UD Personal Statement

To the UD Hiring Committee,

Growing up in Dayton, the son of a blue collar factory worker, I was repeatedly told that I was going to college so that I could get a job I looked forward to going to every morning. College was not about money, or climbing the social ladder, but about purpose.

On Saturdays, I would help my grandfather crush cardboard boxes and beer cans to take them to the recycling center in downtown Dayton. Every time we drove by CJ he would reminisce (to no end) about his high school football days. One Saturday, after off-loading the cardboard and cans, I think I was about 10, he drove me around UD’s campus. I had never seen such a beautiful place in my provincial upbringing, and there, on the spot, I told my grandfather that one day I would

go to UD. Fast forward to 2003. I registered as a graduate student and made good on my youthful promise. My father and grandfather were proud, and for the duration of my career, thus far, I have thoroughly enjoyed the work that UD gave me the opportunity to do.

Today, I am grateful for UD.

Specifically, I am grateful for how it educated me. In the past few years, however, I have come to understand UD, not only as a university, but as a fixture of the Dayton community with a unique purpose. Now, I want to work at UD, to broaden my impact beyond the classroom by being a part of UD’s mission to educate students through faith, service, and community.

I would imagine that as UD evolves into the 21st century it faces many challenges posed by a competitive and shifting technological landscape. Embracing this change, while maintaining core institutional values and traditions is just the kind of problem I would like to try and solve.

Working as an educator and in various consulting roles over the past seventeen years, I have had the opportunity to experience how technology is disrupting so many spaces, ranging from politics to toothpaste. I have enjoyed working with and discovering how teams of people develop technological solutions on the back end, onboard and engage users on the front end, improve their products through feedback, and take calculated risks to drive their companies and/or products forward. Most recently, I am proud of the work I am doing on two

fronts.

First, I am working with the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Colgate-Palmolive to roll out an enterprise-wide phishing campaign and cyber security awareness training program. Among other things, the task has involved baselining user behavior, developing written training materials, and tracking click rates to show reduced opening of malicious emails and changes in user behavior. Analyzing that data, strategizing with executives, coordinating with Colgate-Palmolive employees in New York and Mumbai, vetting third party vendors, and learning from technical Red Team consultants in Israel has allowed me to connect with so many talented people, as well as build domestic and international partnerships, and develop skills that I think would benefit UD.

Second, I spearheaded a school climate and culture initiative in the district where I teach. Collaborating with the ed-tech start up Panorama, I used their open-sourced student perception survey to develop a custom tool to collect data on items ranging from grit to belonging. After creating simple data visualizations, I put together a team of teachers to analyze the data in order to find our blind spots and determine which problem(s) we wanted to tackle. Once the team pinpointed our strategic focus, I led the entire staff through the design thinking process to develop targeted solutions. It was incredibly satisfying, when, at the end of the year, we re-assessed student perceptions and found our efforts improved favorability ratings by 12%.

For these reasons, I would enjoy learning more about the Director of Student Development Planning and Assessment. If the team agrees, and after reviewing my resume would like to talk more, I would look forward to an interview.