Trevor Reid || MBA-Law Student Blog

–|| EDUCATION ||–

A serious student and perpetual automath from about the age of four, I will probably expire with some half-mastered tome open on my escritoire.

For now, I am a first second year law student (lovingly called a 1L 2L) at Concord Law School of Kaplan University. Meanwhile, I’m on track to complete a Master of Business Administration degree at American Military University. My favorite areas of this field are strategic management, research, and marketing. In taking up law my goal is nothing less than becoming the regnant counsel of my generation.

I hold a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from Excelsior College (GPA 3.5) and studied international law in the context of foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (GPA 3.7). At JHU one of my projects, A Model of the Contemporary International Environment and Its Evolution, earned the top mark in my cohort. A reviewing professor called it “a cogent and ruthless analysis of the international legal framework”.

–|| LIFESTYLE ||–

The traits I admire most and try to cultivate are: audacity, candor, courage, generosity, objectivity, pride, and tenacity. It’s accurate to call me a hedonist in an updated epicurean sense. I especially embrace sexuality and everything that goes along with it. Prudishness is the only sin I am so far convinced exists. You can also call me:

• atheist–because I don’t worship any god
• agnostic–because I think it is uncertain whether any god exists
• secularist–because I hold these matters to be among the least important applications of philosophy ever devised

Raised near Buffalo, NY I’ve also lived in South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC. I’ve been to Canada, Poland, Puerto Rico, and Russia. Oh yeah, I am an American Bicentennial Gen-Xer. That puts me in my early thirties—-midlife—-but, I just call it Act II.

Hobbies? I am an accumulator of collections–numismatic, bibliophilic, and crepundiophilic mainly. I stay fit with non-competitive 5k runs and somewhat-less-than-full-contact mixed martial arts. Wordcraft, I suppose, would have gone without saying. Rowling, Tolkien, Doyle, Malory–I’m a big fan of each. Sometimes, I help out at the Washington, DC Legal Clinic for the Homeless and I’ve volunteered as a court appointed advocate for abused and neglected children.

–|| CAREER ||–

So far in life I have worked as a(n):

o paper boy	o cook	o grocery clerk
o soldier	o security guard	o bank clerk
o systems analyst	o computer programmer	o entrepreneur

Those are the jobs where I picked up skills that keep me fed. Plus, I discovered lots about myself. But, what have I been up to lately?

Okay, right now I concentrate on graduate school. For a little over a year I was the database and web go to guy for a congressionally chartered foundation called the National Endowment for Democracy. I administered several Microsoft SQL Servers and a nascent SharePoint server farm. I also evaluated policies from a technical standpoint, especially the build or buy decision for an upgrade to NED’s grant management system. Moreover, it was a fascinating chance to watch foreign policy unfold first hand–the work of the outfit is to openly channel American political assistance to selected interests abroad.

Before that I spent several months writing software for Northrop Grumman and its sub-contractor to maintain a complex benefit management system used by the Department of Veterans Affairs. It was written in old school Visual Basic and it’s design was a precursor to the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. My assignment was to make sure the presentation layer could understand the records received from an Oracle database. These records became increasingly complex as the laws, regulations, and procedures for assigning veteran disability ratings were constantly evolving. It was interesting and lucrative.

The prior 5 years or so were all about building two versions of host interface software for the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore using Visual Basic, SQL Server and the Windows API. The main idea was to bring together healthcare systems on platforms as diverse as mainframe, Unix minis, and modern Web application servers. It was a delight to work with such a broad array of technolgy during this stint–from CICS to .NET and everything in between. I also worked on disaster recovery planning and contributed several functions to Hopkins’ enterprise LDAP and authentication efforts using Cold Fusion before moving on to continue school in Washington, DC.

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