Mark Loveless:  

Workplace I am currently an employee at SallieMae, Inc. I am in the systems development department as a Senior Programmer Analyst. I have been here working in Fishers since February of 1996. I was vice-president and co-owner of Systems Consulting Group, Inc. located in the Indianapolis area before we were forced to close the company because of the market falling out from under us. The consultants, including myself, were responsible for analyzing, designing, testing and implementing new processes for unique conversion requirements from a variety of computer platforms. I assigned tasks to project team members and provided assistance when necessary. I wrote computer program specifications for other people to produce programming source code. I then reviewed their work and assured the coding matched the specifications that was assigned. I also coordinated mainframe database updates and other required updates that were needed to meet the tasks at hand. I have worked on a number of Department of Education approved State-wide conversions for student loans to be moved to the USA Group distributed database systems, totaling over 4 billion dollars. My background and training started back in 1980 when I joined the U.S. Air Force. I was trained in programming and my jobs ranged from personnel data processing to working at the Space Command in Colorado Springs, CO. During the military, I replaced key punch cards with an offline process. I was the first in the world to do so, on October 28, 1984. This allowed the fighter pilots to enter their flight plans when the main frame computer was offline. When I left the military in 1988, I went to college and studied business at the Indiana Wesleyan University through the LEAP program. I worked at TRW in Lafayette, IN, for the next seven plus years, before buying into a consulting business. At TRW, I worked in Systems Development for semi-truck part manufacturing. During that time, I won several awards for innovation by interacting an IBM main frame computer with an HP Unix (Mini-computer) system. This was a major break through in the industry and is still being used today with internet to main frame interfacing.