The Alumni Spotlight highlights Georgetown Prep alumni making impacts all over the globe. Prep's 5,700 live and work all over the world in every field imaginable. The Alumni Spotlight series captures our graduates' stories and Georgetown Prep's impact on their lives after their four years as a student. To submit a story, email alumni@gprep.org.

What have you done since graduating from Georgetown Prep?

After graduating from Prep in 2006, I headed out to Stanford where I enrolled as a freshman and went to two-a-days. (As an aside, Prep's preseason training made my first camp at Stanford feel like an absolute cakewalk). I quickly became a Classics major and was blessed to learn from an incredible faculty at Stanford who unpacked the ancient world and all its applications to our modern times. On the football front, I was lucky to be a starter at guard for three years, and things steadily got better for our team every year: 1-11 (thank God for redshirt years), 4-8, 5-7, 8-5, finally culminating in a 12-1, #4 AP ranking, with us beating the absolute heck out of Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl in Miami for the sendoff of all sendoffs to my football career. I keep waiting for the call when the ESPN 30 for 30 people come and make a movie about our class and that 2010 team, because our success felt every bit as storybook absurd as it sounds. My class included future NFL stars Toby Gerhart and Richard Sherman, I was coached by Jim Harbaugh, Greg Roman, and an incredibly impressive coaching tree across the college and NFL worlds, and we were joined by the likes of David DeCastro, Andrew Luck, Zach Ertz, and a bunch of guys who have made careers out of football. I love Stanford and am so grateful for what that place did in a very similar vein to what Prep did for me: it broadened my horizons, it pushed me, and it kept me humble.

After graduating, I made a shot at the NFL, but a player lockout was in effect in 2010-11, and it was a terrible year to be an undrafted, no Combine invite, try-hard guy. As the lockout continued to hold, my brother Colter (Prep '08) brought up a one-year program offered by the University of Virginia, where he was a 3rd-year student and tight end on the football team. It sounded perfect for me: a one-year MS degree that included an abroad component AND would give me the finance, accounting, marketing, and strategy curriculum of an MBA program. I applied to the last window of a rolling admissions calendar and thankfully got in.

The lockout didn't break, so I accepted my admission to UVA and was officially no longer a football player. In fact, I'm the only member of the 2011 Orange Bowl's starting offense who did not play in the NFL.

But UVA was phenomenal for me. I made a ton of friends, played intramurals, and studied and traveled abroad in China. When I got back from China in June, I drove my family's old van to Minnesota and got married to my wife, who I had met through Colter a few years earlier. From there we drove out to California, where we lived in the suburbs south of San Francisco in a tiny apartment for about four years. I worked for various tech companies which lived out stages of startup life, while my wife was a nurse at Stanford Hospital. We frequently took trips to Napa, the coast, and San Francisco. It's a place I'll always hold in my heart. We welcomed our first daughter in late 2015, and I took an opportunity with LinkedIn which brought me back to DC in early 2016. After four years in Alexandria and welcoming another girl in 2018, we left for Minnesota last year. We live in a south suburb called Lakeville where I work remotely for LinkedIn, and I coach 9th-grade football at the local high school. Life is good.

What advice would you have for current Prep students?

Anyone can turn on YouTube and find a steady supply of catch-all advice that's worth hearing. Old axioms like "don't follow the money" or "be true to who you are" are old axioms because they're usually right for most people. But there's a difference between Hallmark knowledge and true wisdom. Wisdom is a contact sport; it has to be learned. Mistakes have to be made. Knees have to be bloodied and you have to fail a lot in order to find the truth about yourself under the baggage and pretense you're likely putting on yourself.

So my best bit of overwhelming advice is, especially while you're young and in an environment like Prep which will catch you when you fall, do some things that are completely out of your comfort zone. More specifically, go seek out things that you think you'll be terrible at, and pursue them specifically because they're hard and new.

I didn't do nearly enough of this growing up, but to use my own experience, AP Art History was something I initially considered for the schedule block it occupied, but I dismissed it at first because I didn't know if I'd enjoy it. Had I done that, I would've missed out on an experience that I still cherish. Had I not done drama, had I stayed in my lane as a jock and someone vying for a football scholarship, I would've lost out on an experience that changed the way I think about the performing arts and granted me a whole lot of empathy I didn't know I was missing. In fact, it was Coach Paro who, when I told him in homeroom that I was thinking of going out for drama, urged me into it. He told me stories of Prep football players who had done plays and loved it. So this place will support you in expanding your experiences and getting outside your comfort zone.

And honestly? Not everything will stick, and a lot of it will be uncomfortable. Good! The point is to use the time you have and the environment you're into your advantage. Do as many things as you can just to do them. Say yes more than you say no. If you're a jock, do something flexing creativity (I recommend drama, and hey, it's the only shoo-in way to spend time with girls on campus). If you're a proud nerd, go out for a sport. If you're a one-sport guy, go try something that helps you in an area you know you need to improve. If you think you're a math genius, take German. "Specialization is for insects," after all.