Mr. Frey is the math teacher that will always be remembered for his eccentric personality and dad jokes, but some may not know that before teaching, Mr. Frey was a photographer. He went to the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign for his undergraduate degree, and then worked as a freelance photographer’s assistant for around 9 years in New York City. After this, Mr. Frey moved to Chicago and attended graduate school to earn his math degree, which led to his employment at HenHud, where he has been for the past 12 years.

To start off the interview, Mr. Frey was asked what inspired him to pursue photography, and he had said that photography actually was not his first major that he chose to pursue. First, Mr. Frey tried to pursue a business major. “After one semester being a business major, I realized I didn’t like it at all,” he said, as well as describing his interest in photography class during high school. This interest in photography during high school was the reason that Mr. Frey decided to choose a photography major in his second semester of college. 

Mr. Frey’s career as a photographer’s assistant required him to travel many places. “I got to go to Europe a few times,
I went to the Caribbean a lot, I would go to California all the time, and I would go to Florida all the time.” Mr. Frey enjoyed this part of photography because of all the places that he went that he otherwise wouldn’t have. Eventually, Mr. Frey’s job wasn’t sustainable anymore: “when the economy crashed in 2008,” Frey explained, “everybody in the freelance photography world had no work anymore. I was thinking of what else I could do.” This is what led him to search for a new career path. Since Mr. Frey enjoyed math in high school, his thought was, “maybe I’ll be a math teacher in a high school,” and that is how Mr. Frey got into his teaching career. 

While going for a career in the art industry may seem like a risk, it is always okay to change your major if you end up changing your mind. Mr. Frey had the chance to do both an artistic career as well as his teaching career. Artistic careers take lots of determination and work ethic to be successful. When asked for his advice for any seniors and fellow HenHud students attempting to figure out the rest of their lives, Mr Frey responded simply with the following: “Follow your interests and just be willing to work really, really hard.”