Thank you if you've stuck with me this far. There's been a lot of change over the past few months, but I'm hoping some good things come out of it, and that it will lend itself to a lot more content on this site and all of my channels.

Been through any big changes recently? Let me know in the comments or on social.