Cory Upmeyer—Classification Speech

Cory Upmeyer, classification Public Administration, gave his classification talk at the April 17th meeting. After he was born 1970 in Michigan his father retired from the U.S. Air Force and his family moved to a ranch in Yankton, South Dakota where he grew up with his brother and sister amid the cattle and crops. He graduated from Charles City High School, Charles City, Iowa in 1989 and joined the U.S. Army. There he served for seven months in “Operation Desert Storm” as a Bradley Armored Vehicle Calvary Scout.

After mustering out of the Army he attended Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa and in 1996 received a Bachelor’s degree in Landscape Architecture. He then received a Master of Arts degree in 1999 from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and majored in Geography and Environmental Studies.

Over the past 8 years Cory has worked as a Landscape Architect for the Arlington Heights Park District as their park planner. He then worked at Black and Veatch Engineering doing military master planning and then worked as a preserve planner for the DuPage County Forest Preserve. Finally, he worked for the Carol Stream Park District managing several park capital referendum projects.

While working for Carol Stream he attended Keller Graduate School of Management of DeVry University where he earned a Master of Public Administration degree in 2003. While working at Arlington Heights Park District, Cory met his wife Jennifer Stricklin, a native of Palatine. They were married in 1998 in Rolling Meadows. They had their first child in 2002 and then moved to Washington, DC where he was selected to be in the Presidential Management Fellows Program with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He then moved back to Chicagoland to work for the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science at Argonne National Laboratory working on federal contracting and acquisition grants.

Currently, Cory lives in Aurora with his wife Jennifer and 2 children and works across the street from the Wellington Restaurant for the U.S. Department of Labor Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) as a Program Analyst overseeing training assessment. He is also a 19 year member of the United States Air Force Reserves in Human Resources out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He enjoys spending quality time with his family, teaching part time at Triton College and doing volunteer work.