Art delaCruz

Chief Operations Officer

Team Rubicon

Los Angeles, CA USA

“After 15 years of service, those little things that stress you out become, ‘Yeah, that stressed me out, but it made me ready for the next [challenge.]’”

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By Roadtrip Nation

Art delaCruz

Milestones

My road in life has been direct.

As a serviceman in the Navy, he always assumed that was what he’d do for the rest of his life: flying fighter jets and commanding squadrons just made sense to him.

However, after 22 years of service, he and his family decided that it was time for him to move on to other endeavors.

When he first got out of the military, he had trouble finding a job that was aligned to his skills.

Eventually, he realized that a number of his skills did translate into the civilian world—he just had to find a way to repackage them and adapt them to a new environment.

Says the most important part of his transition was networking: after 70 or 80 conversations with fellow veterans, he felt like he’d found all of the pieces of advice he needed to succeed.

He was working for aerospace engineering company Northrop Grumman when he heard about Team Rubicon.

Team Rubicon organizes, trains, and deploys veterans to provide disaster relief to areas that need it.

Says that the biggest disservice a veteran can do to themselves is to leave their self-worth in their uniform and ignore the invaluable skills they learned in the military.

Keep following my journey