Chapters

• 0:00 Who is David Tomczyk?
• 0:48 What led to David's passion Entrepreneurship and Game Design & Development?
• 3:34 Deciding on what major to study in college
• 6:46 David's experiences working at NASA
• 10:37 David's pivot to Entrepreneurship
• 12:03 How David takes his life experiences into the classroom
• 12:53 The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Quinnipiac University
• 14:58 What do students need to excel in Entrepreneurship at Quinnipiac?
• 18:25 David's advice for students who are undecided on what to study

Transcript

Joel Vanner: Hello, and Welcome to ”Who Are You?,” the Bobcats you know, the stories you don't. I'm your host Joel Vanner inside the podcast Studio at Quinnipiac University's School of Communications. And I am joined today by my guest, Dave Tomczyk. Dave, welcome to the show. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: Thank you so much. I am super excited to be here. 
  
Joel Vanner: I am super excited to hear that. Dave, we will get started with a very hard first question, and I'm sure maybe you know what it is. Who are you? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: So I am a professor of Entrepreneurship here at Quinnipiac University. I also occasionally teach game design classes. I work with the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Center for Women in Business and a couple of other random things because I love so many aspects of QU. 
  
Joel Vanner: You wear a lot of hats, and you wore your podcasting hat today to be a guest on this show. Entrepreneurship and game design. How did those two things come together in your life? Take me back to the beginning. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: Okay, so I mean, what kid they didn't play game? Well, not every kid enjoys games, but I was a normal, healthy young guy who really enjoyed playing video games and got into Dungeons and Dragons and things like that as a little kid. But it actually started before then. So growing up, I am tied for the oldest of four. I have a twin sister. Technically, she's a minute older than me. But we'll set that aside. 
  
Joel Vanner: Does she say that often? I'm a minute older than you. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: No, because I was coming out first, but because she was sitting on my body and they couldn't get me turned around the right way, they had to do a C section and she came out first. So, technically, we're sort of tied, but. 
  
Joel Vanner: Okay. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: Anyways, lovely person that she is. She and I were always creating games even when we were infants, and then my younger brother came along, and then my little sister shortly thereafter. And so my mom had to somehow keep four little kids entertained. And what she did was she started to create a lot of different types of games, a lot of educationally based games. But along the way, that level of creativity and play and that encouragement of it just bled into a whole bunch of other areas. So whereas my other siblings grew out of the play, I stayed in it, and it worked out great. Along the way I in elementary school, I got involved with an organization Odyssey of the Mind, which does creativity competitions across K through 12. And it was absolutely awesome because I got to be creative. And that's when I really start to realize, this is something that I really enjoy and I like to do ongoing. And so, between that and games, I start to see where the fusion of things came together. 
  
Joel Vanner: Creativity as a career. And I think you've embraced that throughout years so far. So you did Odyssey of the Mind, right? You did challenges? What was an example of something you did in that program? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: So the program breaks down into a couple of different major categories. One of the first things that they have you do are what are called spontaneous activities. So you're looking at a short activity, probably about 3 to 5 minutes total of trying to do some sort of creative challenge, generate as many uses of a book that you possibly can. You are given a bunch of tools and you have to figure out a solution within the limited time frame. There's usually an overarching problem as well. So something that takes time that you've been working on for several months. Maybe it's a construction thing, maybe it's a marketing thing. In our case, we had to create a marketing plan for the Greek gods. And that was a lot of fun, and we had a whole skit that went with it, and it was a blast. 
  
Joel Vanner: Wow, you did all that before you came to college, right? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: Yes. 
  
Joel Vanner: So fast forwarding to college, had you figured out kind of what you wanted to do by then, or did you come in? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: No, 
  
Joel Vanner: Didn't narrow down. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: Not a clue. I came in completely undecided, 
  
Joel Vanner: And What was that like? You know, having experimented with all sorts of different things, learning different things, taking the big step of going to college and still not knowing. It seems like you were pretty okay with that. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: I was. And at the same time, it was tough because while I might have been comfortable being in a state of like, Well, I'll figure it out eventually. A lot of my friends, some family members, even not my immediate family, they understood that my brain didn’t work that way. But a lot of people are like, So what are you going to do after college? Where are you going? What's your game plan? 
  
Joel Vanner: Right. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: And thinking that way freaked me out. So I just kept forestalling and pushing it off and be like, Oh, I'll get there eventually. And fortunately, I went to a really nice small liberal arts school that didn't even have a school of business attached to it. And while I was there, I found a major that was philosophy, political science, and economics. I got peer pressured into doing a minor in religion by a 70-year-old chair of the relion department who was like, Dave, your friends are doing it. All the other cool kids are doing it. You should do it, too. 
  
Joel Vanner: Jump on that train with your friends. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: Precisely. And I had very fortunately a friend who introduced me to her astronomy professor who ended up signing me up to do some astronomy research on the side. 
  
Joel Vanner: So we have astronomy, we have religion, and then your field of study that you chose was. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: Philosophy, political science and economics. 
  
Joel Vanner: Wow. So there's a lot to unpack there. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: Yes. 
  
Joel Vanner: Having all those experiences at college, how did you take what you learned throughout all of that and apply it to life after college and beginning your career? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: So what was really fascinating to me was how much I could take from any one discipline that I had and apply it into an entirely different field. So you wouldn't think that astronomy has much of an overlap with pretty much anything. But astronomy is about taking your time and care of being patient because things in the universe take time. They aren't going to happen on our scale. So looking at it from that way and then the types of research that I did, I had my own galaxy, NGC 300, which is an absolutely awesome galaxy. It has two what are called superbubbles, places where multiple supernovas went off, pushed all of the stellar gas away, so you can see these holes, they look like bubbles in the galaxy. On the regions of that, you get incredible star formation. Holy cow, that's amazing. But it becomes an analogy that you can bring into other fields. So when you're talking about, say, economics, well, one, economics is something that a lot of people look in the short term, what's going to happen next month But economics takes place over generations, hundreds of years, even, and there's trends that happen. Just kind of like the universe. And that patience that care, the way that I had to line things up to be able to even see that galaxy is, like, taking all the pieces of data and lining them up and saying, Wait, does this Oh, wait, this is off the chart. This isn't what I need. And then pulling it all together to create Oh, this is what we can actually see. Wow. Isn't this fascinating? And accepting what the data are showing you rather than saying, No, no, I need to get it to show my world view. 
  
Joel Vanner: Wow, that's awesome how you connected all your experiences into astronomy. Speaking on that, you formerly worked at NASA, right? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: I did. 
  
Joel Vanner: That's really cool. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: Yes. 
  
Joel Vanner: How did you get the job there and what were your experiences there like? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: So, after I did my undergrad, I very fortunately had a understanding professor who said, Dave, it's very clear you need at least one more year before you can decide what you wanted to do. And so she told me about a one year masters of economics program. So it was theoretical economics. It was absolutely fascinating. But partway through that, I said, I need to apply to a program, and I found the presidential Management Fellowship program. And that is one where they accept about 400 people a year into the federal government who coming out with their graduate degree that year, and it accelerates you through the ranks. And so they had a big job fair where there were all the different agencies represented the Department of Defense. 
  
Joel Vanner: All the acronyms there. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: All the acronyms. And I happened to meet on my first day there two middle aged men named Alphonse, who were both lawyers. I don't know how that happens, but the universe lined up in such a way. And we agreed that every couple of hours we would meet up and check in with each other to see how things are going. During one of the checkups, one of the Alphonse said, Yeah, I just talked with NASA. I said, What does NASA want with a lawyer? He said, They have Inspector General's office, and they look at all sorts of things. I said, Ha, that sounds great, because at that point, I had been jumping from one thing to next and had not a clue in the world what I was going to do. And I talked with them, and it ended up being incredibly perfect match. So in the end, I got an offer from the Department of Justice, one from the FBI and NASA, and it was a no brainer. NASA all the way, who doesn't love space. It's great. 
  
Joel Vanner: Very cool. So now you're at NASA. What types of things did you do while you were there? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: So, because I was in this special program, I got to try a couple of different things. The very first thing, I worked in inspector general's office, so I looked at crime fraud, waste, and abuse in NASA as a whole. I looked at the size of the Astronaut Corp. I came in just after we had lost the Colombia, and so all the things that went wrong in that process to make sure that they didn't go wrong again. But because of the program I was in, after six months, my boss came to me and said, You need to go into a detail somewhere else. So I went over to the State Department for a period of time. I was the US representative on science and technology to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperate, which is a terrifying amount of responsibility for any 23-year-old. 
  
Joel Vanner: But you embraced it. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: I did. It was incredible. Got to tour a bit of the world, and also set some international policy, which is mildly horrifying to be able to say. And then when I came back to my old office, my boss had left and they were like, Oh, you still exist. I said, Not a problem. Let me see what I can find. So I meandered down to the office of the Chief Information Officer, which NASA has 11 centers, and then I was at headquarters, which is the one overseeing all of them. So the OCIO oversees all the CIOs of all the centers. And so it was more policy than anything else, but I got involved with IT security policy. And so that was a fascinating hop skip and a jump around. When I transitioned out of the program, then they said, we would like to keep you on, but we can't keep you on in this position. We're going to have you do federal IT compliance, which is as boring as it sounds. And also, I was apparently overly efficient because I was able to get my work done for the month in about two days. 
  
Joel Vanner: Wow. What did you do with your free time there? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: I was very fortunate because NASA really supports ongoing learning and education in order to make better employees. And one of the things that they had was a life coaching class. And as part of the life coaching class, I realized, Oh, I don't want to be in the government. I want to be doing something with creativity. You can do some things with creativity in the government, but it takes a really, really long time. So I started looking for PhD programs, and I started applying to ones in organizational behavior, which is interesting because the school that I ended up going to, the one where they called me in, and we had a nice sit down conversation between me and the man who eventually became my dissertation advisor, at the end of the conversation, he said, Dave, why are you doing organizational behavior? You want to do entrepreneurship? 
  
Joel Vanner: So you walked in the door, wanting to do one. He said, You should do this. And you said? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: I said, Yeah, let's do it. 
  
Joel Vanner: I sense a trend here. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: Yes. 
  
Joel Vanner: All doors open. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: And it was great, because I didn't realize that that was a possibility. And entrepreneurship really does fully embrace creativity on a level that other disciplines do have creativity, but not quite to that level. And it was great. My dissertation topic was the effective video games on entrepreneurial skills and abilities. So I had been able to bring in the gaming aspect, and my dissertation advisor loved it. It was awesome. Now, he did describe me as being highly distractible. But other than that, I had so much fun. I got to do so many things. I learned so much through that program. And that's when I said, Yep, this is definitely something I would like to do ongoing. 
  
Joel Vanner: And now I see how those two areas came together in your role here at Quinnipiac. How do you translate all of those experiences you've had kind of around in those different places and the things you've learned into the classroom when you work with your students? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: So, it is a lot about accepting the fact that our brains are incredible tools for finding patterns and connections between things. If I gave you any two objects and said, What's the same between them, your brain would do that. So if I said, What's the same between an apple and a star, you might start thinking, Well, they're both round. They both are shiny. They both have colors to them. A gradation of color. Our brains do that? Well, that's what I just do all the time. That's my inherent classes. Like, we come in, and I'm constantly pulling from those different experiences I've had, bringing them to the classroom, and figuring out, how do I help my students do better with them? 
  
Joel Vanner: And you lead a center here at Quinnipiac too. You talked about wanting to be creative, just not in the government space.  What do you do as part of your work in the center for our faculty here at Quinnipiac?  
 
Dave Tomczyk: So, I am a faculty fellow for the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and also work with the Center for Women in Business. And in both cases, it is about helping our students and our faculty go above and beyond. Especially in the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, we are looking at innovation across all sorts of things. So people who are looking to start businesses, people who are looking to grow existing businesses. People who are looking to improve the different activities that they do in the classroom, people who are looking to come up with a new way to run a program, to be more efficient. All of those are types of innovation. Entrepreneurship often springs from that innovation. For the Center for Women in Business, they are constantly looking for not just, Oh, how do we benefit only women. They're saying, how do we bring all people, all different backgrounds into a state where they are considering all the people that they work alongside and what can we do to make everyone's lives better? And listening to women, to minorities, to the allies and supporters of them is a really key part of that. 
  
Joel Vanner: What does it say about Quinnipiac that they support an environment of entrepreneurship and always having that forward thinking mindset as someone who has based a career around creativity and exploring new things and taking things away and finding out what's next. What does it say to be at a place like Quinnipiac that you can embrace that every day? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: It says that Quinnipiac is probably a little bit over permissive to me and let me run rampant. 
  
Joel Vanner: We'll roll with it, though, because you have done quite a lot here. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: But I think what it speaks to really highly is the fact that QU and especially the people here at QU are open to change, open to new ideas, and are excited to work on them. When I was in the government, there were people who were big stick in the mud when I was doing my PhD. I came back to NASA as a contractor for three years. And one of the things I worked on was strategic partnerships. I came across a company that would have helped make the government way more cost effective and energy efficient, so much so that we were going to do a pilot that we estimated would save the government $10,000 a month. The organization that shut down that pilot, the environmental office because they said, Well, the way that you're doing it isn't necessarily green energy. It's more brown energy because it touches the grid, and we don't know. Who cares? We're saving $10,000. We're being more energy efficient. But in their minds, any level of change, we need to test it out in years here at Quinnipiac. I can toss something out, and within a couple of weeks, something is going to start happening. And that's fascinating. 
  
Joel Vanner: That's awesome. And for students looking to join our community, what do you think students need to be able to excel in programs like entrepreneurship at Quinnipiac? Is it just open mindedness? Is it some other type of mindset? Is it a saying that maybe you live by? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: I could give you all sorts of different catchphrases, but I think we can distill it down to two different things. The first is be open to ideas, good ideas and bad ideas. Oftentimes, we're siting there and we're judging our ideas as they come out. Some of my best ideas have come from really, really horrible starting places, that's great. And the second thing is accept that failure is going to happen, but don't accept failure as the end. So one of the things that we really try to drill into students in entrepreneurship and in game design is that when you fail, that's just a stepping stone to the next iteration. So you come out with this great idea, and you go to who you think is going to buy from you, and they're like, No, aren't interested? Well, why aren't they interested? What did you learn from that process? And more often than not, you'll find that if you just tweak, change, maybe heavily modify your idea, it's still viable, and it gives you the next iteration and the one after that and the one after that. And it's okay to say, You know what? It's not worth it anymore. But what you've taken from that experience then feeds the next idea that you have. 
  
Joel Vanner: One of the things I think we really excel at here is connecting and having connections. And to your first point, you may have an idea that's just an idea. You don't have anything else with that idea. But there may be somebody else who's also thinking about that idea that you can connect with and then turn it into something even larger. But you have to make those connections and talk to those people in order to know and grow that idea. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: 100%. The number of times that I've had students who have created clubs and organizations off of totally random ideas that they've had because you toss it out there, and suddenly you find that you're not alone. You're not the only person who has this crazy interest in whatever it is. It's fascinating. And more than that is one of the things that we really try to drill into students' minds in entrepreneurship in game design. I'm also the coordinator for the intro to Business class, so we try to get all of our students in there to understand and accept that whatever background that you're bringing, bring that to the table because everyone else will be learning from that, but it also acts as a springboard for new ideas for them. 
  
Joel Vanner: And that's a course that all business majors would take here at Quinnipiac? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: Yes, upon coming in, it is one of the very first classes that you will take. 
  
Joel Vanner: Awesome. A piece of advice. You've given a lot of advice, but a piece of advice to students who are coming in or who may come in undecided and are trying to find their way. What would you say to them in today's age? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: Okay, so you've hit a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Having been someone who has been undecided and to some extent, still is. But there's a really awesome book called Refuse to Choose that talks about two different types of mentalities, scanners and divers. Divers are the people who they know what field that they want to do, and they are happy to do that for years, decades, the rest of their life. And then there are scanners, and scanners are the people who are like, I'm torn between eight different things. And they start to pursue one, but they're already looking at what are the next eight or ten or 52 that they're going to try to do. Being a scanner doesn't mean that you're broken. Being a scanner doesn't mean that you're a quitter. It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you in any way shape or form, but what it does mean is that you need to accept the fact that your mind's going to work different. So I've been teaching here at QU for 16 years. I never thought that would last more than six months at any place. I fully came to QU expecting to leave after two. Did not because I love it here because I can constantly change what I'm doing. And what I realize is that I don't need to find this magical perfect job for me. What I need to do is be able to find a job that lets me turn it into the type of job that excites me. And I've had so many students through, especially the entrepreneurship program, where they feel like there's something wrong with them. They can't find the one idea that they're gonna stay with. And as soon as we shift their mentality from what are you doing for the rest of your life to what are you going to do for the next year? Suddenly everything falls into place. 
  
Joel Vanner: Becomes a little more digestible. You can understand it a little better. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: And it doesn't lock you in. And that's, I think the biggest thing is when students come to school and especially if you're undecided or you've declared something, but you're not certain if it's the right thing, you feel like whatever you choose is going to define your life. My undergrad didn't have a business school. I'm teaching business. My twin sister got her degree in equine facility management. She wanted to run horse farms. She has not touched one since. She has done a graphic design business. She helped run a small cable channel. She's right now working with a community fair and developing their art program there. My brother got his degrees in math and philosophy. Has done anything but my little sister got her degree in accounting and has been doing awesome things over in corporate finance and now is raising an incredible family. Like, your degree doesn't define your future. So my recommendation to all students, especially if you're undecided, find something that you are passionate about. Do it because then you're going to be much more active and involved in the classes, and you're going to look for more opportunities to do things, and all of that becomes your portfolio that you bring to your jobs. 
  
Joel Vanner: And your interests may diverge from your friends, your family, and it's your path, and you have to own it. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: 100%. And this is tough because our family and friends care for us, and they want to give the best advice possible. And it is not uncommon for someone to say, Well, my parents told me that finance makes a lot of money. Well, you want to know what else makes a lot of money? Literally every single other job. You can make plenty of money doing whatever it is that you want so long as you're passionate about it. But also, you will get a job. There's plenty of jobs out there, and you will make a wonderful living. So don't define success as money. Define success as the enjoyment that you have, the amount of time you can spend with your family, the creativity that you bring, being able to go to work and not hate it. These are crazy ideas, I know. But it's one of the things that we talk with all of our students about for so many of our students, when we ask them, What does success look like in the business world it usually is fame and money. Those are the two big things. And so, you look at Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs and and you say, Great. How many of you guys want the relationship that Jeff Bezos has with his now ex wife? How many of you want to have the absolute hatred that Steve Jobs had from most of his employees, none of them raise their hands. I said, And also, based off of that standard, how many of your parents are just failures because they aren't super famous. They aren't super wealthy. Are you saying that them creating you is a failure? No. The definition of success that we get pushed out through media is a distorted one. It focuses on purely material gains. And for most of us, that's not what we care about. We want to spend time with our family. We want to enjoy ourselves. We want to be stimulated, and by the time that we leave work, however, many decades later, we want to look back and say, I did something positive for the world. Those are incredible metrics to hold ourselves up to, and none of that involves how much money do I make? 
  
Joel Vanner: Right. And explore if you have interests, you can explore them here at Quinnipiac through one of our various clubs and organizations like you talked about earlier, to really feel it out and see what interests you. What's a passion area that maybe you want to explore after college or explore while you're in college, even further, too? 
  
Dave Tomczyk: Yes. I had mentioned earlier that we've had quite a few student teams that have come together and they've created a club or organization centered around something that they're passionate about. That's why we have over 100 different clubs here. 
  
Joel Vanner: Yeah. That's what makes the world interesting is people's path. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: It totally does. 
  
Joel Vanner: Well, Dave, thank you so much for joining me on the show and giving your insight and sharing your creativity with us. I appreciate it. 
  
Dave Tomczyk: Thank you for letting me go on as long as I did about all of this. This is great. And I sincerely thank you for the opportunity. 
  
Joel Vanner: If you enjoy today's episode, be sure to subscribe, share and like, and find other episodes on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube podcasts. Until next time. When I ask my next guest, Who Are You? I'm Joel Vanner. Bye for now.