Laurie Decker:  

d I attended TAS for the latter half of my junior, and all of my senior year. And for those of you whose host company was Bell Helicopter, I also worked at Mehrabad Airport at the Bell facility there after graduation up until my family returned Stateside in August of 1978. I'd love to hear from anyone who remembers me (and I hope those memories weren't too awful!) College After returning from Tehran, I returned to school and began my college career. I suffered from major indecision. I couldn't decide on a major. I shifted from Psych (with an idea of becoming an art therapist) to Communications, specifically broadcasting -- (true to my Student Television And Radio -- STAR -- roots, I was in radio for seven years, and even did a few months at the local indie TV station) before settling into Computer Sciences. All told, while I started at PJC in 1979, I dropped out and in and out and in until April 1989, when I was inducted into Alpha Beta Gamma, the National Business Honor Society. And when my then-fiance passed away after a long illness. In June of 89, at the insistance of our dear friends in Orlando who were sure that staying in Pensacola would just stir up ghosts, I relocated and enrolled in a single semester at Valencia Community College, International Business and French 1. Passed one with flying colors, but failed the latter mysterably when I discovered too late that "French 1" was actually SECOND year French. (Like those damned elevator floors! "G" must have been first year French). And that was the sum of my college career. No drugs. No parties. No room mates. No huhu. <g> Workplace I entered the work world right out of TAS. Within a month of graduating, I was working for our host company, Bell Helicopter International (BHI) in the Inventory Research and Reconcillation section. Basically, I chased down why the computer said we had 11 widgets in a bin when the inventory team hand count only turned up five. In August 1978, just ahead of the mayhem that was about to ensue (unbeknownst to us at the time), we left Tehran to return to the USA and Pensacola where I enrolled at Pensacola Junior College (if you're interested, see college bio). After bouncing around for a couple of years (leaving Pensacola in 1989 for a year with [then] Martin-Marietta in Oveido, FL) I went up to Washington DC to try my luck and landed a job with a government contracting company working at NASA Headquarters as a project analyst. I enjoyed the work and am a space nerd who supports and believes in what NASA is doing, even if they have to do it at a snail's pace on a much maligned budget that, in reality, is far below those of many other Federal agencies who make far worse use of their resources than does our space agency. After leaving that position for a job in Silver Springs, Maryland with another consulting firm, I ended up at the United States Pharmacopeia in Rockville. There I was an SGML (mother-language of HTML) Analyst for a couple of years before they sold off all of their drug information databases to a company in Denver, CO. And that's how I landed in Denver, as the sole USP employee hired as content expert. And during my tenure at Micromedex is when I made the shift to software engineer until a group layoff in 2005 freed me up to finally try to decide what I want to be when I grow up. As for that, I'll let you know when I figure it out.