- Chase Wilkening
- cwilkeni13@gmail.com
Hello and welcome to my personal website. As the title of the website says, my name is Chase Wilkening. I am an IT professional residing in south east Michigan. My background in IT is broad and touches a lot of different aspects. My educational background includes a Bachelors degree in Information Assurance from Eastern Michigan University. Professionally I worked for Little Caesars Enterprises as a Platform Engineer designing and supporting solutions for their instore systems. I enjoy taking on big challenges that force me to learn and grow both professionally and personally.
One of my greatest professional accomplishments was helping Little Caesars remotely upgrade 15,000+ Windows 7 systems to Windows 10. This project helped save Little Caesars over 3 million dollars. This project was particularly challenging for various reasons. The hardest part was trying to achieve this goal completely remotely. Another challenge was the different types of hardware that was used. This difference in hardware meant that there was different CPU architecture on nearly half the systems. Finally, once the process was finalized, figuring out how to schedule and actually deploy the upgrade was a huge a project on its own. I go into much greater detail on this project in my projects section.
Currently, I am studying for the AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator exam. My goal is to break into the Cloud technology industry. At Little Caesars, I had the opportunity to work with Azure for several different projects. We used Azure blob storage to house scripts and files. we could then access these blobs using scripts to automate certain updates or staging for deployments. Azure was also used to create "Virtual Stores" in the cloud. This allowed us to create many different stores that could be used for testing new versions of our in house software or really anything that you could think of. This project also really helped during the pandemic as we could create virutal test systems for our QA team so they would not have to come into the office to work on the hardware.
Originally I am from Sacaramento, CA. After graduating Highschool, I definitly knew that IT was going to be my career choice. As a graduation present, my parents were able to send me to the Red Berenson hockey camp at the University of Michigan. At this time I was still trying to figure where would be a good a place to study IT. While we were in Michigan for the hockey camp, I took the time to look into the educational opportunities around Ann Arbor. During this time, I found the Information Assurance program at Eastern Michigan University. After the camp, I talked it over with my parents and we all agreed this would be a great opportunity.
Moving to Michigan sure was difficult at first. It is quite different from California in many ways. For one, there are much less people in Michigan. You don't feel like there are always a million people around you all the time. The climate is also very different. I do actually really like the winter, fall, and spring seasons in Michigan much more than California. Though personally, I like the hotter weather in California more as the humidity is much higher in Michigan. But Michigan's season all feel unique, whereas in California there really is only the wet and dry season and unfortunately right now, it is more dry than wet.
Another difficult challenge moving across the country is finding new friends. Luckily, hockey came to the rescue once again. Hockey definitly has a culture that no matter where you are, if there are people that like hockey, you will have friends. I was very fortunate that I was able to find a local mens league team almost immediately after moving. This team is the Yaks and we play out of the Ann Arbor Ice Cube. Finding the Yaks has given me life long friends. I have been on some itteration of the Yaks for nearly 10 years now. This is also much more than just a mens league team. There is a whole non-profit organization called The Yaks Give Back. This charity has raised money for all sorts of different charities. From providing relief to people affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, to breast cancer research, to funding another local organization that helps kids with autism play hockey and feel included in the greatest sport.
To say hockey has had an impact on my life is an understatement. It has given me a great foundation for many different aspects of my life. From letting me find people who also love hockey as much as I do, to teaching my things like team work, resiliance, and determination. These attributes I carry through my professional life as well. Whenever I struggle with something like learning a new technology, I always remember when I was learning hockey and struggling to get better. There were times that I wanted to quit, but I loved the game too much to step away and pushed through until I achieved the goals I had set out for myself. While I know I will never make the NHL, to this day I always am trying to get better hockey and always trying to improve myself in other areas.
Outside of hockey, I love playing the guitar. It is such a nice way to relax and get away from the stress of everyday life. Another hobby of mine is playing golf. Golf definitly has taught me about patience and determination. Now it is great to go to the course play 18 and just have a relaxing time out doors. Going back to hockey, The Yaks Give Back organization puts on a golf outing every year to support the charity of that year. It is a great time with present and past memebers of the Yaks. One thing on my bucket list while living in Michigan is to visit some of the great golf courses in northern Michigan.