Academics

My academic path was not clean, and I am not interested in rewriting it so it sounds cleaner than it was. I left high school and earned a GED. I started in mechanical engineering at Southern Illinois University and left that program too. By the time I got to Lincoln Land Community College, I had already built up enough failed starts to have a real reason to wonder whether academics was ever going to be a place where I made sense. That was not abstract self-doubt. That was the pattern at that point.

Lincoln Land is where that started to change. I studied business administration there for about two years, with a couple breaks in the middle. I was in the Honors Program and became a member of Phi Theta Kappa, and that was the first time school stopped feeling like a place where I was just proving what I could not do. It started feeling like a place where I could actually succeed if I did the work. That distinction mattered. It was not some inspirational movie moment. The work made sense. The expectations were clear. I could see what good looked like, and I could meet it. After enough earlier failures, that was a bigger shift than any polished timeline could ever capture.

That is why Lincoln Land still matters to me. It is part of my local story, but more than that, it is where the academic side of my life stopped feeling fake. I did not leave there with a degree, but I did leave there with something I had not had before, which was real evidence that I could do serious academic work and belong in that environment. Once that clicked, the rest of the path stopped looking impossible.

After that, I went on to the University of Illinois Springfield and completed a Bachelor of Science in Biology with a pre-medicine emphasis and later a Master of Public Health. Those degrees matter to me, but not in the usual way people put degrees on a page and expect them to speak for themselves. Biology trained me to pay attention to mechanism instead of assumption. Public health trained me to look at systems, incentives, consequences and the way pressure moves through institutions instead of stopping at surface explanations. Both stayed with me because both matched the kinds of problems I kept seeing in real life.

I am also in the Doctor of Public Administration program at the University of Illinois Springfield, where my dissertation focuses on how federal tax policy reinforces financialization across sectors. That sounds academic because it is academic, but the reason I care about it did not come from a textbook. I have spent years inside organizations where decisions move away from the people doing the work, get run through somebody farther from the problem, and come back down as more work for the same few people to fix. I saw that pattern in finance, in healthcare settings, in government and in nonprofits. The titles changed. The loop did not.

That is also part of what led me to build Integrated Value Architecture. The academic side gave me a place to study the pattern directly. The rest came from living inside enough versions of it to stop pretending it was random. So this page is not here to make my path look neat or traditional. It is here because Lincoln Land was where things turned, UIS is where I finished the degrees, and the doctoral work is where the same questions I had been carrying for years finally had a formal place to go.