WORLD AT HIS FINGERTIPS

Demetric Simmons brings a global perspective
to his role in SD1 Information Technology

John Steinbeck once wrote that people don’t take trips – trips take people.
 
Trips have taken Demetric Simmons around the world and back again. At just 28 years old, the SD1 Systems Analyst has visited six continents and 35 countries. He traveled the globe as an Army Sergeant, doing everything from keeping an eye on Kim Jong-un in Korea to keeping an eye out for IEDs in Afghanistan.
 
“I’ve been fortunate with my military experience,” he says. “I always wanted to travel, but you don’t really see it happening a lot of times. I was fortunate with my placements in the military to be able to do that.”
 
Demetric joined the Army through its delayed entry program when he was a junior at Dixie Heights High School. He says he joined because he took a look at his future and realized he didn’t have money for college. “I didn’t want to go into debt,” he says, “so the G.I. Bill seemed like a good way to get a good start in life.”
 
Just three weeks after his graduation in 2011, he was in South Carolina for Army bootcamp, where he signed up as a geospatial imagery intelligence analyst. Then he spent 36 weeks training in Sierra Vista, Ariz., before his first tour of duty, stationed at Camp Humphreys in South Korea.
 
“I really enjoyed my time in Korea outside of the Army life,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting that. I was actually upset at first when they sent me to Korea. I was like, ‘Oh man. This is like Vietnam!’ I was 18, so I didn’t know anything about Korea. But it’s a great country. I really liked it.”
 
It was an interesting time to be in Korea. Kim Jong-un had just taken over as Supreme Leader of North Korea, and North Korea was threatening to withdraw from the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War, causing increased tension in the region.
 
“I was doing active reconnaissance,” Demetric says. “I would pretty much fly on a plane like eight nautical miles south of the North Korean border and we would actively be collecting intelligence on them. Pretty much making sure they weren’t invading.”

Fortunately for him, the United States hasn’t conducted a paratrooper invasion since the start of the Iraq War. “So the closest thing to combat I’ve actually seen was in Korea doing my missions,” Demetric says. “Because we could see on radar when they would aim their missiles at us.”
 
Demetric left Italy in 2017, to return home and go to college. He got a job at the Internal Revenue Service in Covington, but he needed to move. He’d take furlough from his job to attend classes at the University of Tampa.
 
In 2018, he started contracting work at Wright Patterson Airforce Base for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). In November of that year, Demetric decided to take a deployment job as a civilian contractor in Afghanistan.
 
“That’s when I experienced the most combat stuff,” he says. “A lot of indirect fire, vehicle bombs that would hit our base. But luckily I never got into where it was direct fire and we were shooting at each other.”
 
Demetric says that when COVID-19 hit, he was forced to take a break from travelling. Which for him meant moving to Zagreb, Croatia, to study at the abroad campus of the Rochester Institute of Technology.
 
“When I lived in Croatia, I got my visa to go to there, but as an American, because we were a high-risk country at the time, I couldn’t travel outside of Croatia,” he says. “That limited some of my activities, but I traveled a lot inside Croatia. But not as much in Europe as I wanted to, living there for a year.”
 
After Croatia, Demetric enrolled in a three-month tech bootcamp for Python and JavaScript full-stack development. And just as that was ending, he accepted his current Systems Analyst position at SD1.
 
In that role, which he has held since November 2021, one of the areas Demetric will be focused on is creating online forms – an area of emphasis for SD1 in 2022.
 
He’s also earning his Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies from Thomas More University (to take advantage of what he calls “a lot of self-discovery-type credits, military credits and tech credits), and hopes to graduate by the end of the year.
 
He then plans to earn a tech-related Master’s degree and a Master of Business Administration.

But when Demetric thinks back to some of his favorite places he’s visited – standards like Sydney, Australia and Edinburgh, Scotland and not-so-standards like Medellín, Colombia, where Pablo Escobar once built one of the world’s most powerful drug cartels – it’s easy to see that his travel days aren’t over.
 
“Colombia is nice,” he says. “I was there in 2017 and it’s pretty good there now. I had a good time.” He laughs for a moment and adds, “And no cocaine was involved.”
 
More recently, he spent three weeks in Singapore training mixed martial arts, a hobby he’s had since high school. Demetric says he considered fighting, but due to the ongoing pandemic, he has no future plans to do so.
 
He says he hopes to revisit Poland later this year to visit an Army buddy. “If Omicron isn’t horrible, I’d like to go back there and see more of Eastern Europe that I didn’t see my first time around.”
 
Other destinations on his wish list: Antarctica (so he can check off that seventh continent) and Saint Petersburg, Russia.
 
“Antarctica is a little pricey,” he says. “Maybe in my retirement days, when I have a little more saved up.” As for Russia, Demetric says he’s afraid with his military background that he would get captured and interrogated. So that’s not on the list at the moment.
 
So for now, he says he gets his excitement from learning new things every day from Aaron Angel, Alen Dzaferagic and Doug Wells.
 
“I’ve seen some of the interviews, and I’m going to sound like a cliché, but of all the jobs I’ve had, I really do like the environment here. My coworkers have been so welcoming. And characters like John [Warndorf] keep it interesting, I will say that. I’m having a good time.”

KUDOS TO CHRIS WESSELMAN

\\\ Email from Customer Service Representative Donna Viox to Elmo Young \\\

Hi Elmo,

I received a call from Mr. Robert Williams, who asked to speak with Chris Wesselman. Of course I couldn't transfer the call to Chris, so I asked what it was concerning.

Mr. Williams wanted to thank Chris for leaving him a voicemail and for following through with a service call he had placed. He didn't leave any other information, but I thought it was nice of him to take the time out of his busy day to let us know that he appreciated the service he received.

Thank you,

Donna