Today, I received my 5-year pin from the State of Montana! Seems like it was just yesterday, right? Sometimes! Anyways, I have to say, at one point, I didn’t think this was going to be much of a big deal, but once I hit my 5 years on March 10th, it really felt like an accomplishment. As a matter of fact, working for the State of Montana was my real first job I could call a career.

When I first started with the State, I took a job as an Auditor for the Department of Justice. Now, I’m sure all of you are thinking financial auditing. Absolutely not! I changed my major from Accounting to Management Information Systems for a reason… For the DOJ, I was an auditor of Federal fingerprint background checks. It was actually pretty neat! I got to travel all over Montana, auditing records of fingerprint-based background checks for schools and other agencies. During that time, I learned a lot about fingerprinting and how to fingerprint (fingerprinting was part of our daily work), background checks, and the justice system, which I found to be fascinating. And secretly, it was always super fun to process the fingerprint cards for arrests in Missoula and Helena to see how many people I knew in the stack! However, I wasn’t making much money (money rules all, right?), and I wasn’t using the degree I had worked so hard for. Plus, the job I had applied for in the past and didn’t get (my current position) was reaching out for me to reapply. How can you pass that up? Hence my switch to the Department of Administration as a SQL Database Administrator and Business Intelligence Technical Lead. If you want to know more about my current position, you can read it here.

Anyways, here’s the pin I received today!

I’d never seen one before, so I had no idea what I was getting today, and I’m not entirely sure what to do with it, but it’s cool! It will probably be added to my collection of CIO coins that I’ve received for my work on various projects (see below). They’re also neat to have as it’s my work being recognized on a higher level, but again, I’ve never known what to do with them. Our current CIO joked that they could be used for shooting targets, if we were into that! Ha! If anyone has suggestions on what to do with all of these, I’m all ears! Right now, they’re all just collecting dust on my shelf at work.