If you passed Rodger Combs ‘14 on the street, clad in his white lab coat, you wouldn’t guess that he is an 18-year-old full-time employee of Plex Media Server, college-diploma-less, making $90,000 a year, and doing what he absolutely loves.

Amidst the harried nature of senior year applications last year, and after receiving a score of 36 on his ACT, Combs was still nervous about college acceptances because of his lack of interest in homework.

“My grades were generally abysmal because I avoided doing homework in favor of working on assorted software projects for fun,” Combs said. “I hoped that I’d be able to bank on excellent standardized test scores, but I was very afraid of the possibility that I wouldn’t be admitted to a good school.”

During winter break of his senior year, Combs fixed some problems on a portion of the software he owned and sent those changes back to the CTO of Plex Media Server. He was later offered a full-time position starting right after graduation.

“I no longer cared about being rejected from colleges,” Combs said. “So I found that my life became far less stressful.”

The least stressful aspect of his day, LTTV, was a class in which Combs thrived in and contributed much to. In total, Combs took at least one TV production class each semester of high school, and invested even more time as an upperclassman in an independent study with LTTV advisor Bill Allan.

“My hardest thing with Combs was to somehow make the class engaging and challenging for him,” Allan said. “He very quickly moved up through the ranks of LTTV, and started doing some serious projects for us.”

Combs ended up rewiring the entire LTTV control room and their truck, as well as writing a program called an Optical Character Recognition, where a staff member can train a camera on a scoreboard, and the program turns the video into data, updating the graphic system live. He also bought an exposed circuit board and programmed it to be able to take live stream from the LTTV website and convert it into video for the cable channel, allowing the school TV station to be able to stream from all over the world.

“By junior year, Rodger was doing projects so outside of the curriculum that, for me as a teacher, I had to come up with huge projects that students would normally never touch,” Allan said.

Now, Rodger works as a contracted software engineer and transcoder for Plex, which means he is responsible for fixing bugs in the media encoding portion of the software, improving compatibility, adding new features, and answering questions on the support forums of the company. All of this he does from home, working on his own schedule and communicating with his team via Skype. Sound too perfect? Rodger knows.

“This only really worked out for me because I ignored my studies in high school and focused on what I enjoyed doing,” Rodger said, “and for most people, that isn’t a sound career decision. There are plenty of fields that really do require years of specific training that you can’t get in high school. But for software engineering, college just doesn’t have to be a prerequisite.”