About Me

I am currently a graduate student pursuing a Master of Science degree in Computer Science.

I am originally from Colorado. I grew up in the Littleton, CO area and moved to Omaha, NE during my senior year at Columbine High School.

I graduated high school from Papillion/LaVista High School, Class of 1997; and then spent the next two years of my life as a missionary in Finland.

I returned from Finland on December 17th, 1999 and entered college at what was then Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho. Later the school's name was changed to Brigham Young University - Idaho. I graduated from BYU-Idaho with a 2 year Specialized Associate's Degree in Chemical Engineering in June of 2002. After graduating with the SAS degree I decided that it was time to move to Salt Lake City, Utah to pursue a BS degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Utah. After just one year in the program at the U of U I decided I hated Biomedical Engineering so, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska Peter Kiewit Institute in Omaha, Nebraska.

At PKI I studied Computer Engineering and finally obtained a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering with a minor in Mathematics and a minor in Computer Science in May of 2007. At that time I was also working as an Intern for Lockheed Martin in Omaha. Lockheed Martin was kind enough to hire me full-time and move to Colorado Springs, Colorado in June of that year. I have been in Colorado Springs ever since.

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Interests

My interests include the following:

• Information Assurance
• Cryptography
• Hardware Design
• Secure Programming
• Denver Broncos
• Denver Nuggets
• NCAA Final Four
• And many others

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Hobbies

Currently I don't have a lot of free time. However, in the rare event that I do have some time for me, I like to unwind by doing some of the following:

• Playing World of Warcraft
• Practicing the Piano
• Digital Circuit Design
• Reading

WoW

I currently have a level 80 hunter and a mage in T5 gear that I working on getting to level 80. I have a hard time deciding which character to play. Hunters are fun, but mages blow shit up!

Piano

I am not great at the piano; however, I do enjoy playing when I get the time. I never could get lessons, so, I actually took a college course. It was fun. A lot more girls in that course than in any of my computer engineering or computer science courses :).

Digital Circuits

As a computer engineer at heart, I miss designing circuits. During my junior year in Nebraska we designed and built an 8086 based computer. We actually bought the 8086 chip and the logic integrated circuits, some RAM and ROM, a 20 key matrix keypad and a 4 x 20 lcd and wired it up. The amazing thing was I actually got it to work. I enjoyed the project.

As a senior my team designed a wireless EKG monitor. We used one board to obtain the EKG from the patient and then sent the EKG to a display using ZigBee technology. I had fun with it.

Reading

A love for reading is something that I received from my mother. She always read to my brothers and sisters and me when we were little. So, I credit her with giving me the love for reading.

Some of my favorite books:

• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling
• The Cleric Quintet, The Dark Elf Trilogy, The Icewind Dale Trilogy, and a few others by R.A. Salvatore
• The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan
• Mistborn, The Well of Ascension, The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson
• John Adams by David McCullough
• Eragon, Eldest, Brisingr by Christopher Paolini

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