Growing up, life wasn't easy. Living in a very low income area and in an even lower status made the idea of following the traditional route of going to college to learn a thing much more difficult. I always knew tech was the way I wanted to go, from a fascination with aircraft and aviation through to eventually building and tinkering with anything related to computers. My adoration for tech was often met with questions from family and friends about "what will you do with that?" or "How will you afford to go to school for that?"
Most often I would respond with "I don't know, I just think it's cool." I didn't realize until a few years out of high school, bored out of my mind in engineering courses in community college, that there was another option for me. Insert the military. It answered most of my problems at the time. It gave me a way to work in and around tech and aviation, many times at the same time. I started out working with LAN/WAN and Linux based devices and systems as an Early Warning Systems Operat