Thank You, Full Sail: Bringing My Engineering Journey Into Computer Science

I completed my B.S. in Computer Science at Full Sail University in November 2025. As I update this site and think about the work I want to do next, I want to give that accomplishment its own space. This is a thank-you and a look back at the journey that made returning to school worthwhile.

I came to Full Sail with a career already behind me. I had built networks, operated infrastructure, investigated outages, and learned through the demands of real systems. Starting the degree in March 2023 meant adding structured software learning to that experience. I wanted to understand more of the applications I supported and become more capable of building them myself.

Starting with the network

My foundation was self-taught network engineering. Through AirNetworks, I built and operated a fiber and wireless ISP. That work made engineering tangible: people depended on the connection working, and a design had to make sense when deployed, maintained, and repaired.

I learned to follow a problem through its dependencies. Routing, addressing, physical infrastructure, and customer needs were connected. Fixing one symptom without understanding the path could leave the real problem waiting for the next outage.

Those habits followed me into later roles. At Magic Leap, my work expanded into observability and automation. At Chewy, SRE brought deployment pipelines, telemetry, and recovery into the same conversation. Platform and cloud engineering gave me more ways to make infrastructure repeatable and useful to the teams building on it.

Over time, I wanted to go further into the software itself. Knowing where an application runs is valuable. Understanding how its code represents state, handles failure, and connects to other services makes that knowledge more useful.

Becoming a student again

Full Sail gave that goal a structure. The degree was an opportunity to practice computer science and software development deliberately, alongside the operational experience I already had.

I did not leave my infrastructure background at the door. It influenced the questions I asked about the systems I built. Where would this run? How would I know it was working? What would happen if a dependency failed? At the same time, studying software pushed me to look more carefully at the decisions inside the application, rather than solving every problem from outside it.

That combination became especially meaningful in my capstone work.

Bringing the pieces together through VoiceRAG

VoiceRAG connected my interest in phone systems and networking with speech processing, inference, and conversational context. The project brought SIP and PBX integration together with speech-to-text, text-to-speech, application logic, and Kubernetes infrastructure.

It gave me a reason to work across the whole path. A call has to reach the right component. Audio has to move through the processing stages. The application needs context, and inference needs a serving environment. Each boundary creates a question that cannot be answered by looking at a single service.

VoiceRAG helped me connect software learning to the kind of operational problems I enjoy. It also strengthened my interest in AI infrastructure: the work that turns model capabilities into something reachable, observable, and useful in a real environment.

Thank you

Thank you to Full Sail's faculty and mentors for the teaching and guidance that supported this chapter. Thank you to my classmates for being part of the learning community. I appreciate the opportunity to bring an established engineering career into a new discipline and keep growing.

Completing the degree matters to me because it adds to that career rather than replacing it. I am now targeting AI infrastructure, platform engineering, SRE, and forward deployed engineering roles. I want to bring practical network and operating experience into teams building AI systems, understand the environment those systems need to serve, and help make the result work.

Thank you, Full Sail. I am proud to have completed this chapter and excited to keep building from it.