THE ORIGINAL EAST STUDENT
MEET
MAX YOUNG,
Corporate IT and Help Desk Specialist at the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, LLC. Max is an EAST legend. He is among the first few students that experienced EAST before it even had a name. Max attributes his open mindset and career in STEM to the seeds planted during his time as a student in the classroom of EAST founder, Tim Stephenson. Read on for a firsthand account of how this Class of 1998 Greenbrier High School graduate continues to live the EAST ideals through his day-to-day actions.
Hi,
I am Douglas Max Young, but please, call me Max. I have been involved in various forms of STEM/STEAM for the last 23 years professionally. I have worked with mechanical, wireless, and electrical engineers, artists, designers, developers, toxicologists, epidemiologists, pilots, first responders, and various other agencies and trades. I spent 10 years in the cellular industry alone. Currently, I work with the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health (CTEH, LLC) which is a branch of the multinational Montrose Environmental Group Inc (NYSE: MEG). We live on the cutting edge of technology as it relates to our industry. We make use of tools such as Boston Dynamics SPOT robot dog, DJI Drones, Balloon aerial photography, FLIR, Rae Systems Multi-Gas and VOC detectors and monitors, mass spectrography and many other innovative and exciting technologies. None of this would have been possible without the intervention of opportunity through the EAST program, and, particularly Mr. Tim Stephenson. I had troubles at home going into my junior and senior years and found myself acting out in response to those stressors. After making a few bad decisions at school, I faced expulsion or my agreed participation in a new program, which was not even called EAST yet. Back then, it was just a big experiment where Tim Stephenson took some of the knuckleheads like me and paired us with some more well-behaved and more scholastic peers. Before solutions like 3-D printing and other high-end peripherals were commonplace, we were doing computer-assisted design with basic single pen plotting output. Mind you, at this point, I had already hacked the school’s older terminal systems and caused some upset, all without getting caught, so in hindsight, I am not sure it was so smart to put me in that class. It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. If any of my old teachers ever wondered who sent a broadcast alert message “Loki Rules!!!” to every networked PC in the school simultaneously back in 1997, look no further. Mystery solved. I am sorry about that by the way. I did not know, however, that the message was also going to quintuple beep the speaker system on every networked NAME: Douglas Max Young II computer simultaneously. That was an added bonus. High school is already one of the most emotionally charged times of a young person’s life and when you have a young person who is going TITLE/PROFESSION: IT Help Desk through things at home that ended up being exhibited through poor choices Specialist /Corporate IT and behaviors at school, you are likely to have an “interesting” story. My EAST PROGRAM: EAST at first memories, of what is now known as EAST, were sitting in rooms Greenbrier, Class of ‘98 where we worked in small groups. Josh Risk was one of the first people to take me under his wing and show me how to start designing in CAD. CONTACT MAX: myoung@cteh.com At that time, we were using Intergraph computers. Josh has been working in the engineering field for over 20 years and is now finishing his degree
