As the company’s boots-on-the-ground safety coordinator, I spent a year and a half working at Detyens Shipyard in North Charleston, SC, where I carried out duties including, but not limited to, job safety analysis responsibility, work injury investigations and recordings, escorting injured workers to the local occupational health medical center, holding and facilitating weekly and daily safety meetings, and daily safety walkthroughs on various job sites. I also spent a large amount of time conducting employee hire-ins and orientations, including the highly tedious task of conducting applications for our employees to gain access for work at the local Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. I also spent time on jobs at a local towing yard in the same area, Stevens Towing, located in nearby Meggett, SC, as well as VT Halter Marine, located in Pascagoula, MS.

In my first stint as an insurance salesman, I learned the rigors of gaining business clientele from the ground up! Thankfully, I was surrounded by a very committed and professional administration staff who helped me every step of the way. Soon after I began with Liberty National, I was offered an opportunity with U.S. Coatings that I simply could not turn down. Had the offer not been given, I would’ve still been with these guys. I learned the basics of falling in love with the process to be successful here.

I’ll never forget my first day on this job. It was the beginning of summer, blazing hot, and my first time ever dealing with new construction concrete work. I drank about 17 bottles of water that day and, needless to say, both badly out of shape and inexperienced, I was ready to pass out only about three hours into the work day! Thankfully, that was on a Friday, and on my way out of the job site I was told that I might be better suited for an office job with the company instead. However, the weekend passed and I was called back to the Mobile, AL Container Terminal to continue working. I continued with G.A. West for the next several months, and I helped on jobs at AMNS Calvert and TechNip (Theodore, AL) before heading to a power plant in Batesville, MS for what ended up being my last job with the company. Throughout the course of my time with G.A.W., I grew up far more than I ever knew I could. By August, I ended up taking a job back in my hometown doing residential concrete with a local businessman and his crew. I will never forget my experiences here. I needed it more than I ever knew.

I was so excited and honored to finally get a job with the same school district that I grew up in. I felt so strongly about following in the footsteps of my mother and father as a successful teacher and coach, and I was given the opportunity to do so as a sort of traveling physical education teacher. There are eight schools in the George County School District, and in my first three years here I worked at seven of them in one capacity or another. On Mondays, I taught P.E. at L.C. Hatcher Elementary, Tuesdays at Central Elementary, Wednesdays at Rocky Creek Elementary, Thursdays at Agricola Elementary, and I split Fridays at both Benndale Elementary and L.T. Taylor Intermediate (formerly, Lucedale Intermediate School). For the first two years, I was an assistant football coach at George County Middle School. The first year with the Rebels, I coached offensive and defensive lines, and in my second season I coached running backs and outside linebackers. I always wanted to be a coach, just like my father, my uncle, and my grandfather before me. However, being so proved to be far more difficult than I ever imagined, and I learned very quickly that education is an ever-changing profession, and that it requires a very specific personality that I didn’t necessarily walk into it with. In my last year here, I was moved to a different position at what proved to be a first year, one-and-done, experimental alternative school program as a general education teacher. At that point, I was going through a very mentally difficult time in my life, and the work environment I was in seemed to have me in constant survival mode as an educator. By March 2017, I’d decided that it was time to make some immediate changes in my life to take the next very important steps that I needed to take. It was a very uncertain time, but things gradually improved. Perhaps one day in the future, when the time is right again, I will try this.