Problem-Solving is No Problem for AVS Alum

On June 8, 2011, Alpine Valley alumnus Andreas Suter spoke to about twenty people at the school about his current job—how he found and settled into it, and how his time at AVS prepared him to stand out as a successful employee. The following is an adaptation of notes taken by one of the attendees.

Good evening. I attended Alpine Valley School for about six years, graduating back in 2008. Currently I’m employed by EcoBroker International, which trains and certifies real estate professionals in environmental practices. My official job title is “Performance Operations Analyst,” but really I just do a bunch of different things, solve problems, figure out how to make things work. It’s been a lot of fun, and already I’ve learned so much. 

A lot of my job deals with Continuing Education regulation compliance and generating training certificates. When I started this past February, the first few days I was working on organizing student records. These were in a spreadsheet, but I ran into a problem: none of our computers was talking to the printer. The Standard Operating Procedures had no instructions for this, and so nobody was doing anything to try to fix it. We just had a bunch of computers that couldn’t print. (I have to say, what I’ve seen of the workplace is that SOP is used so often as a crutch. It’s a limiting factor—unlike at Alpine Valley, where if something doesn’t work, you find a way around or through it.)

Well, fortunately for me, the AVS experience helps students stay curious and confident. You may not know exactly how something’s done, but that doesn’t stop you, and whatever it is, you don’t assume you can’t do it. So, since I needed to print out these student records, I asked if I could take a look at the printer. I tried this and that, poked around with the settings, and within a day I had the printer working with all the computers.

Then there was the water cooler. It’s the kind that has two taps, one for hot and one for cold, but the hot tap wasn’t producing hot water. So I called the company that sold it to us, and was told that this was something we couldn’t fix ourselves, that we’d have to call in one of their trained professionals, who wouldn’t be available for some weeks. Well, I said I’d have to check with my boss on that. After I hung up, I decided to just pull the water cooler out from the wall and take a good look at it. When I saw that there was a screw next to a tank—a tank that, since it was insulated, was probably for the hot water—I turned the screw and…suddenly we had hot water again.

So I’ve found that I’ve been able to do a lot of things that I’ve never actually been trained to do. People have asked me if I majored in Computer Science, for example. My boss asked me, the day before a big webinar, if I could find a new service, figure out how to use it, and then teach others how to use it. The Alpine Valley connection here may be the improv group I was in at this school, which helped me a lot with thinking on my feet; also, there were the times I worked the lights at talent shows. Anyway, the webinar went well enough that my boss said he never wants to do another one without me at the helm.

To support my company’s online curriculum, I’ve been learning CSS and HTML on my own through blogs and tutorials, with a lot of trial and error. I spent hours and hours at this, and it was pretty exhausting, grueling work. But again, Alpine Valley School had helped me learn self-direction and self-discipline. So while our web developer was kind of put off by how basic my coding was, and I did crash the website once or twice, it was okay: I could take the criticism, and I was proud that I could teach myself to do this challenging stuff. Am I afraid of failure? Well, yeah. But I’m also prepared to reassure people while I’m going about the process of trying to make something work. It doesn’t keep me from trying or starting something. Failure happens; you learn.

I got this job in the first place because I knew the CEO during my five years of working at Vitamin Cottage, where he was a regular customer. After I left Vitamin Cottage I was unemployed for a long time—which I thoroughly enjoyed, actually. Then I started working as a handyman, picking up odd jobs here and there, when I ran into this guy again. He said, “I have an opportunity for you.” I assumed he meant as a handyman, but he meant a job in his company (an internship at first, but he told me that if that didn’t work out, he has contacts that he’d recommend me to). I guess he’d come to see me as a good, genuine person, not just a cashier; as the kind of person who doesn’t need to wait for someone to tell him to do something.

The transition from a Sudbury school to a non-Sudbury work place was, in truth, kind of hard at first: there’s no such thing as a Sudbury office. But I’d already had practice with this kind of structure from working at Vitamin Cottage. And actually, when I started this job they were blown away by my productivity. I guess that’s partly because I didn’t know what a “normal” level of productivity was. For me, it’s just a matter of integrity: when I take on a job, I do what I said I would do. At AVS you learn to keep your word, without supervision, even on little things.

There are so many smaller tasks involved in my job, projects like website optimization, which involves coding, tags, and tracking data. Actually, they’re giving me all the work I can handle. And again, I think it all comes down to being curious, being willing to give things a try, wanting to learn more and more stuff, and that’s definitely an attitude that Alpine Valley School promotes.

Not being educated in a tracked, categorized way has opened me up to a broader range of work possibilities. I learn everything that I learn because I just want to learn. And to some extent that’s true of every AVS graduate. This is a completely proactive system of education, where you don’t wait for the teacher to tell you it’s time to learn this or that. So now I stand out as a guy who can fix things and gets things done, who takes on tasks he’s never done before and does a good job with them.