Michael Black:  

Life Hello to all. I am Michael Black and I am a veteran of the U.S. Navy. I spent 6 years in the Navy as an Aviation Electronics Technician. After I received my discharge I started working in retail and figured out real quick that this was not what I was going to do. I started back to school at Germanna Community College here in Virginia. Once I completed my AA&S degree I went on to Mary Washington College intending on pursuing a degree in Pharmacy. I ended up having to leave school to work full time and never finished the degree. After that I got a job working for a major international logistics and steamship line. I worked with three other IT persons to maintain an international Windows 2000/ Exchange 2000 network. Our network consisted of approx 1200 workstations and 100 server computers. I was primarily responsible for server testing and implementation along with anything relating to the network infrastructure and security. I recently took a position as Sr. Network Security Engineer for an IT consulting company. In January 2007 I graduated from the University Of Phoenix with my Bachelor Degree in Information Technology. In May 2007 I began the MBA program at University of Phoenix. In November 2008 my life took a real bad downturn as I received the first lay off notice in my adult life. For the first time I had no job and lots of bills. Naively I thought since I had 2 months severance and 20 years experience in I.T. things would be fine. I could get a new job before the severance ran out. The the economy tanked. I looked unsuccessfully for 6 months for a job. Ran though most of my 401K trying to keep from losing everything since unemployment amounts are a joke compared to what your salary was. In April 2009 I finally landed a position as a network engineer at Tek Systems as a contractor. I completed my MBA on May 29th, 2009 and Walked Graduation at the University of Phoenix Honolulu, HI camp...Expand for more