I'm 24 years old, from Madison, Wisconsin, and I'm looking to build my career inside a Japanese company. My background is in data engineering and analysis. My last year was spent between a U.S. analytics startup and a small town in Nagano, teaching English to six hundred Japanese students. Those two jobs taught me the same thing from different sides: good systems and good communication are the same problem.

My Career

I began my career as a Software Development Intern at Forward Health Group in Madison, where I built internal infrastructure components to accelerate onboarding for new enterprise clients and shipped custom web portals using modern tech stacks. Since April 2024, I've served as Chief Data Analyst at a U.S. sports-attendance networking startup — spearheading the aggregation of historical and real-time datasets, engineering optimized pipelines, and orchestrating the architecture that integrates legacy statistics with current performance trends.

In August 2024, I moved to Minowa, Nagano, Japan, to teach English at AtoZ Corporation. For nine months I designed high-engagement curricula for twelve classes — over six hundred students at widely different proficiency levels — and delivered data-driven progress assessments for individual students. Teaching in Japan taught me more than Japanese: it taught me how communication, precision, and patience actually work inside a Japanese organization.

Why Japan

My interest in Japan is not theoretical. I studied Japanese for four semesters at the University of Wisconsin–Madison alongside two semesters of Japanese culture, visited twice before moving, and then spent nine months living and working in a small town in Nagano. I left wanting to return — but the right way: with a real job, at a company I respected, and with a role I could grow into over years, not months.

Brief Background

I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and graduated from Madison West High School in 2020 (ACT 32, 97th percentile). I started my undergraduate studies at the University of Colorado Boulder before transferring to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where I earned my B.A. in Economics in May 2024 with an emphasis on econometrics and data analysis.

Outside of work and study, I'm interested in how tools — especially the current generation of AI systems — change what a small team can do. I'm continuing to improve my Japanese, and I spend time with friends and family.

Interests

Sports

American football — the Minnesota Vikings and the Wisconsin Badgers. International soccer — I follow the UEFA European Championship and the FIFA World Cup closely.

Video Games

I regularly play a variety of games. Find me on Discord as xlbluefish.

Media

Anime: Horimiya and Jujutsu Kaisen. Movies: The Big Short and The Martian.