My name is Tyler Madding. I am twenty-nine years old. I was born and raised in Decatur, IL. I have three sisters and six brothers. I have three children. Their names are Tynslei who is five, Tyia who is two, and Tyler, Jr who was born on Thanksgiving last year. My mom lives here in Decatur and my dad lives in Californina. I go visit there at least once a year and plan to move there after I graduate from Millikin. I am a business owner for a lawn care service called CoTyns. I am also a landlord and own five properties. COVID-19 has really impacted my business. I also have a home improvement company for various household tasks such as flooring, windows, siding, plumbing, drywall, etc. This business was not hit as hard as people who are sitting home tend to want to remodel to pass the time. I enjoy being able to make my own schedule and spend more time with my kids at home.
My major is International Business. I want to be able to do business with other countries to expand the market of my business and invention ideas. I previously studied at Richland Community College. I studied welding at Richland and graduated in 2014. I worked for a year, had a baby, then went back to school. This time, at Richland, I studied business management and graduated in 2018, right before having another baby. While attending Richland, I also achieved a certificate for Entrepreneur. I began attending Millikin University in Spring of 2019. I am expected to complete my courses in the summer 2021. I then want to move to California and obtain my masters degree in Economics.
Some expectations that I had before we had to go virtual was meeting lots of new people and connections. I was expecting to have a close experience with the people so I can learn Spanish. I was looking forward to bringing my family with me so they could have the experience as well. I expected to work hard but still have time to explore the University and the area in which I would be living and studying. Now that we are virtual, I am expecting to still learn the culture but in a less personal way. Instead of experiencing it, I would now be learning through short class times and internet searches. I still expect to meet some great people although not as many since we are split into groups and its hard to communicate with a lot of people on an online platform. There will still be lots to learn and I look forward to it.
I am studying at Universidad Finis Terrae. It is located in the capital of Chile, which is a city called Santiago. Like Millikin, it is a private university. It is a part of the Anahuac University Network which is a group of universities led by the Legion of Christ. It is hard to find much information on the University itself because all of their pages are in Spanish.