I come from a family of veterans. My father and grandfather both served in the U.S. Army. I was in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) program in high school. On my birthday before graduation, I enlisted in the U.S. Army delayed entry program, which allowed me to finish high school prior to enlistment. On graduation day, as I received my diploma and walked off the stage, I was immediately greeted by my Army recruiter and shipped to boot camp, still in my cap and gown.

After basic training, I trained as a bio-medical equipment repair technician. I specialized in x-ray equipment. This took me around the world repairing hospital equipment in countries such as Germany, Korea, and parts of Central America. Soon I achieved the rank of Specialist 4, equivalent to the rank of corporal.

My favorite and most special times were when I was stationed in Honduras and in charge of all medical equipment at the military hospital. There, I met with members of the Peace Corps and Project Hope, who were working with civilian hospitals that lacked functioning equipment needed to treat and diagnose patients. I organized a joint military and civilian task force to repair those hospitals’ broken equipment to improve patient care. For my efforts, the Army gave me the Army Achievement Medal and promoted me to sergeant. It was an honor to serve during those times.

Most of the medial equipment required some form of programming, which the Army trained me to perform. This training helped me learn other programming languages as I was drawn to web development, including PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

I am now a front-end web developer at SAFE Credit Union and I am very proud to be part of the digital marketing team. The skills, leadership, and discipline I achieved from the U.S. Army laid the foundation for me to be a part of an organization outside of my military service and be part of a team at SAFE.

► Check out more reader-submitted stories.