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John´s Web Design Portfolio:

I am currently working on several new Web sites, in addition to the ones listed below, and will post links as they are completed. These are all the sites that I have designed (listed in chronological order). The early ones are a bit rough, and in need of reworking...

John´s Career History


My career path has been a little... quirky, i guess. In other words, i didn´t have a clear, straight road to becoming a Web designer – certainly not a background that would have led me into this field. But i have had a variety of experiences which have all been interesting, enriching, and have taken me to the far reaches of the earth. If nothing else, my story is evidence that there is a benefit to having a liberal arts education and refutes the idea that "liberal arts major" means "dead-end career."

That being said, here is a synopsis of my career history. If you´re in a hurry, here´s the short version:

I earned a B.A. degree in English in order to become a high-school English teacher, a career which lasted all of one semester; i then worked as, in turn, a meter reader, salesman and carpenter – all within the stretch of a year – then went back to teaching, but this time Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, which i did for 9 years, 5 ½ of those in Japan. I then changed direction completely and went into computer tech support for 2 years, and finally became a Web designer, which is what i have been doing since the summer of 2000.

OK, that´s not really too interesting or informative, is it? Here´s the longer version:

The Early Years:

Like some people, i spent the first few years in college playing "Declare A Major Roulette" – and definitely not winning at it – and generally drifting along without a clear focus or career goals. I toyed with several career ideas, including one dream of becoming a radio sports broadcaster, which i spent a semester as an intern in Chicago in order to pursue. (You can read all about that adventure, at WLS radio in Chicago, in my bio.)

That experience ended up pushing me in a completely different direction: English education. After my internship, i transferred from Calvin College in Grand Rapids to the University of Michigan, where i received a B.A. in English and also obtained my Teaching Certification for Secondary Education. I had an incredible student-teaching experience with a group of world-class teachers at Salem High School in Plymouth, Michigan (a suburb of GM), and was set to become a full-time teacher there after i graduated in 1987 when i lost my position at the school under a pretense. (The full story is in my bio.) When my mother was then diagnosed with breast cancer late that summer, i moved back to my hometown to be closer to my family and abandoned my teaching aspirations for the time being.

Over the next year I held several jobs, including meter reader, car salesman (a miserable experience) and carpenter, until my mother´s cancer was declared in remission. Being a car salesman is still the only job i am embarassed to have had – and that includes cleaning horse stables – because of the stigma associated with it, for one, and because i was so miserably mediocre at it. I was only any good at all because i loved the product – Honda. (I still drive one now, in fact.) But in a way i´m glad i took that job, as it rid me of whatever naïvete i still had and taught me good negotiating skills – and a healthy dose of humiliation.

After my mother´s return to health, i began looking for something to satisfy my desires both to do something "meaningful" with my life and travel overseas, so i decided to join the Peace Corps. Unfortunately, it became a real adventure just trying to get an assignment. At one point, the Peace Corps lost my entire application file. Not just misplaced – LOST. I had to reapply and go back through the entire process – again.

Thoroughly disillusioned with government bureaucracy, i decided to seek some other avenue for living and working abroad, just as a backup, and – on advice from my parents – ended up applying to become an English teacher in Japan through the mission board of my church. When i was offered jobs by the Peace Corps and a community center in Japan on the same day, i decided to go to Japan, as the Peace Corps wanted to send me to then-North Yemen, which was still in the midst of a civil war. Even so, that was one of the hardest decisions i´ve ever had to make.


"Japan, Part I" or "Like A Fish Out Of Water"

So, i headed off to Japan, only able to speak a handful of Japanese words, and not really knowing much about my new career in TESOL. I figured my background in English Education would be sufficient. And then i landed in Japan.

If you have ever visited Japan, you know what a truly disconcerting place it can be. Here is a country that, by all appearances, is completely "Westernized": its big cities have all the urban trappings of the West; people wear Western fashions; there's an American fast-food place seemingly on every corner. And yet, in mentality, it couldn't be any more different from the U.S. than if it were from a parallel universe.

To say i went through culture shock is like saying that Microsoft has had some influence on the PC market. I had a virtual monopoly on culture shock. You can read much more about it in my bio. Eventually i adjusted, however, and had a marvelous time teaching English for two years to literally all ages and skill levels at this community center, which was in the Japanese equivalent of the middle of nowhere – by which they meant a town of only a quarter-million people in an area that was surrounded by actual trees.

My biggest coup while i was working at the Good Neighbor Center was organizing an international Friendship Festival at the center, involving gaijin (foreigners) from 15 different countries and 5 continents. Considering there were only about 40-50 gaijin in the entire city at that time, i think my participation rate was pretty damn good. We had food, dance, music, cultural artifacts, and of course, language. It turned out to be more wildly successful than we had ever dreamed it could be. Unfortunately, i don't think the center has had another one since i left.

I also met my wife, Michelle, while i was in Morioka (a story you can find in the About Us main page), so when my two years were almost up, i decided to try and extend my stay a little longer so we could leave Japan together to travel through SE Asia. Fortunately, my mission board was able to find me a temporary fill-in position at a Christian high school in Sapporo.

I stayed there for a semester, and got a whole new glimpse into Japanese culture via their school system. I didn't so much teach there as just go through the answers to the students' daily grammar exercises. My job was simply to help them get accustomed to hearing a native speaker; ultimately all their "real" English training came from the grammar classes they had with the Japanese teachers. I felt basically like a prop. No, make that a flesh-and-blood casette player. Unfortunately, this is by far the most common teaching experience other foreigners have had in Japan. But i was at least able to be more involved with my students in the various extracurricular clubs they were required to join. My colleagues also took me all over Hokkaido – if you've never experienced Japanese hospitality, you have no idea what you're missing.

Here and Back Again

After finishing out my contract in Sapporo in August of '91, i left Japan to go backpacking with Michelle through SE Asia for the remainder of the year. My experiences traveling overseas (and even domestically) have had a huge impact on my life, enough so that i am a firm believer that there is no better teacher in life than travel, and nothing will rid you of your prejudices faster than living overseas for an extended period in a country where you are a stand-out-like-a-neon-light minority. Living in Japan covered the latter, and travelling through SE Asia provided me with a wealth of experiences that, as clichéd as it sounds, you just cannot get from school or work.

After our trip, we came home, worked for half a year to save up $$ for our wedding, got married and then headed right off to Indiana University for grad school, where i earned a Master's in TESOL (and Michelle earned hers in East Asian Studies). I was very fortunate to receive a scholarship while we were at IU which enabled me to teach in the department's ESL program. While there, i started a sports club for the ESL students, which got them involved together in IU's intramural sports program. Our soccer team, naturally, was the best of all the teams we had, and included players from Brazil, Bolivia, Columbia, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, Japan, South Korea, Angola, Burkina Faso and the U.S. – a real all-world squad.

Two years later, though, we were headed right back to Japan, where i had landed a job as a professor of EFL at Kwansei Gakuin University, a private university in Nishinomiya, a suburb of Kobe, a large port city just west of Osaka. The job and the city were awesome, and the pay was great – far better than i could have hoped to make as an ESL teacher in the States for years. That is a sad statement on the condition of the teaching profession here in the U.S., and one of the main reasons why i eventually left the teaching field. (More on that shortly.)

While we were in Kobe, my two-year contract at KGU was extended to a third year, which enabled us to become more involved in the Kobe community, which we loved – major earthquakes notwithstanding. (Read our bio for more info on our experience in that catastrophe.) We were also able to see more of Japan and travel to Australia, and through the international church, Kobe Union, i helped lead several Habitat for Humanity workcamps in the Philippines. In general, life was very good.

A New Direction

But as the saying goes, "All good things..." My teaching contract at KGU was non-renewable, and rather than try and find another teaching job in the Kobe area, we decided that it was time for us to move back to the U.S. to be closer to our families again.

So, we left Japan in the summer of 1997 and moved to Valparaiso, Indiana, where i had gotten a job teaching ESL at Valparaiso University. As reluctant as we were to be living in Indiana again, i was happy to be gainfully employed in a field where good jobs were few and far between. And teaching at Valpo was an enjoyable experience: their ESL program was much smaller than IU's had been, so we got to know all the students pretty well.

That fall, though, marked the collapse of many Asian countries' economies, and by the following spring our ESL program at Valpo had lost 1/3 of its students, and it became evident that there were going to be some job cuts among our staff before the next fall term. I was starting to feel a bit burned out on teaching by then, and given the poor pay and sudden lack of job security, i decided to look for something new. The economc situation at Valpo simply made it easy for me to make a switch.

This was right about the time that the Internet field was really taking off and computer jobs were everywhere, so IT looked very interesting to me. Through a connection i had with a guy in my wife's vanpool, i was able to get a job in computer tech support at the large bank in downtown Chicago where he worked. Thus began my career in computers. There was only one catch: i had no engineering or technical background and knew next to nothing about PCs.

Not to say i was a computer neophyte; i knew a lot about computers, but my 12 years of computer experience up to that point had been exclusively on Macs. My only experience with PCs had, in fact, been at my nine-month stint at Valpo. So, i had to take a self-taught crash course in PC support. My first few months at my new job were a bit rough, but i gleaned a lot of information from my colleagues and was able to make great strides in my work in relatively short time. All this to say that if a liberal-arts trained, technically-challenged dufus like myself can make a career switch to the computer field, almost anyone can.

It's A Mad, Mad, Dot-Com World

Two years later, however, i was ready for a change: the atmosphere at the bank had become fairly poisonous, the tech department was being woefully mismanaged, and i felt like my job was not going to take me anywhere. This was also the height of the Internet boom, and the idea of becoming a Web designer really started to appeal to me. Web design requires creativity and imagination, two skills i was not using in tech support and desperately wanted to. So, late in 1999 i started taking some online Web design courses and taught myself HTML and all things Web-related. The next spring, i left the bank and landed a job at Heller Financial (now part of GE Capital), only to be headhunted ten weeks later by my old boss, Gary – the guy in Michelle's vanpool who originally got me into the IT industry – who had just become the CTO at a dot-com startup. So, i left the job i had just settled into at Heller and became the (only) Web developer for this new company, Dynamic Trade, which has since changed its name to Performics.

I've now been with Performics for over two years, and really enjoy being a Web designer. Being a "dot-commer" is also, well, pretty cool – economic recessions notwithstanding – and Chicago is a kickass place to live and work. I like the informal atmosphere of my office, too, and i work with a great group of developers.

There are certain aspects of my job which drive me nuts, of course, especially dealing with a certain business unit whose sense of reality is somewhat... different (not naming names, but it can't be coincidence that this department's name begins with "mar"). But, it could be a whole lot worse. I realize that i am one of the lucky ones in this field because (a) i still have a job and (b) our company has not only survived the "dot-bomb" bust but has actually become profitable. Of course, in this economy, who knows what will happen a few months down the road, but right now this is a good place to be and a good job to have.

So where does this career path lead? Who knows? I am hoping that our department will expand enough in the coming months so that i can become the leader of an actual Web development team. Somewhere down the road i'd also like to set up my own Web design shop, if i can find a few other colleagues who'd be willing to take the leap with me. The economy's going to need to do a big U-turn before that happens, though. In the meantime, i plan to enjoy the ride while the road is straight.