 The Choctaw has kind of a motto, and it's they'll know we are Choctaw by our faith, family, and culture. It grew up with the strong faith, strong family, and a cultural understanding just of the past, of what came before you, of understanding the struggles, of understanding the path that all of the generations before us has walked. My dad's Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and my mom is kind of a European descent mix. The thing that I admire and that I really like is the Choctaws have always kind of put a focus on education and on trying to strive to obtain a better life for yourself and for the community around you. I kind of joke that I became an engineer before I knew what an engineer was. I didn't have anybody in my background that I ever knew that was an engineer, so I didn't understand the fields. The opportunities was just a leap of faith that ended up turning into a long-term career. I graduated high school at 17 and went to Tucson, to the U of A, and I got involved in a group called NASA. It's the Native American Student Affairs. I got an internship with IBM, kind of purely by chance. IBM was looking to hire Native students out of a program called Project View, which was focused on diversity hiring. I had two majors when I came out of U of A. It was Spanish Linguistics and Communication. So in my mind, I was going to become either a bilingual education teacher or a social worker. And the co-op and internship that I got that year as a way to get experience and make some extra money to support myself through college actually turned into a long-term career. So I became an engineer. I had a mentor that taught me the different ways to approach problems, different ways to look at things and how everyday struggles that we have. If you look at them as how can I solve this instead of what a pain this is, there's a lot of opportunities for advancement. Right now I have, I think, 65 plus patent applications submitted. Currently the project I'm working on is called Blockchain. Blockchain has the capability to do for transaction processing what the internet did for data. So it's a revolutionary technology that has the capability to transform the way that transaction processing is done today. So a quick recap. Although IBM is a large company, it's also a very diverse company. So you're constantly working with folks with very different backgrounds. And the different ways that we look at problems and that we look at technology and development brings a well-rounded point of view and solution that's better for the kind of global audience that we served. Had it not been for wonderful mentors I had and people that kind of helped me early in my career, I wouldn't be where I am today. I wouldn't have had the right mindset to chase my goals, to pursue my interests. Being an IBM master inventor basically means you're one of the top inventors within the company. And not only that, but you're also working to help mentor others that you're giving back to the communities. I've been a member of ACES for a long time and they have a local RIT, ACES chapter. So the Rochester, New York presence is all of the ACES students at RIT are natives. Basically a communication channel between mentor and mentee. They represent kind of a variety of tribes, mainly a lot of the northeastern tribes local to this area. I'm able to go out and meet with the students there and partner with them to understand what projects they're working on, what areas we can collaborate and also to help them understand some of the opportunities that some of them might be interested in the future. There's a quote that one of my aunts said that if you light a lamp for someone it will brighten your own path. And I think that's how family and mentorship and even career can be described is if you help others it not only lifts you up but it also comes back to help you.