Major in Anything, Minor in Math

Friday, March 7, 2025

Christine: I just want to recap. I sat next to you on an airplane. We were on a flight from Denver to D.C., and you said something to me that I found so fascinating:

You told me that you don’t care what your kids major in; they can major in whatever they want — but they have to minor in math. And I just love that line. So I want to talk to you a little bit more about that line and why you say that because I found your reasoning fascinating.

But first, do you want to tell us who you are and what you do, where’d you go to school, and how did you work your way into this world?

Joshua: Yeah. I’ve had a, I would say, a non-conventional path through life, which I think is more normal than people expect. I’m currently a software engineering manager at United Launch Alliance. We launch the Vulcan and the Atlas rockets. We put satellites and actually the Starliner that put the astronauts up there that are still there, the ISS. That was our rocket that put them up there. So that's what I do.

Christine: Where’d you go to school?

Joshua: I went to the University of Arizona for my master’s degree in electrical computer engineering. I got my undergraduate degree in physiology and developmental biology from Brigham Young University.

Not a lot of crossover.

Christine: Tell me about your first job out of college.

Joshua: Oh man, my first job out of college was a night shift position at Myriad Genetics, working on what I can only describe as an assembly line of genetic testing. We were going through samples that people had given to their doctors for cancer screenings, breast cancer, blood cancer, mostly breast cancer, but there was a lot of different types of cancers we screened for, and I worked 12 hour shifts, Sunday night, Monday night, Tuesday night and that was an interesting job.

Christine: It sounds like it! How many years went by between your bachelor’s degree and your master’s degree?

Joshua: It was four years; I finished my bachelor’s in 2012, and I started my master’s in 2016, and I finished in 2020.

Christine: So you had a good four years of work experience before you went back to school; what did that do for you?

Joshua: It was a really big wake-up call. If I’m being honest, the world that I thought I was entering after I finished my degree and the world that actually existed were very different, and I struggled quite a bit, actually finding my place, finding out what and how work actually gets done. It’s not something that I feel I learned very well in college. The workplace is hard, and the world is really rough, and nobody tells you how to do anything, really. Nobody feels obligated to tell you anything unless you have really good people in your circle. People don’t go out of their way to tell you much or teach you much. I went and found some mentors, and I found some people who could help me out and redirected my life path towards engineering.

It took a while to get there. I worked a bunch of jobs that did nothing to do with my degree. I started at myriad genetics and then I went to, I started doing medical device sales. I shadowed somebody, and then they offered me a job and then rescinded that job offer because their company was being sold.

And then I did software sales for a medical for a home health software company. And then that company laid everybody off that was living outside of Texas. And then that’s when I was like, I guess I'll go do some engineering and taught myself to code. I did a bootcamp as well. (I have mixed feelings about coding bootcamps.)

And then I did a job where I was working for another genomics company, but I was doing web development for them rather than being on the floor doing in the lab doing the genetic work. I was building their internal websites, and then that got me enough experience under my belt that Raytheon was hiring. Raytheon hired me, and about nine months into that job, my boss asked, “Do you want to have a successful career?”

And I was like, yeah, the last four years of my life have been pretty rough. I still don’t know what I’m doing. Sure. Yes. I want to have a good career, Boss. That's what I want. And he said, “You have to get a master’s degree. It’s okay. We’ll help you pay for it. Don’t worry about it. Apply for this program where we pay for the whole thing up front. You don’t have to do the reimbursement stuff, and we think you’re a good candidate.”

So I did that. I got into the University of Arizona, and I did my degree and I worked full time while doing that degree as well.

That’s why it took me four years rather than two or two and a half.

Christine: So you were working full time and a full time and really doing school almost full-time.

Joshua: Yeah. And my wife and I had a kid.

Christine: And you had kids.

Joshua: Yeah, we had two kids when we moved back to Arizona to take that job with Raytheon.

And then we had another kid when I was a year and a half into the program.

Christine: Yeah. So you had a newborn, a full time job,

Joshua: Yeah.

Christine: Your master’s degree,

Joshua: Yeah, it was —

Christine: Fun and tricky times?

Joshua: Yeah, it was stressful to say the least.

Christine: Yeah. Yeah. But it paid off.

Joshua: It did. It did

I did a lot. I got exposed to a lot of really interesting things that Raytheon did and many different types of software.

That’s something that people don’t understand, either: software is a huge field, and it’s not all web development. It’s not all database engineering. And I did most of it. I did real time. I did embedded. I did DevOps. I did cloud computing. I did machine learning. I did algorithm development. I got exposed to a lot of stuff there, which was really cool and really fun.

Then, a little less than a year ago, I was offered a job to come to Denver and be an engineering manager at United Launch Alliance.

So that’s my weird story of how I got to where I was. I started in pre-med, physiology, and developmental biology, and now I’m an engineering manager.

Christine: Yeah, and I don’t think that’s necessarily uncommon.

Joshua: No. More and more people whom I meet have these weird paths, but nobody told me that. I just thought that you go to school in a degree and you go get a job in the field, and you progress and that’s it. But it’s not what it is.

Christine: It’s not what it is.

Q: So what do you tell your 18-year-old self now? Or maybe your 17-year-old self?

Joshua: Just relax. Don’t worry about any prescribed paths. Just do what’s fun — not “fun” in the sense of hanging out with my friends and traveling, which is not a bad thing. I think that stuff's really important. But what’s interesting to you that is fun.

If you really love Russian literature, read it, study it, get into it. It’s all good. All of it’s good. All of it makes you a better person. All of it develops your brain.

We don’t want mindless STEM degree robots that just crank out math, science, and technology and have no culture, no media literacy, no philosophy understanding. That's how you end up with people who do really dangerous stuff with their skills because they don’t understand ethics or civics because they only did math, science, and technology.

You need balance and if you don’t feel like you're getting it in your academic time as an undergraduate, then you need to go find some stuff to read. You need to expand. You can’t just stay in one lane because life won’t let you. And your life will not be as enriched if you stay in one lane.

Christine: Yes. I one-hundred-percent agree. And I’m so excited to hear you say that. I tell my students, especially for a bachelor’s degree, study what you love.

Joshua: I wish I had done that. I wanted to do a business undergraduate. My parents wouldn’t let me, they really wanted me to do some STEM degree, so I picked physiology because I thought, “Oh, I’ll be a doctor. That’d be great.”

Turns out, through a handful of experiences, that was not the path for me. Going back, I would have just done business because that stuff’s interesting to me.

Now I’m considering an MBA. I don’t know what I’m going to do right now, but I’m seriously considering doing an executive MBA program sometime in the next couple of years.

You asked, “What would you tell your 17, 18 year old self?” I would say, just get the business undergraduate, get it out of the way. If it’s great for you, great. If it gets it out of your system, then it gets it out of your system. There's still a ton of stuff to do.

Christine: This is a nice segue to:

Q: Go get the business degree; but what do you minor in?

Joshua: Math.

Christine: Why?