About Me
My name is Dwight Phelps, and I have always been a tinkerer. It's how I learn.
Growing up my favorite toys weren't the colorful action figures scattered across our basement, but rather the rough, leather-bound briefcase holding my dad's set of screwdrivers. I would take everything apart to see how it was built and how it worked. Living in a house full of electronic equipment - from a homemade telegraph key to a stack of oscilloscopes - directed my inquisitive nature to computers. I spent much of my formative years learning how to build them, to fix them, and to code with them.
I started at George Mason University with the expectation that I would pursue a path in computer science. After two years of frustration with the obligatory calculus classes and hours trying to write assembly language I made the difficult decision to take a step back for a semester and reassess what I really wanted to do. I didn't want to stop the technical work entirely, but I needed to find a way for me to blend it with something more creative.
I became an art major!
I had no prior artistic experience beyond doodling in the margins of my notes, but I became fascinated with Flash and its ability to create fully realized animations and interactive experiences within a single platform. I quickly found my niche in the animation department, quickly finishing classwork to spend time with my friends on our own passion projects. I found employment teaching multimedia workshops to the student body and eventually secured a position in the premier design lab on campus, with access to some of the coolest gear I had ever laid my eyes on. The shift in my educational path proved to be a tremendous success, leaving me energized and fulfilled by the time I graduated.
Finding work as an animation student in the area was challenging, but my combined artistic and technical backgrounds led me to working at a web design firm out of college. There, I further developed my skill set to include prototyping, branding, and web development.
In 2007, I was hired for my current position as a Web Designer and Developer, supporting the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). My duties here have covered a wide range—from photo correction requests to troubleshooting database issues, maintaining and upgrading old tools, building new ones, and even the rewarding task of redesigning the landing pages for each center managed by the department. What I love most is seeing the creative approaches my coworkers take to solving problems. I often find myself diving into their code to see how it functions, tinkering just like I did when I was a kid.
It's how I learn.