Dakota Kelley

About

Dakota Kelley was born in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Throughout most of his childhood, his family moved all over the South Central United States, but always seemed to make it back to Bartlesville. He currently lives in Edmond, Oklahoma with his lovely wife and their two dogs. From a young age, Dakota had a love for taking things apart, figuring out how they worked, and putting them back together (often frustrating his mother as she’d come home from work to find things taken apart). While he had a love of solving problems, which expressed itself as an affinity for math, he often found school itself boring. That all changed once Dakota got to high school and found he could spend half of his day in a vocational trade school known as Tri-County Technology Center. Dakota eventually enrolled in a Computer Repair and Network Engineering course and fell in love with solving problems using computers. After high school, he set off to Oklahoma State University, Institute of Technology (OSU IT) where he earned a Bachelors of Technology with a focus on Software Development, Information Assurance, and Computer Forensics. After graduating from OSU IT, Dakota took on a position as a Software Developer and spent several years working with data. Along the way, he realized he wanted to dive in and learn more. He would work during the day and spend his nights taking classes at Oklahoma State University while he pursued a MS degree, which he obtained with a 3.9 GPA in December of 2021.