Bob Cottrell is a businessman and class of 1987 Sinclair alumnus.
Cottrell said he was never certain of what he wanted to do growing up.
“I still don’t know,” he said. “I like information technology, but if I had to do it all over again I think I would of become a lawyer or a doctor. You can start your own company that way and control your own destiny.”
Cottrell said IT was a good career in the 1980s, but in this day and age, we have a lot going on.
“Now we have too much offshore going on,” he said. “It drives the salaries down for everybody. You really can’t stand up and haggle with your boss anymore, because you have nothing to haggle about — there are always guys who will work cheaper.”
Cottrell holds two degrees, an associate from Sinclair in Computer Science, and a bachelor’s degree from Capital University in Management Information Systems. These degrees allowed him to focus on his favorite aspect of business.
“I like being the liaison between IT and the business folks, which is kind of a high tech business analyst,” he said. “You have to have a lot of IT background, but you also have to know how to talk the talk when you’re writing business requirements for the business folks. They don’t know IT and honestly, IT doesn’t want to go out and pull the requirements from the business side.”
Cottrell said in order to succeed you have to take the bad situations along with the good.
“You can take a bad situation and turn it around to your benefit. You have to be aggressive — when something pops up you have to grab it,” Cottrell said. “No one wants the hot potato but if you take it, people remember that.”
Cottrell’s job as a system analyst consists of him controlling the interfaces out to the third party administrators.
“It’s busy, but I like it. I have an office, but I typically only go in if I have laptop issues or there’s a meeting or something like that,” he said. “The majority of the time I work from home. It saves on a lot of gas and a lot of those eight, nine dollar lunches.”
Cottrell first went into the Marine Corps for four years to get his college benefits. After the Corps, he tried out factory work and then realized he wanted something better for himself — that was when he turned to Sinclair.
“I wanted to do something better for myself; I wanted to get a more professional degree, so I thought — there’s nothing wrong with being a computer programmer,” he said. “You go to work clean, you work all day and you go home clean.”
Cottrell’s time at Sinclair proved pivotal to his success.
“I was pretty young back then, and to me it was a good experience,” he said. “Typically at Sinclair you meet a few people in class then go home, at least I was that way. I didn’t want to hang out with them but I also worked — that’s why I went to Sinclair because I didn’t have a lot of free time — I was working four security jobs at once.”
Cottrell believes the key ingredient of any success, be it in the business world or at Sinclair, is ones appetite for achievement.
“You can’t sit back if you want to be successful. Now-a-days the competition is too tough, you have to be very aggressive,” he said. “If there’s a project out there and no one’s taking ownership of it, you need to step up and take it otherwise you’re just another cog in a wheel. It‘s just the nature of the beast; you have do it, because there are always other people who will if you won’t.”
Overall, Cottrell said he is happy with his life.
“I’ve got a good career and in another 15 years, maybe I’ll retire,” he said. “I enjoy my job a lot and I can‘t see myself quitting. If you like your job, that’s a big part of the battle.”