Chase Condra

What’s up class of 5720 it is nice to meet everyone! My name is Charles Condra but I like to go by Chase. I am from Suwannee, Georgia, and went to Peachtree Ridge High School. Similarly to most people, I am a 4th year MIS student here at UGA. I graduate this spring and am planning to come back for a 5th year and get another bachelor’s degree in Management here at Terry.

My Background

I was born and raised in Suwanee, Ga, and have lived there the majority of my life before college. I say majority as I did move to Chicago for 3 years from k-2nd grade. I loved the snow but there is no place like Georgia that’s for sure. In my neighborhood, I had 8-12 kids all around my age which made growing up a blast. Where I lived in Georgia was right on the Chattahoochee River and in the middle of Gwinnett County so there were always shenanigans to get into with my friends. These activities would range from golf carting to McDonald’s way past any normal time of the day (1 am-2 am) to rafting down the Chattahoochee after the Buford dam was released. If our parents had any idea of these activities, they would have us hanging by our toes that’s for sure! Getting into things we were not supposed to be doing is not all that my friends and I did, however. In middle school, I remember just about every day running off the bus throwing my bookbag inside my house, and rushing right back out the door to go play football in our neighbor’s backyard which we called “Howard field”. It was named after my friend’s outdoor cat who seemed to always be near. Outside of shenanigans with friends I was always a very active kid. I have played a sport every fall, winter, and spring since I can remember. In elementary school, this mainly consisted of random sports but as I got older I narrowed it down to baseball and basketball. I have two older sisters who both played softball growing up so baseball was always in my rotation of sports.

Family

My family in my opinion has an interesting dynamic. I have two older sisters who were 15 and 13 years old when I was born. With there being such an age gap, I considered them more as a 2nd and 3rd moms to me than siblings. I saw this “parent” image from them growing up after my mom passed in 2011 due to brain cancer. I have been blessed to have two very strong female figures in my life to help fill in the shoes my mom left behind. As I have gotten older however this dynamic is slowly changing from a parent figure to more of a sibling now. Both of my sisters are married, and they both have two kids as well. My eldest nephew is Eli and he is 11 this year. I always thought it is crazy that there is a closer age gap between me and my nephew and either of my sisters. My family is also a family of engineers. My dad graduated from Mizzou with a Mechanical engineering degree and both my sisters graduated from Mercer with Industrial engineering degrees. Growing up I had always said I wanted to be an engineer but that ended abruptly when I hit Calc II here at Georgia. After that class, I quickly changed my mind that almost anything else would be better than that torture.

Hobbies

I have not mentioned this in my blog post yet but my main hobby is running. Playing baseball my whole life, I thought that it was going to be my main sport until my dad convinced me to run XC going into my freshman year with the plan being it would help me get into shape for the next baseball season. Little did I know I was going to have a very successful season of cross country my freshman year of high school and end up quitting baseball to run track as well. I am now on the UGA XC & Track team here competing at the highest level you can before you are considered a pro. A hobby I enjoy doing outside of running however is sewing. Surprisingly I learned how to sew this past summer and started designing my own clothes. Some of the items you may see me wear to class. I was invited to be a designer for a fashion show this past October but sadly couldn’t make it because I had a race the same day.

This Class

I am very excited to learn more about digital innovation in the business industry. I am specifically interested in learning about AI as it has just been fascinating to see the latest advancements in it in the last year or so. I agree with Professor Kane as I do not believe AI will replace jobs, but instead, people who learn to use it to their advantage will replace the competitors that don’t. I look forward to hearing from many speakers and their advice for us in this constantly changing technological world.