I have lived and worked all over the United States. My early years after graduation included working as a Commercial Diver and doing salvage work on the sunken pirate capital of Port Royal, Jamaica and four years of Commercial oil field construction diving in the Gulf of Mexico. My deepest working diving depth was 238 feet. I gave that up after a diving accident and returned to East Tennessee and enrolled at UT's College of Engineering, where I earned a Bachelors Degree in Civil Engineering in 1981.