I was a terrible student.

Remedial math to RF engineering

I started community college in remedial math, reading, and writing. Not one of those. All three!

I wanted to finish in four years anyway, so I took 24 credit hours a semester to catch up, then transferred to the University of Oklahoma's ABET-accredited electrical engineering program. At OU I failed Circuits 1 three times, then talked my way into being the professor's teaching assistant for it. I TA'd Intro to Digital Design too, did undergraduate RF research, and finished with two straight 4.0 semesters. The whole story is here. I graduated in December 2016.

From cell sites to stories

I joined T-Mobile as an RF engineering co-op in my last year of school and stayed for five years. I designed and optimized cell sites, helped integrate the first standalone 5G broadband network in the US, and learned that the best network decisions came from reading the data well.

At DISH I led RF engineering teams, eventually running an 80+ person regional organization across seven markets. I built automation and dashboards that turned piles of manual analysis into something leaders could act on in minutes.

Now, at Ookla, I lead customer relationships with major US phone and internet companies. My job is to help them see what their own customers actually experience, and to turn that into a story an executive can act on.

Why I overthink it

I still remember what it's like not to get the math. That's why I explain data the way I do, in plain words, with a chart that makes the point before the paragraph has to.

It's also why I mentor. I'm a senior capstone mentor at the University of Oklahoma, where student teams use real connectivity data to tackle open-ended problems, and I serve on the Industry Advisory Board for the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Houston.