Inducted into the Islip High School Hall of Fame
Today, a letter showed up from Islip High School, and I had to read it twice. An induction into the Hall of Fame, Class of 2026–2027, as a graduate of the Class of 2005. This was not on my 2026 bingo card.
Islip High had been firmly in my rearview for years, save for a handful of teachers with whom I'm connected on social media. So a letter like this lands in a strange and good way.
Islip will always be home. It's where I grew up and where I first started forming ideas about work, mission-driven service, and what I wanted to be part of. At 15, I took a job as a pharmacy technician at Islip Pharmacy. I had no idea it was the start of anything. But that's where the path began, and it went on to wander through healthcare, nonprofit work, technology, real estate, and the unglamorous job of making organizations actually run.
My career has rarely followed a straight line.
I've helped build organizations for young adults facing cancer. I've traveled to all 50 states to advocate for patients. I've launched programs, scaled systems, written a couple of books, and run companies. Somewhere in there, I moved from Islip to New York City, then to Austin. I became a husband and a father, a CEO, a co-founder, a board member, and, this August, a doctoral student. Despite all of this, Islip has a tendency to break through, like an intrusive thought. Ice breakers want to know where you're from… I'm from Islip. As that teen in the local drug store, I never thought I'd leave. Plan A was to become the local pharmacist, until I failed high school chemistry.
That's what makes this one feel personal.
A plaque is one afternoon. The work behind it took years, and a lot of other people. This one belongs to the teachers who pushed me when I didn't want to be pushed. To a few colleagues who bet on me before it was the obvious thing to do. And to the people at home who stayed through the stretches that didn't look like they'd pan out.
It also belongs to the missions I got to be part of. A lot of my work has happened around hard moments in other people's lives. A diagnosis. An organization outgrowing itself. Someone trying to find one clear next step inside a system that wasn't built for clarity. Most of the time my job has been to build the thing around that person so they can keep functioning while it's happening.
School lunch, 2003(?)
I couldn't have said any of that out loud in 2005. That spring my dad was diagnosed with cancer, and most of senior year happened with that running underneath everything else. I was 18, scared, and doing a passable job of pretending I wasn't.
The ceremony is in September, on the football field. The last time I stood on that field was graduation, and I was thinking about my dad's mortality. Whether he'd be okay. Whether any of us would be. I'll be standing on the same grass this fall to be honored, and I don't think it's an accident that the work I found my way into has been about cancer, and patients, and people sitting in waiting rooms trying to hold it together. It started at home, the year I graduated. I just didn't know that yet.
To the selection committee, and to Susan Melaniff (Meagher) and the Islip School District, thank you. This wasn't on my radar, and I am honored to represent the class of '05.
To the teachers, classmates, friends, colleagues, and family…thank you for supporting me throughout this journey.
To the newly minted class of 2026 grads and the class of 2027, your path doesn't have to make sense yet. I have a "never say no" policy. It lands me in interesting places and keeps me out of trouble. Show up and be you. In a world of artificial intelligence. Be you.
