As a small child you always want to spend time with your parents doing fun things. You don’t realize it’s a hobby to them at first just that you enjoy doing it and being with your parents. I hear all the stories about when I was really young before I can remember about my favorite hobby that I have. My would have to say my favorite hobby would have to be fishing. Growing up in a rural part of southeastern Iowa with the river basically in my back yard it was almost inevitable that it would be the way I wanted to spend everyday. My parents always told me and everyone who asks how young I was when I first starting fishing. I may have been a little young to hold the rod and reel to fish, but none the less I was there with them on the boat at a month old. You can say I floated through my childhood. As I grew up I remember a lot of the memories of fishing with my mom and dad. We loved fishing so much we were out on the river every night running our bank poles that we had set out during the week. On the weekends we would also run out bank poles but we would find a nice log jam and park the boat and sit there for hours with our rod and reels in hand soaking up the sun and spending quality time together. One of my most fondest memories fishing as a kid was when the river flooded in 1994 my dad and I went digging for some worms in the yard and fishing off the back porch of a family friend who had a cabin at the bottom of the hill down by the river. One of my other favorite memories growing up is when we were trying the load the boat on the trailer after our fishing trip. The motor we had on that boat was sometimes hard to start, but I had watched my dad do it a hundred times. He went to go back the trailer up so we could load it on the trailer and it had died and started floating down the river. I was the only one in the boat at the time, but since I had watched him start it so many times I knew what I had to do to get it started and get it back to the bank so we could load it on the trailer. As I have gotten older and have children of my own I have passed my favorite I guess you can call it a hobby, but if you were to ask my wife it would be more of an addiction down to them. They love to go fishing as much as I did when I was their age. I just hope when I have grandkids they will want to go fishing with us when they get old enough.

Being a parent has affected my journey to higher education. I didn’t think I would be able to be a a full time parent with a full time job to support my family, and be a full time student that would help me to better support them after I graduated. I always thought about going back to school after my children were born, but was always worried about how am I going to afford to go back to school. When would I have time to go back to school. I can’t go back to school because of my work schedule won’t allow any time for class. I kept pushing it off and pushing it off because my family always comes first and I put my education on the back burner because I thought it was what I had to do to survive and support my family. Now that I have decided to pursue a higher education there are endless possibilities. Of course there are the higher wages I would be getting to support my family and give them everything they want and need. It also sets an example to them that if you put your mind to it anything can be achieved at any time in your life. Think about what you really want to do for the rest of your life, it might not be the same thing you want after you graduate. After I graduate not only would I be able to meet their needs for their future education I would be able to spend more time with them. Find a job that doesn’t keep me away from them as much as my current job does. Show them that there is more to life than working 100s of hours a week. Make memories with that they will last a lifetime. Now that they are older I want to do some of the things I did with my dad at their age. Show them the things that made me the person I am today and give them those memories that they too would pass on to their children for generations to come. Having a job with higher wages to better support is only half the battle of life, the other battle is being able to be happy and spend time with the ones you love and make memories that will be cherished forever

When I graduated high school in 2007 I started off my college career in automotive. 2008 that all changed I was working part time as an industrial mechanic for Tyson Foods. The automotive field fell out and more and more people were trying to make repairs themselves. I dropped out of school so I could go full time at Tyson after doing some math and found out that I could make just as much or more by going full time. I worked my way from mechanic to electrician in just under 7 years. After almost ten and a half years my career path changed as I uprooted my family and made the trek to Minnesota from our Indiana home. In 2018 I started at Prime Pork now Hylife Foods Windom as an electrical apprentice. I have a strong passion for what I am doing now and wanted to go back to school so I can learn more in the electrical field. I want to be the go to guy when in the job site either with Hylife or another employer in the future.