What have you been up to:
Wow, can it really be 25 years….? Hard to believe how fast life has come to all of us.
I ended up going to a small college in central PA (Juniata College) where I continued my basketball career. I helped turn around a floundering program to actually winning our conference in just a few short years. Some of my favorite moments included a European tour over Christmas (87) where we spend time in Luxembourg, Germany and France. It was an amazing experience and one that I really didn’t appreciate until much later in life (Seriously…who could have appreciated the view from the Eiffel Tower, the architecture of Notre Dame, the lights of Champs-Élysées or even the priceless art within the Louvre at the age of 19?). In my junior year, fate brought an amazing woman into my life (turns out she was one of the cheerleaders for our football team). We dated throughout her residency for her Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology and eventually married in 1993. Both of us lived in the Lehigh Valley for a few years where I worked at various financial institutions (Keystone/First Lehigh Valley Bank/National Penn) as a Bank Manager and Commercial Lender. In 1996, my daughter was born (Alanna) and a few years later, my son (Zachary) in 1999. That same year, I had an opportunity to work with the Federal Reserve Bank of Pittsburgh as an Examiner. We took this opportunity and moved to the suburbs of Pittsburgh (Bethel Park) where we have been ever since. I worked for the Fed for nearly five years traveling around the fourth district (PA/OHIO/WV) auditing financial institutions both from the financial and technology perspective. It was a great opportunity, but as my kids began to get older it became harder and harder for me to leave for an entire week or say “good night” from a hotel room. In 2003, I left the Fed and took a local job working for a Data Center as their Disaster Recovery Officer. Unfortunately, within the year, a large conglomerate acquired the organization and I found myself either looking at the opportunity to move to Chicago or Arkansas to manage their data operations center. Not wanting to relocate, I ended taking a similar job with American Eagle Outfitters overseeing their entire Disaster Recovery Program. After five years, I surrendered my resignation (to the dismay of my preteen kids!) to move beyond the IT sector and assumed my current position with Bank of New York Mellon as a Vice President of Governance and Compliance. I now oversee all technology audits (both international and domestic) for the entire organization.
