Celebrating four years at CoreTech in October, Ethan is an indispensable member of our IT
Operations Team. His interest in technology and gadgets came about through early Gameboy handhelds and the early years of the internet. 

The Building Blocks of Life

I grew up and lived in Central Omaha. My family took advantage of the zoo, and we used to visit it often. I did not realize, of course, then how amazing and acclaimed our zoo was. Now I keep track of the rankings. Each trip we visited the polar bears, however, the big cat house with snow leopards and tigers were my favorite. Red pandas took the tigers down one notch eventually, yet snow leopards are my favorite to this day. They hold their tails in their mouths to prevent them from dragging on the ground, so cute. 

As a kid, I was interested in reading and gaming. The latter was heavily time-restricted, along with television, so any time outside of school and aside from TV and gaming was devoted to books. I enjoyed taking swings at harder literature like The Hobbit or some of my brother's or father’s sci-fi novels when available. I was a regular of the library’s summer reading program, sometimes butting heads with the librarians due to the quantity and difficulty of books I was recording that were above my age group. 

My interest in gaming came about as an extension of my fascination with tools and gadgets. Growing up the internet was developing. I expanded from the local ecosystem of home consoles into the ocean of the world wide web. From flash game aggregates to forum communities, I provided guidance on implementing network changes to facilitate online LAN sessions for Halo. With this, I found fast friends who were halfway around the country.  

It was truly perfect timing; technology was advanced enough not to be a science in and of itself, but was not as user friendly as today’s technology where everything is automated to a single button press.  

Back then there was downloading firmware onto external drives and connecting them to devices to update, search engines that were good but still requiring some clever keyword usage rather than the data-scraping mind-readers of today. Then, I was shown just enough of what was behind the curtain to continue my interest in IT, rather than being scared away from it with all the detail like I was with AP Chemistry. 

How did you get interested in an IT career?

I started as an IT intern at a large company my brother worked for as a Systems Administrator. I leveraged my interest in gadgets, gaming, and learning new things to tackle the new position. I stayed with the company for three years.

At CoreTech, I started out triaging and troubleshooting to help reduce the load on the other techs. Now a Systems Administrator, I am assisting the project team in integrating new tools to help IT support operations. In addition, I am working on more investigative tickets and integrating equipment onsite. More often, you will find me responding to tickets that come in to the support line.

My brother, Eric, and I still work together in our different roles, leveraging each other’s knowledge to provide faster, higher-quality services, especially in networking and firewalls.