Hi, I'm Alex,
a linguist, consultant, and builder in
Salt Lake City.

A jack of all trades

My experience is as eclectic as my interests, ranging from medicine, to Spanish interpretation, competitive ballroom dance, linguistics, sailing, traditional joinery, and more.

An innovator at my core, I have spent my career finding, understanding, and solving complex problems. I look forward to continuing to build my skillset so I can put chaotic elements into order, then use them to educate and serve.

Below you will find my CV, links to my writing, and at the bottom of this page, a more extensive bio. Thanks for visiting!

Provecho!

The Great Lakes was where I got my start, spending my childhood in Michigan and teenage years in Cleveland, Ohio. After graduating from Westlake High School, I began a degree in physiology and developmental biology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, hoping to become a biomedical engineer. I put that on pause for two years to serve the people of Santiago, Chile as a proselytizing missionary, and returned with a passion for service and a love of Spanish. I pointed my compass toward medicine and began volunteering in free clinics, scrubbing in on surgeries, and serving as a volunteer, and later, professional, medical Spanish interpreter.

Despite my ultimate goal, all it took was one Spanish phonetics class to draw out a hidden passion for linguistics. So I changed my major to English language (linguistics), and got to rekindle my childhood fascination with Old English, explore dialects, and study social psychology and language--all while focused on preparing for a career as a physician. I learned to sift through studies, craft experimental designs, and carry out my own novel research (you can find some examples on this site).

Along the way to graduation with a BA in 2013, I picked up a minor in ballroom dance and made headway on a Spanish minor and BS in Biology (although I ultimately decided to stick to one major and minor).

Alas, by 2016 my journey towards medical school was diverted and it became time to leave my cherished job at a pediatrics speciality clinic and jump headlong into business. I started as a marketing intern, where I learned how to ghostwrite compelling, thought-leading articles for the logistics industry, and that led to a management position in a software branch of the business. It was during that process that I found my reason for staying in Utah--Breanna! 

We met in spring 2017 and I knew she was different when I found out she wasn't reading Hamlet for class, but for fun. We were married on the last day of summer in a vintage wedding, flowing with the tartan of our Kennedy clan, and have since become proud parents of two wonderful boys--both named for kings and heroes from our shared love of classic literature.

Since that time I have started my own business as an operations consultant, Breanna has become a fabulous costume designer, author, and illustrator, and together we have designed, built, and sold a couple houses. I currently serve as VP or Operations and Chief Superintendant for Arcadia Builders. My ultimate goal is to return to medicine and academia someday and practice family medicine, publish research, write, and eventually teach as a professor.