Growing up on a farm in western Kentucky, A-B Tech alumnus Stephen Price, 60, often helped his stepfather fix machinery when it broke down. His love of tinkering carried into high school computer class in the mid-1980s when his school got two computers and let students play on them. “They bought us books, and we basically taught ourselves,” he said.
After graduating high school, Price owned a TV/satellite dish repair business for several years. Wanting to expand his skills, he enrolled at A-B Tech in 1991 for a two-year Information Sciences degree. Price breezed through a host of programming classes, then encountered a networking class that would change his life.
“I liked the thought of connecting things, of making a computer in one state talk to a computer in a different state,” he said. “When I took that course, I knew I wanted to be the networking guy.”
Price landed a part-time IT gig at Westinghouse Electric Company while still a student at A-B Tech. It had nothing to do with networking, but he took it hoping it would lead somewhere. After three years with the company, Price moved to Philadelphia-based Synthes, a manufacturing firm that made medical implants. Over the course of more than two decades, he worked his way up from IT operations and engineering to network manager for the company’s eight U.S. locations. Synthes grew over the years and moved overseas, and Price ultimately managed a global network of 13,000 users in more than 270 locations in 60 countries. As part of his role, he travelled to 35 countries and interacted with co-workers all over the world.
“It was an exciting time for our company because we were growing so rapidly,” he said. “In a lot of ways, I was building the foundation our company was growing on.”
After 18 years working for Synthes, Price retired in 2016 at age 49. The company had been acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2012, then took a downturn.
“I loved Synthes,” he said. “I would’ve stayed there. But I got burned out on the corporate world.”
Since retiring, Price has travelled cross-country and abroad, taking extended hiking trips to more than two dozen national parks; and living for months at a time in places including New Zealand and Australia, often with his dog in tow.
After two decades in Pennsylvania, Price returned to Canton last year to care for his mother, who is 83. He looks forward to future hiking trips to Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Mount Everest in Nepal.
Looking back on his career, Price feels grateful that he was able to fulfil his dream to connect people and computers across space and time. He recalls one of his A-B Tech professors who told the class: “Everything you learn will be out of date by the time you go into the business world. If you’re not the kind of person who likes to continually learn, then you picked the wrong field.”
Through the years, Price has grown along with the IT sector, adapting and rising to new challenges. He is grateful that he had the common sense to take the part-time job he was offered in his early 20s, even though he had no desire at the time to work on a clunky mainframe computer.
“My advice to (young people today) is to take advantage of any opportunity even if it might not be exactly what you want to do at that moment.”