Candice Wilson, a U-M employee of almost 25 years, has earned a reputation as a problem solver.
“I like to fix things. I don’t care if it’s a people problem, a business problem or a technology problem. Solutions are fun,” said Wilson, a DevOps manager at the Institute for Social Research’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.
Previously, Wilson worked in a variety of roles at Michigan Medicine, including as a solutions architect, programmer and systems analyst.
Wilson’s interest in understanding and improving how things work extends beyond U-M, too. A self-proclaimed “hobbyist engineer,” Wilson has designed and hand-crafted audio amplifiers, her own 3D printer — and custom light fixtures for her bedroom.
She and her husband are also working together on creating an animatronic parrot.
“We are redecorating our dining room, inspired by the Enchanted Tiki Room at Walt Disney World,” Wilson said. “The original animatronic parrot at Walt Disney World was done with technology from the mid-century, so we are cheating a little using modern technology. But it’s still not easy to do.”
Showing an early aptitude
Wilson’s interest in mechanics and engineering began as a small child. In 1986, at the age of 3, her father gave her a computer — a used Compaq Deskpro.
“I started banging around on it, trying to figure out how to do things. By the time I was 6, I started to write some things in BASIC,” Wilson said.
Shortly thereafter, Wilson took apart an old Commodore 64 her dad brought home.
“First, I got really interested in the software, then I got really interested in the hardware. I took apart the Commodore, laid it all out on the floor of my bedroom, and my mom walked in and freaked out,” Wilson said. “When my dad got home, he was like, ‘Well, let’s see if she can put it back together.’ And I did.”
From that point on, Wilson couldn’t get enough of computers and mechanical objects. Her grandparents took her to computer fairs, where she was often the youngest attendee. She’d also go to estate sales with her grandfather, who owned an antique clock business, and they’d buy old radios Wilson could take apart and put back together.
In middle school she built her first computer.
“I cobbled together a 386 for myself; it was my first Windows machine. I made it out of pieces I’d gotten for free or next to nothing,” Wilson said.
On that computer, Wilson started connecting to bulletin board services and began exploring the internet, which was relatively new in the mid-1990s.
“I got into high-performance computing and started working with overclocking, which means finding ways to increase a computer’s clock speed — make it faster, make it perform more. It’s like hot rodding, but for computers,” Wilson said.
Wilson’s friends were into computers too, and they’d get together and have “LAN” (local area network) parties.
“There’d be half a dozen of us in the same room, all hooked into a 10-megabit network hub playing Warcraft or Duke Nukem,” Wilson said.
Applying her tech talents
It was clear by then that Wilson was exceptionally tech-savvy, and a friend’s mom helped her land a part-time job in high school working evenings in desktop support at a pathology lab.
“I spent most of the time reinstalling Windows or making sure someone could connect to the internet,” Wilson said.
After attending Grand Rapids Community College, Wilson took a job at Circuit City installing car stereos.
“That was when ‘The Fast and the Furious’ came out and everybody wanted stuff in their cars, so I spent a lot of time installing subwoofers, which was lucrative,” Wilson said.
Around her 20th birthday, Wilson landed a position at Michigan Medicine and began her long career at U-M.
A new chapter
Over the more than two decades Wilson has been at U-M she also transitioned to being a woman.
“I began the transition while I was at Michigan Medicine, which was awkward, but people were generally supportive. And it does take a long time. I started growing my hair out, then taking hormones and doing laser hair removal,” she said.
When she moved to the DevOps team in 2018, she socially transitioned.
“It was a tumultuous time, because I was having to learn a new set of skills in my new job, while also trying to be this new me,” Wilson said.
Spending time at her work bench helped.
“When I’m really engaged with a project, it tunes out the noise. I just lean into the flow of creation and it’s a lovely feeling, like everything is right,” Wilson said.
Wilson refers to herself as a “skill collector,” and says her favorite projects are those that incorporate a variety of engineering disciplines.
She points to a vacuum-tube based headphone amplifier she made that plugs into a USB. She’s created six of them from scratch.
“This amplifier uses a pair of military spec vacuum tubes from the 1960s, and it has a very warm, old-school sound to it. But then it also has a Texas Instruments digital-to-analog converter that allows it to plug into USB,” Wilson said.
A few years ago, Wilson was hired by a friend to help him create a display for the chip design he’d developed for the AMD Ryzen processor.
“I designed a computer backplane from scratch, and we bolted everything to it. It also had neat lighting effects and was water cooled, so we could do some overclocking,” Wilson said.
Creating things that challenge the viewer by being too big or two small is also something Wilson loves to try.
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“I enjoy making things that are the wrong size. It elicits a kind of cognitive dissonance,” she said, citing a 150-millimeter wrench she designed, as well as an oversized orange chess piece Wilson made with a 3D printer she also built.
Finally, Wilson likes to create novelty items inspired by entertainment — or that facilitate its enjoyment, such as a lightsaber, a Maltese falcon she built for her father, and a surround-sound system and lightbox for her home theater.
Inspiration, Wilson says, is everywhere — though that can be a double-edged sword.
“I have way too many projects going on,” she said, laughing. “But I’m grateful and fortunate that I can do these things because these are expensive hobbies. It’s one of the reasons I work so hard at my day job — to pay for my projects.”
