Jeff Macharyas is the Director of Marketing at Corning Community College in New York. He is a writer, graphic designer and communications director who has worked in publishing, higher education and project management for many years. He has been the art director for Quick Printing, The American Spectator, the USO's OnPatrol, Today's Campus, and other publications as well as a telephone pole design engineer contractor. Jeff is certified in Google Analytics and Adobe Visual Design and holds Amateur Radio license: K2JPM. He is also a certified fencing instructor.
Jeff earned his AS from Indian River Community College (Ft. Pierce, Florida), his BS in Communications from Florida State University, a miniMBA in Social Media Marketing from Rutgers University and a Masters in Cybersecurity and Computer Forensics from Utica College.
Authored Comments
Thank you. The funny thing about job descriptions is that they really don't describe the job. For the job I described, I just found keywords that seemed to apply and disregarded the rest of it. I have found job postings in the graphics field to be similar. I think many of them are just picked up over and over again. All too often I see references to QuarkXPress (not a useful skill nowadays) or Macromedia FreeHand (not a thing anymore). So, I would advise people to not take these descriptions at face value. There might be some hook between your skills and their perceived needs that don't get addressed through these automated job systems.
PS: My son just started in the USMC and is a PFC at Camp Pendleton. Thank you.
Thank you for your article, Dr. Pearce. One other thing to consider is online learning. I earned my Graduate degree in Cybersecurity from Utica College in New York, even though I lived in Florida. Yes, it was still expensive—$30,000, but my laundry room made a pretty good campus. Fortunately, I was able to communicate and collaborate with my professors and classmates quite easily, even though they were in California, Indiana, Maryland, and New York. When I started the program, I knew nothing about open source anything, but the program opened my eyes to the world of Linux, open source intelligence, open source tools, etc. Although I work in graphic design and not open source cybersecurity, it did lead me in other interesting directions, such as exploring and using open source graphic design tools, such as Scribus, and researching and writing about open source—right here on opensource.com—as well as my WordPress site, macharyas.com, and posting my classwork research on ResearchGate. Thanks.