Art delaCruz

About Art

• 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.