My Story

My foundation in IT began in the mid-1990s supporting small business networks, and deepened significantly during my time at UC Santa Cruz, where I progressed from Tier I helpdesk support for a campus of 18,000 students, staff, and faculty to Tier II support and eventually dedicated workstation and server support for approximately 300 clients across departments including IT, Staff Human Resources, Risk & Safety Services, Financial Affairs, Registrars, Title IX, Police, Physical Plant, Receiving, Business Services, and the Chancellor’s Office. Working as part of a small team, I supported enterprise environments running many different applications including ERP/BI apps like PeopleSoft, Banner, and Business Objects/Crystal Reports, ensuring client installations, database connectivity, and readiness for end users and development staff alike. I also administered and maintained critical server infrastructure supporting academic and administrative operations across the university. This included a campus-wide emergency alerting system integrated with phone services for mass notification during public safety events, WebCBT — the university’s sole online learning platform at a time when web-based education was still in its earliest stages — and multiple departmental database, file & print and domain servers.

It was that experience — understanding what a well-run, resilient IT environment looked like at scale — that I carried into my next role as IT Coordinator for a worker-owned cooperative. There, supporting 90 users across approximately 40 workstations and a range of networked devices spanning multiple business units — a restaurant, bakery, bar, nightclub, manufacturing facility, catering operation, and festival and farmers market presence — I was responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the entire infrastructure

Much of what I built during my time as IT Coordinator, I first had to learn. I came in knowing what a resilient system needed to look like — from my experience at UC Santa Cruz — but not always how to implement each piece. I learned one technology at a time, introducing changes incrementally while keeping critical systems online. User training was a central part of the migration. Moving from Windows to Linux — as well as from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and eventually to Google Workspace — was a significant shift for everyday users, and I made user adoption as much a priority as the technical implementation itself. I communicated changes before they happened, trained staff on unfamiliar tools, and worked to make each transition feel as smooth as possible. That combination of technical self-direction and people-aware implementation is something I carry into every environment I work in.