The First Principles of Being Human

Justin Rufa grew up in a small Rust Belt town on the St. Lawrence River with one clear thought: I'm leaving. What followed was nearly 24 years in the Air Force — aeronautical engineering, a master's, a PhD from Michigan, teaching calculus at the Air Force Academy, space launch operations in El Segundo — and then retirement at 42 with no clear next step. Two months in Kansas. A year teaching high school math. A three-month solo stint in Colorado, walking a creek every morning, trying to figure out what comes next when structure is no longer handed to you.

What Justin eventually landed on wasn't a job title. It was a question: What does it mean to be a good human being? In this episode, he talks about the tension between prestige and passion, what the military gives you and what it doesn't, and why he thinks the younger you can reach a student, the better. He's now tutoring, academic coaching, and moving toward middle school teaching in the Boulder area, and for the first time, it feels like the right fit.

This one is for anyone who has ever taken the long road back to what they actually care about.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

If I look back, my 20-year-old self, the things I got emotional about were just wasted energy. And I think about some of those different things that I wasted energy on are like, will you get this assignment versus advantage?

SPEAKER_01 0:10

It doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Somebody else is picking by narrowing your focus on what your priorities are and what you focus your emotional energy on. You can actually make those things count and be more open like I am now. What do you care about? You care about just being a good human being. And that looks like so many different things.

SPEAKER_03 0:26

Hi everyone, and welcome to Pathbound, the podcast about the real, messy, unexpected journeys that lead us to the work we love. I'm Monica Argandonia, and every week I talk with someone whose story proves there's no single right way to build a meaningful life. What if every detour in your life turned out to be exactly the right path? Justin Rufag grew up in Messina, a small rust belt town on the St. Lawrence River in northern New York, with one clear thought. I'm leaving. What he didn't know was just how many times he'd have to leave and return and leave again before he understood what he was actually looking for. He went to the Air Force Academy and almost didn't graduate. He got his master's, his PhD, and his adream assignment, and still ended up teaching high school calculus in Colorado Springs. He moved to Kansas for a job that lasted two months. And through all of it, what kept showing up? A passion for building relationships, mentoring students, and figuring out what it means to be a good human being. Today, Justin is a math tutor, academic coach, and aspiring Montessori middle school teacher in the Boulder area. His story is one of the most genuinely nonlinear ones I've had the privilege of hearing, and I think you'll recognize a piece of yourself in it. Justin, I'm so happy to have you here this morning with me. And as I start everything, can you just give us a little bit of background on, you know, what were you like growing up? Where are you from?

SPEAKER_02 1:44

I actually grew up in a small rust belt town in northern New York named Messina on the Canadian border. Our claim to fame is we're halfway between the North Pole and the equator, or at least I thought we were until I actually learned about how the globe works. We're actually a little closer to the equator to the North Pole, 45th latitude north, on the St. Lawrence River, which kind of speaks to how our town grew up. We have a power dam there that bridges the US and Canada. We spent a lot of time going between the U.S. and Canada. And also what I found was interesting was because we had that cheap electricity, we had two aluminum plants and we had a General Motors plant. Only one of which is in existence today. So my family was one of those blue-collar families. We played sports, we worked hard in school, our parents worked overtime sometimes. And you know, we just always tried hard to be a good Italian Catholic family up in northern New York and occasionally driving south in I-81 or I-95. And I did that for first 18 years of my life.

SPEAKER_03 2:37

Did you know? Like, did you think I'm gonna end up in one of these factories? This was my path, or what do we what were you thinking?

SPEAKER_02 2:44

I did not have that thought once in my life. My thought was I'm leaving for college. I didn't know what that looked like, but from the beginning, I knew that I was leaving Messina, New York because I needed to see what else was out there.

SPEAKER_03 2:55

What do you think drove that?

SPEAKER_02 2:57

I think that I was one of those kids that always would read with a flashlight under my blankets. I read the whole Hardy Boy series, I don't know, like maybe like three weeks. And so I think that just always like I just really like to read. I like to do math. I was very STEM heavy from a young age. And I think it just kind of as I learned more, especially about NASA, and I was a kid who had the like mini face shuttle and everything. I wasn't sure I was gonna be an astronaut, but that intrigued me and I knew I couldn't do that where I was living. I knew that I had to go, I had to go away somewhere to learn whatever that, whatever those skills were that those people had to do that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_03 3:30

So where did you end up?

SPEAKER_02 3:31

So I actually ended up going to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs because my parents liked the fact that service academies don't have tuition, even though I wanted to go to the University of Michigan. Implied, got in, found what out-of-state tuition cost, and they're like, you need to focus more on the school out in Colorado Springs.

SPEAKER_03 3:46

Yeah, that well, finances play a role. All right. So you end up at the Air Force Academy, and so what was that like?

SPEAKER_02 3:54

Oh, it was really hard. It was and I actually, the first year I applied, I actually got into the Air Force Academy Prep School, which is an on-campus one-year preparation program. It's very academic focused with some military parts of it. It's more geared for folks that are already in the Air Force, want to transition to becoming officers, and go to the Air Force Academy rather than folks who are just right around no high school students. So, like for me, that that year was barely straightforward. But then actually going to the academy for the four-year program, the basic training, like you hear all these stories about pleaf summer at some like the other service academies and like their first academy was just like that. For the first six, eight weeks you're there, you're always with people. And it was just you either you're in the you're in the dorm room with the roommates, you're doing physical activities, you're doing military stuff, you're eating, but it's always with people. And it's not until you finish basic training and right before you start classes first time you're allowed on your own. And when you're flying allowed on your own, anytime you're out in the general area of the Air Force Academy, it's what we call the cat area, is essentially a big square. You have to run on these one one foot by one foot marble strips on what's called the trash though. And as a freshman, you finally run around the perimeter. So anywhere you get, you have to go in right angles.

unknown 5:02

So, you know.

SPEAKER_03 5:03

Did you ever think I'm not gonna keep doing this?

SPEAKER_02 5:06

You know, because I went to the prep school, I didn't really think about the other options like all those other colleges I applied to. And even when I got to the academy and finished basic training, and I was running on these one by one marble strips, I didn't think about that. I knew what I was getting into, right? Because being at the prep school, we got to spend two days up watching these freshmen and observing them and like that's terrifying, but clearly that's part of the path. So we'll do it. And I think that it really wasn't till like I had some struggles athletically while I was there, like you have to all pass physical famous tests. Had some struggles with some of that. And when it got to the end and they were gonna not let me graduate because of that, that's when I started exploring other options. And one unique part of my story is that one of the schools I applied to way back when, before I went to college, that was only 10 miles from Messina, New York, school called Clarkson University. I actually that came back. That came back five years later because he said, Well, you know, you really need to like pass these P classes and this and this physical fitness test to graduate. I had had a collapsed lung at one point and things weren't there was a lot, there's a lot of different drama happening. And to make a long story short, I ended up having to spend a semester at that school in New York while after I finished at the academy, while everything was getting sorted out.

SPEAKER_03 6:15

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_02 6:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:16

So did you so you didn't graduate from the Air Force Academy?

SPEAKER_02 6:20

I did. That was what was interesting. So it took about six day months to get all sorted out, but then finally said, you know, we're gonna honor your graduation and your commission. And so I actually, when my graduation actually was with the RTC students at Clarkson University and their spring graduation in 2003, my congressman actually awarded me my Air Force Academy plaque, the same one I got a nomination from to attend in the first place. It was two circles, two full circle moments at once.

SPEAKER_03 6:47

That's awesome. All right. So what were you okay? So you're at the Air Force Academy. What were you actually studying? What was your major?

SPEAKER_02 6:54

I studied aeronautical engineering. I knew from day one. And was interestingly, as I've talked to more students who want to attend the service academies and that Air Force Academy in particular, many of them say, I'm gonna go and study aeronautical engineering. And we always chuckle, like, because that's what I'm gonna go fly and I'm gonna be an aeronautical engineer. That's well, that's back in the early late 90s, early 2000s. That's why people said they would go there. Well, there's only 40 aeronautical engineering majors in my class, out of the thousands. So clearly there were a lot of people that changed their clients.

SPEAKER_03 7:22

Right. All right. So you graduate with that degree, then what?

SPEAKER_02 7:26

Then I get finally get my commission a year later, and I end up in the Air Force. I end up in sunny, warm, windy, hot, humid Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, at Tinker Air Force Base in the middle of everywhere. I will say this today, like I said, it when we got there 23 years ago, people in Oklahoma are some of the nicest people on earth. It's a great place to be young. My wife and I had just gotten married. We were young, we didn't have kids, we only had two cats. I was very young in my career, so not a lot of expectations. So we just got to really I got to just have all that all that fun that I guess we didn't that you don't necessarily have going to a service academy, like other college students maybe would, but I did that from being like 23 to 25 instead of 18 to 22.

SPEAKER_03 8:07

Okay. So how what what are you doing and how long are you there?

SPEAKER_02 8:11

I was there for about two and a half-ish years, almost three years. I was my first job actually was a good eye opener. We worked in a building that's almost building 3001 is the main. Anybody with this has ever been to take your first space and learn exactly talking about it. I think the building's like three quarters of a mile to a mile long because they such refurbished airplanes in there. My first job is I had to walk around to all the different organizations in there that are part of all these processes and learn about their paperwork. I'm an engineer, and the first thing I get to learn about is engineering paperwork.

SPEAKER_03 8:40

Okay, that had to be a surprise.

SPEAKER_02 8:42

It was a little bit of surprise, but you know it was good because I got to meet so many people. I got to meet so many people in that in that building during those first couple of years. And I just got to tag along to meetings and just like talk to people, take notes. And it was, as I reflect back on it, it was the perfect first assignment, even though it wasn't as glamorous as what a lot of my friends were doing.

SPEAKER_03 9:02

Okay. Then what else do you do?

SPEAKER_02 9:03

I actually went back to went back to school. But of course, it was another nonlinear type situation because I applied, I applied initially to go to go to grad school and therefore said, Well, you're good, but no, we'll put you on the supplemental list in case more spots open up. And then, of course, a month later, like more spots opened up. So we're we're gonna have you go to grad school, or you have to go to our grad school, which is in Dayton, Ohio, right, Patterson Air First Days. So we pack my wife and I and our two cats pack up, we drive northeast to southwestern Ohio, and I become a student again.

SPEAKER_03 9:33

Okay. You did paperwork first. Did you ever work actually as an aeronautical engineer?

SPEAKER_02 9:38

A little bit. During during my last year or so there, I got to work on the big refueling aircraft, KC-135s, which sadly was in the news recently. These one had crashed in in western Iraq. But we worked on a couple of different projects on those because they were such old aircraft. We worked on, I guess best way to describe it is their little upgrades that just either made the plane that made the plane operate more functionally sound, or it made the like things less loud, or just kind of like, or one of the projects that had to do with creature comforts. One of the projects was replacing the wheels and brakes. And so I got to just kind of dabble on that for about a year and just again be a sponge and just kind of absorb everything.

SPEAKER_03 10:16

So why did you decide to go back to school? And what do you do?

SPEAKER_02 10:20

An engineer, I was in a situation where I knew my career would take one of two paths. And one of them was I was gonna go back to their first academy to teach. Thought I was gonna go do a flight test, become a flight test engineer, and go to test pilot school to do that, which is at Everage Air Force Base, not too far from where you are. And so both of them required a master's degree. And so I knew I got to get the master's degree in the test pilot school also required me getting more involved in like civil aviation and getting a private pilot's license and those kind of things. So kind of how I made the decision was I'm not as satisfied in that piece of it as I am in the school piece of it. So that's why I went to get a master's degree, and then I had to make that then I had to think about making that decision.

SPEAKER_03 10:58

Okay. So again, engineering, more engineering. This is a master's, not a PhD.

SPEAKER_02 11:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 11:04

You get through that program, then what?

SPEAKER_02 11:06

So then I stayed there, got into more program management, but still kind of aircraft engineering. It was more experimental, where we take some different parts like a radar and a radar and an infrared camera. Can we put them together? And well, that creates will that let us see through weather. We actually worked with a couple of organizations in Southern California doing that. So I got to gangle back out to Edwards. Again, Edwards did that, got to do some other cool stuff where where we do this was interesting, such as just analyzing satellite imagery, using satellite imagery and looking where you can land an airplane if you had to, like I'm pitting an airplane if you had to, which is interesting given again what's happened recently and in the Middle East with rescuing the downed pilot, where we landed some airplanes. So I found that was another full circle moment. But when we were working this way back when we were driving around the cornfields of southwestern Illinois, like just east of St. Louis, we actually ran this software on Alice on this particular area. And one day, again, 100 degree even humidity in the middle of the summer, we drove around and checked these places out to see did this software do a good job. And so that was one of my one of my very fondest memories of being in the Air Force is that day driving around and stopping for lunch and just getting to know all these people while we were just sweating profusely.

SPEAKER_03 12:19

Okay, so you're enjoying the work. You finished grad school, it's going well. So then what?

SPEAKER_02 12:26

So then I finally go back to teach at the Air Force Academy.

SPEAKER_03 12:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 12:31

Yeah, that was because I had that kind of decision point. I did this previous job we just discussed. That was kind of my payback for the masters. That organization kind of they sponsored my spot to get the master's. I pay them back for a few years, and then I applied to come out back on to Colorado to teach at Colorado Springs. And again, because life is nonlinear, I come out and I interview with the Aeronautical Engineering Department and like, what's where I got to teach? That's where I got my degree from. And everything made sense, right? But then there was something in the back of my head that said, Well, if you're out there, why don't you talk to a couple other departments? So I also talked to the math departments, and they're like, Yeah, sure. You know, we we had we're the base departments, we generally always have spots open. Come out and talk to us, we'll do an interview and you can do a practice lesson and things like that. So I go out there and I do that. And then a few months later, the the air engineer department says, Yeah, we'd love to have you out here. You know, we got a spot for you. We're excited to have you come out next year and teach. Like, great, perfect. And go back, teach in the same department where I got my degree from. Then of course, life happened. And three months later, like, sorry, that spot's no longer open for whatever reasons. We're really sorry. Like, did you interview with any other departments that were out here? I did. Interviewing the math department. Like, well, well, they said we'll talk to them and you call them up and we'll see what we can do for you. And that's how I ended up teaching you in the math department at the Air Force Academy.

SPEAKER_03 13:44

Just going back a little bit, you were really enjoying your work. You got your master's, you're enjoying this new work you're doing. What made you decide to go teach?

SPEAKER_02 13:51

It's something I wanted, I knew I wanted to do, and I just and it just like I wasn't joining the war, but one of the things I suffer from is once I get in kind of that routine for long enough, and the military does this to us too, right? We crave novelty, we crave change, and we crave change on a 36-month clock. And I had been at that base for 48 months because I did a master's there and then I did this job. Like, it's time to go. We've been here, we've been in Dayton, Ohio for 48 months. We're getting too comfortable here.

SPEAKER_03 14:19

Okay. All right. So teaching, is it what you expected? Are you enjoying it?

SPEAKER_02 14:24

It was actually a really enjoyable experience. With the department did a fantastic job at the beginning. Like, we show up in the beginning of the summer. We showed up in June. Class don't even start there until August. And we essentially spent a month like relearning calculus because that's the first class everybody teaches. And we spent a whole month relearning it. And then we spend another month like learning about what it means to be a faculty member at their first academy. So that's like that's eight weeks of preparation before you even show up in the classroom. And when you're earlier in your career, you end up getting involved in more different activities as you either volunteer or you get volunteered. So I got volunteered for a lot of different things, opportunities when I was there for those two years. The second year I was there, I was actually in charge of running all the administration for the department. It's about 75% military, 25% civilian professors. And so the military have like performance reports, they have like different training requirements, all that kind of stuff. I kept track of all of that and kind of kept the trains on the track for that kind of stuff. I also got volunteered to be the summer research representative, which essentially meant that I had to go out and seek different summer research opportunities for the cadets that would go like for three weeks at a time to a different Air Force location and do like Air Force-centric math type research or operations research and like on an Air Force problem type thing. So I got to organize all of that from finding the opportunities, all the travel, all the funding. Uh, I was on the academic eligibility committee for the division one hockey team.

SPEAKER_03 15:46

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_02 15:46

All about doing my day job of actually teaching cadets calculus.

SPEAKER_03 15:49

All right. So did you like being in the classroom?

SPEAKER_02 15:51

I loved it. I wasn't good at it initially, but I loved it. I was that teacher who's gonna or that professor is gonna die on every hill like my first couple semesters. Right. And then the second year I started picking less hills to die on. Then I got sent back off to school again because I knew that I really liked this. I didn't want to be able to do this longer term. But the buy-in to do that is going back to grad school to get a PhD.

SPEAKER_03 16:12

Right. So, all right, so you go and get a PhD then in Colorado?

SPEAKER_02 16:16

It was an interesting time because there were budget constraints. So I was told that I could go to civilian school with the civilian school fully fundamentally. I applied to four schools. Uh, I knew those would be possible. I applied to Michigan. I looked into Michigan, Colorado, University of Minnesota, University of Texas, were the four schools I looked into. And another full circle moment, I picked Michigan.

SPEAKER_03 16:36

That's awesome. So you finally get to go to Michigan.

SPEAKER_02 16:38

I finally get to go to Michigan. And what's crazy is they still have my student ID number from when I was I applied and was accepted back in 1996, 97. So it's the same number. I was still in the system.

SPEAKER_03 16:49

So your PhD was in what?

SPEAKER_02 16:51

It was in aerospace engineering.

SPEAKER_03 16:53

So now you completed your PhD in engineering. You're done now.

SPEAKER_02 16:57

Yes. I'm done with school at that point.

SPEAKER_03 16:59

And then you went back to teaching.

SPEAKER_02 17:00

I did not go back to teaching because the Air Force doesn't think it's good development to teach, go get a thermal degree, and then go teaching. And I think maybe you should spend a little time back in the Air Force before you come back to teach. Again. So I went down to Southern California for three years.

SPEAKER_03 17:14

Okay. Where'd you end up?

SPEAKER_02 17:16

I was at what was known then as LA Air Force Base in Dalfegunda.

SPEAKER_03 17:19

All right. Teaching. Or no, working on the base.

SPEAKER_02 17:22

I where I was working there. I was working in space launch, which was again, that goes back to my NASA dream when I was a kid. But when I actually got the behind the scenes of space launch, and it is not like it is not as glamorous as we saw with the Artemis 2 launch. That's not what it is behind the scenes.

SPEAKER_03 17:37

That's pretty cool. I mean, you kind of, you know, you may not have landed where you wanted to immediately, but end up getting there eventually. So you're at Space Launch. You said it wasn't as glamorous, but did you like it? Did you enjoy yourself?

SPEAKER_02 17:50

The work was interesting, but it was a different cult, it was a culture that was completely foreign to me, which was a struggle because I was still like very amped up for my PhD program. Like it took me, like took me a long time to spool back down. And you know, I was very again going back to the Air Force, I want to get back at it. Then I show up with this new assignment. I don't know anybody, I don't know anything about this world except for I'm an engineer. And so it goes, it went back to kind of that first assignment back in Oklahoma where I was just talking to people, writing things down, and I kept doing that, but I was more than halfway through my career at that point. And I so I felt like I feel like I'm brand new again and I don't have any responsibility to somebody who's like halfway through their career. I had responsibility to somebody who's like brand new. So that was a tension that I struggled with during my time there because I was learning a culture while also learning a new, a new way of doing engineering, a different way of doing engineering all at the same time.

SPEAKER_03 18:39

And you were there three years?

SPEAKER_02 18:41

I was there about three years.

SPEAKER_03 18:42

So then what?

SPEAKER_02 18:43

So then I finally get to go back to uh Colorado Springs, finally get to go teach at the first campaign the second time and use that shiny PhD. And that was just it was such a different time. Like at that point, my wife and I had we had, you know, we had a child at that point who was six, five or six, I think. Three. No, he was only three. I went back and he was three. And so so we're back in Colorado. I'm older and more experienced. Teaching looks so much different. I have all these higher-level responsibilities in the apartment now because I am more senior in my career. And I recognize that the teaching was freeding and to really appreciate it more and really appreciate a time with the cadets. During that time, my my lessons were just so much more full of we talked more real world, we talked more real life, we made more connections, like both with math, both with other subjects, talked about the Air Force. It was so much more than just standing up at the board and writing and dry erasing.

SPEAKER_03 19:35

That's awesome. I do believe that's what students remember more than a lot of the other stuff. So, how long do you do that? Are you still doing that?

SPEAKER_02 19:42

I'm not doing that anymore. So I did that from 2017 to beginning of 2019. Then at the end of 2019, I had to go because I hadn't deployed yet in my career, I had to go do something that was deployment-like. I do have a medical issue that keeps me from going over fees. So I went down to a I went to a base in the US to work on more Air Force operational centric type issues for six months to have that experience to kind of see how the SATC plays out and when we're actually doing like Air Force operations. So I did that. I did that for six months, first half of 2019, and then came back to uh teaching. So this is July of 2019. So I go six months back there and I finally get the job I've been looking for. I was in charge of all the math courses that the STEM majors would take. I got the physics majors, engineering majors, economics majors. I was in charge of all those math courses. So I got to work, I got to work with course directors and other faculty members, and and I really got to get to know my department much better there because I had to decide who I like. I had to go around and talk to different professors. Ask them, are you interested in teaching any of my courses next semester? And if so, how many courses, how many sections, things like that? What are you looking to bring to it? Or like, and then like ask them like how I can continue to like make the courses more effective. And so I really got to do like the thing that everything had to prepare me for in that role. All my education, all my experiences, all my mentoring, all the leadership. That was kind of the culmination, that role. And remember, that was July 2019. And then fast forward to March of 2020.

SPEAKER_03 21:15

Right.

SPEAKER_02 21:16

Yep. Now do it all, now do it all remote.

SPEAKER_03 21:18

So did you stick through that?

SPEAKER_02 21:20

We did it remotely, and I just had to, it was a good opportunity to let go. You know, tell my instructors, course directors, like, I'm not going to tell you how to do your job for the most part from this point forward because I don't know how to teach online any more than you do. I will help you in whatever way I can. I will support you. And but I can't, I won't ever tell you what to do in that situation, other than as long as we're treating the cadets right and everybody is safe, right? So and I ended up doing that for from March that year until we went back in purse for a little bit that fall of 2020, but then we ended up going remotely from evening in November onward to make sure that the cadets did travel home for Christmas, because they were not able to travel home for Thanksgiving. And So that was my last semester in the classroom at that point teaching. So I was going to retire approximately. I retired in July of 21. So that fall of 2020 was my last semester teaching. And then in the spring, it was all retirement type stuff and burning all my vacation days and things like that.

SPEAKER_03 22:15

So you retired at what age?

SPEAKER_02 22:17

I retired from the Air Force. It was July 1st, 2021, at 42 years and almost a month ago.

SPEAKER_03 22:24

So you'd been there over 20 years?

SPEAKER_02 22:26

I was in the Air Force about 23 weeks short of 24 years. If you count this the Air Force Academy time, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:35

All right. So you retire in 2021. Now what? Like what happens?

SPEAKER_02 22:39

This is when the story actually gets good.

SPEAKER_03 22:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 22:42

There's a little bit of a joke in the Air Force and the pilot community that after pilots retire and they're either going to be keep being a pilot for the airwide or they're going to become a high school math teacher. Well, I wasn't a pilot, but I was teaching math. And one of the unknowns about retired ones, I had no idea how the money. So I was like, I know I need to find a job. And there's a local Catholic high school in Colorado Springs. I was looking for math teaching for the 21-22 school year. It's like, well, I haven't found anything yet. I'm not sure what I want to do, so I'll go teach math for another year. I taught math at a Catholic high school for a year in Colorado Springs.

SPEAKER_03 23:10

Okay. Very different than college.

SPEAKER_02 23:12

It was. It was. It was interesting. I had some students there that were applying to Service Academy. So I was able to support them with that. I was very proud of the seniors. I went to their graduation and I told them I was, I taught AP CAG because I told anybody that gets a five, I'll take you out. Anybody that gets a five night exam, I'll take you out to dinner. But then I actually, there was a job I had like kind of been looking at the previous year that popped back up. It was a research manager, uh U UAS unmanned aircraft research manager job at Kansas State. And around that point, we had been at Colorado Springs for five years and again, a moving itch. My wife starting a new career as a speech therapist. So she's at this point, she's very she does not, like it doesn't matter where she does it because speech therapists were man everywhere. We decided to drive the 500 miles to Kansas and give that a shot. And I lasted two months in that job.

SPEAKER_03 23:58

Did you take any of your students to dinner?

SPEAKER_02 24:00

We'll get there.

SPEAKER_03 24:01

Okay. All right, got it.

SPEAKER_02 24:03

One of my students, one of my students is actually on a road trip and they and so the campus house supportive for Kansas State was one of Salina, which is just in the middle of Kansas on I-70. And it's about 50,000, 60,000 people. But we ended up living in Wichita. It was about 80 miles south. It was about four or five hundred thousand people. So I would be driving up like three or four days a week. And that's part of why the job only lasted two months because I just couldn't keep doing, I just don't want to keep doing that drive. But one of my students from the Catholic school was on a road trip that summer and came to Wichita. I told them, like, a deal's a deal. You find a you find a restaurant and I'll be there with my credit card.

SPEAKER_03 24:37

Did they?

SPEAKER_02 24:37

Yeah. Yeah. So actually, I actually entertained them to breakfast.

SPEAKER_03 24:41

So nice.

SPEAKER_02 24:42

But it was at a good grease, it was at a good greasy diner in Wichita.

SPEAKER_03 24:45

All right. So now what happens in Kansas?

SPEAKER_02 24:48

We're there for a year. It actually was a good opportunity for me to realize that I gotta figure out actually what I'm actually want to do with my wife versus rather just keep taking jobs.

SPEAKER_03 24:57

Which is an interesting question in your 40s.

SPEAKER_02 24:59

Very interesting. At this point, this is 2022, so now I'm 43, which I thought was old.

SPEAKER_03 25:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 25:05

So I start having conversations with people and start trying to like can I find something to work here? There's this nagging feeling in the back of my mind and back of my wife's mind. That's because about a month after we moved there, my wife drove back out to Colorado Springs to take my our son to a scuba camp, we had promised him. And when she was there was when I actually quit my job. And she thought, well, I'll just stay in Colorado. Why do I have to go back there? Like, well, you got your first speech therapy job out here. And right, it's like where our family is. And we had a really older wee dog and all this kind of thing. But with the feeling in the back of our head was maybe we belong in Colorado. And that's what that year in Kansas showed us was that while I was trying to figure my life out, I was figuring it out from afar.

SPEAKER_03 25:42

So you go back to Colorado. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 25:44

And we ended up running on the side of a hill just northwest of Boulder. And so we, my my wife got a job in the Boulder School District, and they came out three months later. And we knew we were back where we needed to be, which was, I think, priority number one. Our son was in a good school situation, priority number two. This whole time I was doing tutoring, and that was it was keeping me a little bit engaged. But then I then I found this thing, I knew what to call it, called academic coaching. Yeah, I didn't even know it was a thing. So I'd run into I'd seen an online job post and I'm like, oh, that sounds interesting. Sounds like trying for me to like help students like get to know themselves better and then apply those skills to their schoolwork. And so I started doing that online while I was trying to find I used four different opportunities in Boulder. I mean, I I applied to do the academic coaching in person. I even applied to work as a to have a junior ranger program out here that exposes like 12 to 14 year olds to doing like park ranger type work. I applied to be like a coordinator for that. I oh gosh, I did all sorts of things. I even I did a nine-month immersion with one of the conservation organizations out here. It was a monthly meetup to learn about land conservation and water conservation. And it was just a whole smokers borg of things that I tried during those first couple of years back out here.

SPEAKER_03 26:55

Did you settle on something? Are you still trying to figure it out?

SPEAKER_02 26:58

I actually last year I got a I got a one-year contract with the project management institute, kind of going back to that very engineer project management type part of my brain. And we worked with we worked with Lincoln Lab out in the Boston area for a year. It was good to kind of get back into that. I was like dipping my toe back in the government military world, but doing it as a contractor, not even the contracting to an organization supporting another organization. So I was very separated as far as the all the directors. It was good to travel a little bit. It was good to like like talk to other people in advanced degrees again and get back into that. But it was a year. And what it showed me was my passion is teaching. My passion is definitely teaching. It's the tutoring, it's the academic coaching, it's the mentoring.

SPEAKER_03 27:40

So are you teaching now?

SPEAKER_02 27:43

I am right now in the process of potentially like working, working as a part-time Montessori math read next year.

SPEAKER_03 27:51

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_02 27:52

For a middle school. And what's interesting is my wife's out of middle school right now, speech surface, and she's going to high school next year. But what I've learned is that the younger that you can have that influence on them, the more that influence is gonna help them grow and expand. Like even college students, I love my cadet, but if they got their mind set on doing something a certain way, you're not gonna change your mind at 22 years old. You gotta wait till they're like at least 45 again.

SPEAKER_03 28:18

Until they're 45. So a couple of things. Looking back, I have students who have considered military. Would you advise that for someone in high school who may not either know what they want to do or as an avenue to kind of move up quickly?

SPEAKER_02 28:34

What I would say is that I don't advise forward or against it. What I tell people is what are you seeking? Are you seeking structure? Are you seeking kind of that discipline, that ability to put your goals below the goals of a bigger type entity while still working out your goals, but knowing that in return for making your goals subservient, you're going to get a lot of benefits that just don't exist anywhere else in our society right now. Right? You're going to get somebody, an entity to pay you to wander around the world for X number of years and potentially pay for degrees and moves and whatever else. And then if you stick it out for 20 years, they'll pay your health insurance for the rest of your days and a retirement. So what I would tell people is you can do any, you can almost anything for two years, four years at that age, at 18 to 22, 18 to 30 years old. If this looks like something that you'll get more out of it than you'll put into it, and you'll put a lot into it. So it's hard to get more out of it than you put into it. I I uh I absolutely did. But if you think that's a possibility, then it's certainly something to consider.

SPEAKER_03 29:36

Okay. So you're teaching now, this is gonna be it for a little while at least, until maybe I mean, you seem like you're very open to all kinds of opportunities. So maybe something else happens, you know, 10 years from now. But looking back now at you know, your path and what you did, what advice would you give your 20-year-old self, knowing what you know now? Yes.

SPEAKER_02 29:58

If I look back, my 20-year-old self, I remember the day I turned 20 actually. I was in the summer between my freshman and sophomore year at the Air Force Academy. I remember the dates. I remember I remember right and I thought, wow, I was just walking across that same area where I didn't have to walk on the Marble Streets anymore. I'm like, wow, I don't even know. And what I know now that I didn't know then is that the things that matter really matter, yet 99.9 of the things don't matter.

SPEAKER_03 30:21

Okay. You want to explain that a little bit more?

SPEAKER_02 30:24

Yeah. It's about priorities, right? For example, what used to matter to me, right? I remember this vividly. The day before my mom passed unexpectedly, I was watching University of Michigan hockey, was playing in an Australia Championship game against University of Minnesota Deloule. And they lost in overtime. Michigan lost overtime. I remember screaming out top of my lenses TV for like 20 minutes. I was so mad. And so fast forward to like a couple months ago, they were playing University of Denver in the semis, and they lost in double overtime. Oh, well, whatever. I got stuff to go do. And so why down here? We got I got work to do. And I just like, as I think about my younger self, the things I got emotional about were just wasted energy. And I think about some of those different things that I wasted energy on are like, will you get this assignment versus add something?

SPEAKER_01 31:06

It doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_02 31:07

Somebody else is picking. You said your piece, somebody else is gonna pick, and you're gonna go make the most of it, right? I think by kind of narrowing your focus on what your priorities are and what you focus your emotional energy on, you can actually make those things count and be more open like I am now to whatever comes because now you're just in this receive mode because what do you care about? You care about just being a good human being, and that looks like so many different things.

SPEAKER_03 31:30

Right. I think that's great advice. I usually say in and ask yourself, is this gonna be significant in 10 years from now?

SPEAKER_00 31:37

Right.

SPEAKER_03 31:37

And like you said, most things aren't. Yeah. So that's nice. I like that. Uh any advice for college students kind of on their path?

SPEAKER_02 31:47

There's so much noise right now that they're having to filter out from like what's actually meaningful right now. About like, do I study what I care about? Do I study something that's going to like help me get a job in AI? Do I do STEM? Do I like all these kinds of things? They're hearing so many different things. And what's helped me get to a lot of dark times since 2021 is that I go back to what are the first principles of humanity? What does it mean to be a human? Because the first principles of humanities persist and they always will as long as there's humans on earth. And my advice, my one said, because I don't give advice. But what I did was I started reading history from about 1800 onward, and specifically US history, which the history is not unique to the US, but it's I think it's important to read the history about the land that we're currently sitting on and how things have evolved or devolved and like the Faussian bargain made when the Constitution was signed. I think that I got a lot out of that over the last few years of just recognizing that we're no different than the people 200 years ago. We're making different deals with the devil at this point. And how can you, as a college student, make a deal that you can live with and know that while also trying to be a good human being? Because that's what it's about. Yes, you do have to pay your bills, but but you also have to sleep too. Can you pay your bills and sleep at night? What does that look like to you and focus on that?

SPEAKER_03 33:05

Nice. Justin, thank you. Thank you for sharing your story. You've had quite an interesting path. I'm sure you are great in the classroom because when you find that passion, you care so much about students, that that really shows. So thank you. And yeah, this was great.

SPEAKER_02 33:21

I appreciate the time, Monica. I appreciate the opportunity, and I most definitely appreciate what you're doing. I really do.

SPEAKER_03 33:26

Thanks. I appreciate that. And hopefully this will hit somebody in the right place and it'll connect with them. So thank you, Justin. All right, thank you. Thank you so much for listening to Patdown. If anything we talked about today connected with you or gave you a new perspective, we'd love it if you subscribe, left a review, or shared the episode with someone you care about. You can also find us on Instagram at Patdown Podcast. To explore more stories, resources, and ways to get involved, visit keepstoneetwork.org. This podcast is just one part of the journey at Keystone Network for helping young people and anyone figure this out as they go, build meaningful futures one step at a time. A huge thank you to my podcast editor, David Strutt. You can find them on LinkedIn for helping bring these stories to life, and to Elizabeth Minor at Silvermine Creative for the beautiful artwork and web design. And if you're on your own path, navigating the unknown, making a pivot, or simply figuring it out as you go, just know you're not alone. The route may not be linear, but there's always a way forward. I'm Monica Argandonia, and I'll see you next time on Path Found.