Bakery clerk takes a trip around the World Wide Web
How a high-school web-design competition got me, an 18-year-old bakery clerk, an internship in the corporate IT department. With the company newspaper clipping to prove it.
In June 2004 I started at Schnucks as a bagger, on the day the Lake St. Louis store had its grand opening. I got bumped up to bakery clerk pretty quickly. That was the job I was working, an 18-year-old behind the bakery counter, when the rest of my life quietly got started.
I had been building websites since I was 10, and in high school I went deep on it at Lewis & Clark Vocational School and competed through the FBLA. Somehow that reached the right people at Schnucks, and corporate offered me an internship in the Information Technology Department. It was the door everything else walked through. (I wrote about the long arc of all this on the history page, and about finally leaving Schnucks seven and a half years later.)
The part that still makes me grin: the company ran a feature on me in the employee newspaper, the one that goes out to every store and every associate. Here I am, apron and name tag and all.
Here is the article itself, reproduced word for word.
Bakery Clerk Takes Trip Around The World Wide Web
Todd Hertzelle started his career with Schnucks as a bagger in June 2004 at the grand opening of the Lake Saint Louis store before being promoted to bakery clerk shortly thereafter. Outside of work, Todd has shown an interest in web design since the age of 10 when he designed his first web page. During high school Todd pursued his interest in web development at Lewis & Clark Vocational School completing 980 hours of computer programming and computer language courses.
While at Lewis & Clark he entered the high school competition sponsored by the Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) in web site development in the category of “Desktop Publishing” in a group setting, placing 2nd.
Later Todd’s teacher encouraged him to compete in “Web Site Development” requiring working independently after school. Todd entered the district competition where he took first place and moved on to State. The State competition was held in April ‘06 in Columbia, Mo., and again, Todd finished first. Naturally Todd advanced to the National Competition held in Nashville, Tenn. over the 4th of July weekend, placing 15th. What’s even more amazing is that Todd is only 18 years old.
Todd’s accomplishments did not go unnoticed at Schnucks. Most recently Todd had the opportunity to join the associates in the Information Technology Department at the Lackland office as an intern while continuing his education.
Reading it back twenty years later, “a trip around the World Wide Web” is a perfectly 2006 headline, and I love it. That little internship turned into seven and a half years, and, really, a whole career.