I Wanted to Teach Physics. The Navy and Life Had Other Plans.

I went to the University of Wisconsin to study physics. I wanted to be a high school physics teacher, and I still remember the lecture where we walked through Einstein's proof of E=mc². It was surprisingly simple — but only because we already knew where we were headed. Working backward from a conclusion always looks obvious. Getting there first is the part that's actually hard, and it's a little humbling to sit in a room decades later and realize how much genius it took to arrive somewhere that now takes an hour on a whiteboard.

I couldn't afford my last two years. Finishing the degree meant transferring back to an in-state school in Indiana, and by that point I'd grown too much to go back. A lot of my friends were engineering students heading into the Navy as submarine officers, and they suggested I enlist as a nuke instead. So I did. I went to Basic Training in Orlando on November 16, 1992, as a Machinist Mate.

Nearly two years of A-School and Nuclear Power Training later — Orlando, then Charleston — I finally made it to the fleet. My first boat was the USS Ohio, SSBN 726, Gold crew. As a Machinist Mate, my division of about fifteen people owned every gas and liquid system supporting the reactor, the steam plant, propulsion, and electrical generation. If it moved fluid and kept the boat running, it was ours to maintain and operate.

I also happened to be the guy who kept the division's training records. That detail matters more than it sounds like it should.

One of my supervisors wanted to become an officer, which meant finishing a bachelor's degree. He found a program Southern Illinois University ran on base — sailors could earn a degree in what the program called Workforce Education and Development, teaching them how to develop, deliver, and manage corporate training. In the mid-90s, that was a genuinely new specialization for a four-year degree. He knew I'd wanted to teach high school physics. He also knew something else about me: I didn't dislike kids exactly. I disliked other people's kids. And he'd watched me manage the division's training records well enough to notice I had a talent for it. He suggested I look into the program.

It took me a couple of years to actually go back to school. The degree itself wasn't hard — it just took time, especially once I transferred to my second submarine and started going to sea for extended stretches, rearranging which classes I could take and when. If I'm honest, I wish I'd started years earlier than I did.

One requirement of the SIU program was a corporate internship, and that's where everything actually clicked. I did mine at CEVA Logistics in Jacksonville in 2006, and for the first time in my life I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up: an eLearning instructional designer. eLearning itself was barely past its toddler phase at that point — nobody had settled on what "effective" was even supposed to mean yet. CEVA wanted to stop buying generic off-the-shelf training and start building its own library internally, and they needed people who could move fast. I learned what actually went into building eLearning and running an LMS, and I loved every minute of it. That internship is also where I met Diane Elkins, one of the people who genuinely shaped this industry — a friend of the training manager I was working under, who introduced us.

From there I went to shore duty in San Diego, teaching fellow submariners damage control and quality assurance in a classroom, and finally finished my bachelor's degree. I started a master's in the same field while I was there. That BS and the work toward my MS got me my first civilian job — training coordinator at Rio Tinto's Boron Operations, the world's second-largest boron mine and the original home of 20 Mule Team Borax.

I've held a few other jobs since then. It always came back to instructional design.

I didn't set out to become an instructional designer. I set out to teach physics, ended up maintaining a submarine's reactor plant, got noticed by a supervisor who saw a skill in me I didn't know I had, and only found the thing I actually wanted to do once I was standing in the middle of someone else's training department, watching it get built from scratch. Twenty-something years later, I'm still doing the thing that internship convinced me to chase — just with a lot more scar tissue and a much stronger opinion about needs analysis than I had at twenty-six.