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Darren – How did you handle going back to work?

Darren – How did you handle going back to work?

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I had this great mentor at the time, and he’s like, “Darren, what you really need is corporate experience.”   He’s like, “Go out and get a job, I don’t care where it’s at, get a job.”  I literally went down the Fortune 500, and appl... Show More

I had this great mentor at the time, and he’s like, “Darren, what you really need is corporate experience.”   He’s like, “Go out and get a job, I don’t care where it’s at, get a job.”  I literally went down the Fortune 500, and applied to every single company on the list, and I made that my job for, like, six months.  And in the end, like after company 275, because I was very focused by that time too, because I was like so disgusted with the way I had kind of squandered my education as a youth.  And also, really overall this waste of time in my 6-8 years in between ’93-2000 when I went back to school finally.  By the time I finished school, I was on a mission, right.  And I had an offer from Aetna in Alpharetta, Georgia, or Boeing in Anaheim, California, and I’m like, “Well, you know, Anaheim is a little closer that Alpharetta,” so went and got a job at Boeing.  I was on the ICBM Missile Guidance Replacement Program—which sounds really fancy—working on the program management team.  So I was in the finance group and, with herds of engineers, doing 80 guidance systems a year for the government, and it was our job to make sure that basically they were billing the right program, report back, and do all the reporting stuff in the finance group.  I was a business and planning analyst, and I was doing a lot of Excel-based work, and working with my little group.  But it showed me that I could do a corporate job, and I could actually do pretty well because I was focused—thank God for technology, right?  So, I was able to really just kind of do circles around these, like you know, sorry, older folks, that were used to doing the research slide rules and everything, instead of the Excel stuff.  So I was a pretty good member of the team, and I was able to go pretty fast. 

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Darren – How did you handle going back to work?

Darren

Injured in 1993 at age 20, quadriplegic
More Videos by Darren
Transcriptadd

I had this great mentor at the time, and he’s like, “Darren, what you really need is corporate experience.”   He’s like, “Go out and get a job, I don’t care where it’s at, get a job.”  I literally went down the Fortune 500, and applied to every single company on the list, and I made that my job for, like, six months.  And in the end, like after company 275, because I was very focused by that time too, because I was like so disgusted with the way I had kind of squandered my education as a youth.  And also, really overall this waste of time in my 6-8 years in between ’93-2000 when I went back to school finally.  By the time I finished school, I was on a mission, right.  And I had an offer from Aetna in Alpharetta, Georgia, or Boeing in Anaheim, California, and I’m like, “Well, you know, Anaheim is a little closer that Alpharetta,” so went and got a job at Boeing.  I was on the ICBM Missile Guidance Replacement Program—which sounds really fancy—working on the program management team.  So I was in the finance group and, with herds of engineers, doing 80 guidance systems a year for the government, and it was our job to make sure that basically they were billing the right program, report back, and do all the reporting stuff in the finance group.  I was a business and planning analyst, and I was doing a lot of Excel-based work, and working with my little group.  But it showed me that I could do a corporate job, and I could actually do pretty well because I was focused—thank God for technology, right?  So, I was able to really just kind of do circles around these, like you know, sorry, older folks, that were used to doing the research slide rules and everything, instead of the Excel stuff.  So I was a pretty good member of the team, and I was able to go pretty fast. 

Darren – How did you handle going back to work?
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