Camden Wagner, Class of 2020
What is your current occupation?
Currently I am Nuclear Electronics Technician for the U.S. Navy.
What led you to your current occupation?
JROTC taught me the principles of leadership and service. I credit my enlisting with the values Sergeant (Al Conrad) and Major (John Sheaffer) were sure to instill.
What was your education after Concordia?
All nukes take 3 training programs in around 18 months. For me it was the Naval Nuclear Electronic Technician A School, Naval Nuclear Power School, and Naval Nuclear Prototype.
What did you love most about CLHS?
JROTC and the Latin program are programs I definitely think back to fondly and also consistently use the knowledge they gave me.
What advice would you pass along to students?
Whether it is your faith or your work, never give up, for solid results stem from strong roots, and always seize good opportunities as you never know where thev'll lead.
Jackson Wagner, Class of 2017
What is your current occupation?
Founder and COO of First Gen Industries, Inc. We build, scale, and manage online stores for people on Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify for an ongoing share of the revenue. At the moment we have about 87 clients and 21 employees.
What led you to your current occupation?
I took a gap year for the 2020-21 academic year and spent it doing sales for a digital advertising company, which started off as an internship and I eventually got to lead the sales team. This taught me so much about the online world, and I'm really grateful to the managers at the firm for giving me a shot in the first place. It gave me a really good feel for the ecommerce space, and I realized that there were many more ways I could be adding to it- from there, started First Gen.
What was your education after Concordia?
History Major at Georgetown
What did you love most about CLHS?
What I loved most was simply the fact that the whole time we were anchored in faith because you soon realize after graduating how easy it is to get lost in the world without some sort of grounding like that. I've met countless people since high school who have seemingly everything in life except for faith—in either their education or their home—and their lives can be really turbulent as a result without that foundation. There are a lot of great places out there to go to high school with strong academics, community, and athletics but only a small fraction of them give you some sort of faith component that isn’t incredibly watered down. This is something I wasn’t fully appreciative of until after the fact. Also for me personally, joining JROTC was probably the best single choice I made in high school—Sergeant Conrad and Major Sheaffer have done real service in their lives and are great mentors, and for those who treat the program how it is supposed to be treated, it can be incredibly formative. My favorite class was undoubtedly Latin with Ms. Holtslander—salve magistra!
What advice would you pass along to students?
High school is one of the many things in life for which you don’t fully grasp the importance of how you engage with it until it’s over and you’re more matured. If you’re reading this and in high school, you are currently forming all of the habits of living, working, and interacting that you will carry into adulthood. Not to scare anyone, because obviously you can change a lot with age. But as the years go by you will realize how much of that foundation which you lay in that high school period is here to stay. As a general rule in life, the earlier and more consistently you start doing things, they easier they are to maintain and the harder they are to stop. Just be very intentional about the person you’re crafting yourself into right now, because you’re going to see all of the fruits and all of the wages that come from this over the next decade and beyond.