Learning from experience: Success begins with education and training Published Jan. 13, 2009 By Airman 1st Class Steve Bauer 30th Space Wing Public Affairs VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- Coming from an Air Force family, I already had a pretty good idea what the Air Force was all about before I joined, or so I thought. Passed on to me by my father, I have been deeply embedded with Air Force ethos, the importance and value of education and training. My father, Lt. Col. Kenneth Bauer Jr., retired after his 20 years in service, but has not strayed far from the Air Force mission. My father spent his time in service as a professor of operations research for the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, and continues to do so for the civil service. Growing up under the supervision of a professor, I learned quickly the value of education. Occasionally, to my delight as a child, my father would let me come into work with him. Sitting in on his classes, listening to his instruction full of technical jargon far from my comprehension, I wondered if I would ever in my life grasp the concepts of any one of his classes. Preceding class, he led me down the hallway to his office. Proving my strength by opening his door, I was confronted with an office comprised of books lining every inch of his four walls. Scanning the titles of each, I reasoned they must have been incredibly scientific. While sitting there at the end of the day I watched him respond to an endless amount of e-mails. Although he must have been exhausted after a full day of prepping for class, attending meetings, etc., I noticed a sight that I'll never forget: He wore an incessant and merry smile on his face. After seeing his outward expression, I could only come to one conclusion: My father loved his job. My previous idea about work was that it is grueling, tough and anything but fun. I got a glimpse that day that prompted me to ask my father, "How did you get so lucky to get a job that you enjoy?" My father responded by saying that luck had nothing to do with it, but rather it took him his entire life to get to this point. Before letting me mull over his statement he said, "Education and training was the key to my success." He followed by telling me a story from his youth, which he was always good at doing. He told me about his experience working at a cement plant to pay his way through college. He painted a picture of 'plant life' for me. He said he remembers the work environment as being unbearably noisy, the air polluted with heavy dust and he recalled working jobs under hazardous conditions in claustrophobic settings. One day after leaving the plant and returning home, he stood in front of a mirror to wipe the dirt from his brow. Startled, he saw a strange man covered head to toe in grey cement dust. When he realized who he was looking at, he told himself that he was not going to work for the cement plant for the rest of his life. He knew schooling was his only way out, and it is what he did. He later went on to receive a doctorate in industrial engineering. That story has stuck with me to this very day. It was my reason for going to college. Although, there were many times in my life when I wanted to quit school, I never let that story stop echoing through my mind. It became the final push that helped me finish my degree. I learned from my father that education is a form of self-improvement that opens the doors to a better life. My father once told me, "I am proud and fortunate to have been born in a country where a man's aspirations are only limited by his talents and his sweat. In my case, I simply took every education and training opportunity offered to me by the Air Force and, in slow and deliberate steps, realized my life-long dream of becoming a college professor."