Concord Academy welcomes Jean Mike Remy, a new member of the IT team, this fall. He has experience working in education and technology, having worked as a data specialist in the Arlington Public Schools, and an IT coordinator at the Davis Leadership Academy, a public charter school in Boston.
Remy’s interest in technology started with computers and Playstation games when he was a child. These were personal passions of his. He was inspired by the Geek Squad commercials, in which a computer support network is advertised, and as he got older he developed more advanced technological skills, such as learning to build and fix his own computer. Even though he did not study IT in college, he learned valuable information from majoring in automotive engineering. He worked on technologies that seen in common cars today, including auto-braking and lane shift technology. He also took electives in database management. However, he remembers always being fascinated by computers in his free time throughout college and this interest eventually led him to pursue working behind the scenes.
Remy works with the software to make sure that all of the online resources we use work well together throughout the school year. He and the rest of the IT team work hard to set these things up in September and take them down and reset them in June. He explained, for example, that Schoology needs to connect to PowerSchool, which in turn needs to connect to all of our Gmail accounts.
Remy said that the hardest part of the job is having to tell people that technology is limited and that some things just are not possible yet. The best part of the job though is “the opposite of that. Problem-solving, spending the time to find creative solutions to everyday problems people have, and finding a way to connect the systems together and write custom code to make it happen for them.”