Hello there. Welcome to my blog. Let me try and hit some highlights about me to provide some context as to why I write what I write and what experiences influence the order of my words.

My name is Andrew and I’m from a small town in Central PA. I’ve always experienced it as a rough place but that’s probably not the case for everyone. After barely graduating high school to poor attendance and motivational problems, I left home for the US Army in July of 2001. I was 82nd Airborne Artillery and did one tour in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom.

After the Army, I got a degree in sociology from Penn State University. I was painting for the university until I landed a full time job working for a school for court ordered juveniles outside of Philadelphia. I didn’t get paid much, so after a while I also got a second job helping students who dropped out of high school get their diplomas. (Here is a post focused on inequality that gives some context about this part of my life.)

I had no days off and was barely making $50K working 80 hours a week, and I knew something had to give. So I thought of a skill that I could add to my resume that would support my sociology degree and at the same time get me more earning power. I landed on an MS in applied statistics. I quit the two social services jobs, switched to the restaurant grind, and attended West Chester University of PA.

The plan more or less worked and after working a contract job at Citi Group, I landed a full time job as a customer experience analyst at Comcast. This is where I finally learned that I’m smart enough, that I can hold my own in any room, and that I am capable of playing the game at the highest levels. This is also when I fell in love with Philadelphia.

Even still, I wasn’t quite ready to commit to the corporate life for ever and ever amen, so rather than going through with closing on a home in what ended up being a booming section of the city and climbing the corporate ladder, I applied for the Peace Corps and shipped off to Namibia, Africa for two years. There, I lived in the Kavango West region and worked on a community health and HIV and Aids project. (See the Peace Corps section of my bog for some of those stories)

After Africa, I moved to San Francisco and worked with national nonprofit organization that utilizes running as a platform to serve the homeless community. After about a year, I knew that after all of that moving around and those incredibly challenging experiences, I needed to be back in PA closer to my support system.

As a result of some pandemic stuff, I ended up in my hometown again for way longer than I could have anticipated and now work for a bank that started there. Where I am currently the AVP of Multi-Experience Analytics. More importantly, through magic or luck or something, I met the woman who would I would eventually marry and have a beautiful daughter with. Who was not from anywhere near my hometown but from Caracas Venezuela.

In no world do you expect to meet a woman like this in Clearfield, PA, but a global pandemic and pocket sized super computers have a way of changing things I suppose. My family and I now live in a suburb of Philadelphia.

Anyway, that’s about it. There’s a bunch of stuff and pain and loss and love and happiness in between, but those are some of the highlights.

On the hobby side, I’m a book nerd, like in a book club book nerd. I still skateboard occasionally. I used to be a solid basketball player, but I’ve probably been out of the game too long to claim that anymore. I like to run and ride bikes and like most 40 something year old men, I’m like, into birds now. Oh, I’m also an inactive yoga instructor – there is a cool story about how I became a certified yoga instructor that I’ll share more about. (It is briefly mentioned in this post here)

If you’re curious about more, then, by all means, read some of my articles.

Thanks for being here,

Andrew