I started working for the Human Resources Laboratory in 1984 as a summer hire graduate student assistant. I was hired by Dr Henk Ruck and worked for a year on a project known as Strength and Stamina research. In September 1984, I was converted from a summer hire to part time cooperative research student (CO-OP for short) and worked in this capacity for a year on a variety of projects including closing our Strength and Stamina and working with Joe Weeks on Aptitude Requirements and the Technical Training Impact Model (TTIM). I worked extensively with folks like Janice Buchhorn and Doris Black and Cal Fresne as I was primarily a data analyst. In the Summer of 1985, I started working for Dr Sherrie Gott. I learned quite a bit from her and from the project. I also started to learn quite a bit about CODAP and occupational analysis and where I met folks like Johnny Weissmuller (one of the biggest brains I have ever known). Occupational and task analysis would turn out to be a career making adventure and one of my pet passions. I also started working on the Training Decisions System program around this time and learned quite a bit about modeling and career field education and training. Worked very closely with OMS and with Jay and Monti and the entire OMS team. I also worked very closely with the McDonald Douglas team working on TDS and met some great folks who continued to help me grow: Dave Vaughan, Jimmy Mitchell, Bob Gosc, JR Knight and Bruce Perrin among others. I learned program management and conference presentation 101 from these guys and got heavily involved in career field modeling and planning. In 1989, LtCol Nick Ovalle and Col Rodger Ballentine offered me a deal I could not refuse to go to school and get a Ph.D. I went tto Texas A&M where I met Winfred Arthur and Dave Woehr on the Faculty and with whom I have continued to work to this day. Graduated from TAMU in 1995 and continued working at the Lab on Task analysis methods, the son of TDS the Training Impacts Decision System or TIDES with the TDS crowd and Brice Stone, Jonathan Fast and others and supported the "Year of Maintenance" and "Year of Training" initiatives from the CSAF at the time. I continued to work on task analysis and job analysis tools and technologies right up until the big budget crush of 1996-97 when the Lab took a major cut from OSD of almost 100% of the funding for Manpower and Personnel research. Training budgets were tapped to pay the bill and to offset the cut, but the next year those dollars were cut as well. I saw many good people hurt by those decisions and I feel the ultimate looser was the warfighter. It will literally take ten years to build the capabilities back when we need to. With the demise of Brooks AFB, my family and I moved to Mesa AZ and I went to work for one of the surviving parts of the Human Resources Lab and we continue to do great things for the warfighter and many of you are once again collaborators in arms with our work. Although a number of the folks I worked closely with are no longer with us, their spirit and their passion lives on in each of us that had the distinct pleasure of working with them. I am pleased for the friends and colleagues I have today and I hope that I have instilled in some of folks I have had the honor to mentor the same fire and passion for this stuff that makes this the best job in the word.  -- Wink

Those Whom Wink Has Helped: