We’re each a product of the path we’ve taken so far in life, so I’d like to share some of my journey with you. This is mostly a personal bio – to see my professional experience try this link.

A brief origin story

I grew up in Wisconsin, with most of my family in the Madison and Milwaukee areas, but my formative years in the small town in the middle of a state in the middle of the country – Stevens Point. I ran track, played soccer, competed on the swim team, did a year of debate, and joined a few of those resume building clubs during my high school years. It’s when I learned to love road biking with a few of my peers and did my first triathlon. With 40,000 people and not much of a downtown, bus service was meaningless and, although I biked the 5 miles to campus a few times, it was mostly an athletic activity. Those years certainly kicked off my language studies though – I was lucky enough to attend the local state university for both Chinese and German courses my final year of high school.

Getting a start at UW-Madison

Graduation lead me to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I hope kids growing up in Wisconsin can always say they have access to an amazing educational institute that offers in-state tuition and some of the best research programs in the world, I certainly could during my years there. Focused on the economics curriculum my first couple years on campus, but couldn’t keep up with both German and Chinese at the same time. (I’d advise all graduating high school students to take a gap year and visit somewhere away from home – I wish I had.) In between freshman and sophomore year, I completed a summer program in Tianjin and liked it so much I decided to spend junior year in China at Beijing University through a CIEE exchange program.

My first consulting experience

Before heading abroad for my year in China, I served as the vice president of business development for the local chapter of AIESEC – an amazing student run organization. I helped securing international talent for a couple of Madison companies and learned a lot about organizational development, team management and both cold and warm sales work. These are the things you’re supposed to learn in college outside of class, I guess. I worked with absolutely amazing people on campus, who shared their years of experience with me and opened up leadership opportunities. There’s no better way to learn about change management than in an organization that changes over it’s entire leadership team and redoes strategic planning every single January. I also attended international conferences in places like Puerto Rico and had sales trainings at national head quarters in New York City. I gave it up when I headed to Beijing.

What I learned in China

I think that time abroad was what really solidified my passion for working on transportation issues. I didn’t learn as much Chinese as I had hoped, but it was inspiring seeing the scale of infrastructure construction happening in China, and depressing dealing with the smog in Beijing. I decided I wasn’t going to survive a career in international relations – I needed to work on something more concrete. Although, my work today is mostly policy related, I’m much more comfortable about the positive impact I can have on people around me through working on transportation issues, than I am about what I could have accomplished as a diplomat. (It’s true, projects in Boston seem to stretch for decades, but at least you have some idea what the status is and where different parties stand.)

Back on campus

I was mostly done with my economics degree before heading to China, so while I was abroad I had to make some additional decisions about what to do next. I was accepted into an accelerated Master’s degree at the La Follette School of Public Affairs, which allowed me to stay on campus to wrap up a few classes and dig into a lot more applied economics and public policy courses. All those Benefit-Cost Analysis and Public Management classes meant studying Chinese went the way of German a few years earlier. I never reconnected with AIESEC either, since 50% of the membership had turned over and there had been some shifts in national priorities. I was glad to be back in the States and on a path which I saw leading somewhere good.

Almost a full-time transportation consultant

(And still without a degree.) Grad school was great because almost all of the courses at La Follette are project-based. Since the school is located in the state capital and has alumni connections across the country, I opportunities to work for Wisconsin DOT, the US Department of Energy, the City of Madison’s sustainability committee and others. I also supported the local transit authority, Metro Transit of Madison, with equity analysis of an on-board survey, sat on campus planning committees, negotiated the campus transportation service contracts, and secured funding as a research assistant at the Center for Freight and Infrastructure Research and Education (CFIRE). Why graduate when they are paying you to learn survey analysis with R, do planning analysis in ArcGIS, and Monte Carlo simulations in STATA?

Realizing I’d have to learn another language

In those graduate school years, I also met my now wife. So far, we’ve been back home to Colombia 4 times, and I finally made it to Europe, but the Spanish speaking part, not the German-speaking lands. I’ve got to say, it’s totally worth it! (And I get to see Transmilenio in Bogota.) Sofia keeps me grounded AND in the air seeing new places! We got to have weddings in Cambridge, MA, on the Caribbean beaches of Colombia, and in front of a wild Midwestern prairie. She tells me she doesn’t do transportation, but she sure loves to complain about bad transit service, and I consider bridge maintenance, design and management all to be transportation related.

Into the real world

I spent a summer working on transportation issues for the the Congressional Budget Office, which was my first time living in a big city that wasn’t Beijing. (A little crazy going from Wisconsin to Beijing, right?) My boss from that summer is also the one that connected me to EDR Group at TRB the following winter. I’d already heard of EDR Group since one of their staff attended the same graduate programs as me, but David did the favor of introducing me to them. I’m so glad that they brought me out to Boston and Sofia joined me here. Things got off to a great start.

What I do in Boston

(That’s a story I still haven’t found time to write…)

Back to the Midwest

(Even though we’re already on to another chapter…)