// Database
Information
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Name: |
Gregory D. McDowell |
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Rank: |
Lieutenant |
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Age: |
28 |
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Race: |
Human |
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Gender: |
Male |
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Weight: |
57.15 kg |
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Height: |
2.00 m |
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Eyes: |
Blue |
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Hair: |
Brown |
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Birthplace: |
Raleigh, North Carolina |
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Birthdate: |
Stardate 7505.17 |
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Mother: |
Heather McDowell |
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Father: |
Owen McDowell |
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Siblings: |
JR McDowell
(Brother) |
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Spouse: |
-------- |
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Children: |
-------- |
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| Stardate
10401.27 |
Assigned to CEO aboard USS Geneva as
Lieutenant. |
| Stardate
10404.05 |
Received
Axanar Humanitarian Medal for your actions
to help the Gruthorians on Zestel IV. |
| Stardate
10409.02 |
Received Captain's Letter of Commendation for dedication for ship and crew. |
| Stardate
10501.29 |
Received
Captain's Letter of Commendation for
Creative Thinking |
| Stardate
10504.10 |
Removed
to Inactive |
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The McDowell family is rather well known throughout Starfleet, especially in the realms of the Third Fleet. Probably the most visible was Greg's uncle, Robert McDowell, who previously served aboard the Mendeleev, Honshi, Geneva, Scimitar, Orion, and went on to act as a Sector Commander before being killed in a firefight. Greg's older brother, JR, served briefly aboard the USS Aconcagua during its launch cruise and subsequent
re-christening as the USS Paula Greene. While "Uncle Bob", as Greg called him, seemed to have become the limelight-catcher for the family, Greg's father, Captain Owen McDowell, was content with his somewhat-less-glamorous position as a Project Coordinator for the Theoretical Propulsion Group at Utopia
Planetia. The same was true for his mother,
Lt. Cmdr. Heather McDowell, who served as a chief surgeon at the Meridiani Medical Facility on Mars. Suffice to say that this branch of the
McDowell's are a quiet, typical Starfleet family.
During his childhood and most of his adolescent years, Greg's family lived in the Old Research Triangle area around Raleigh, where Starfleet had a matter/antimatter reactor test complex, where Owen worked for a good portion of his career. On the whole, Greg's childhood was decent and typical. Owen tended to push him to excel at times. This instilled a workaholic sense of accepting nothing but the best into Greg, despite some psychological side effects. It was when Greg was 14 when Owen received the promotion to Project Manager, and the family had to uproot and move to Mars. This created considerable strain between Greg and his father, as Greg had recently become an accomplished member of the Early Engineers Guild (a Starfleet-sponsored "career shadowing" group at the complex) in the Applied Subspace Mechanics Department. Greg was not happy at all with the move, nearly threatening to run away and stay behind to continue his work. It was only the legal reality that Greg simply couldn't stay behind because he wasn't of adult age that forced him to move.
The next three years continued the strained relationship between Greg and his father, where many times the two would enter into heated arguments over the theoretical vs. practical applications of Owen's engine component designs. Greg largely regards the day he was accepted into the Academy, at age 16, as his happiest time, for he was then able to return to Earth, his love of applied engineering, and ultimately define his own life.
In the present day, Greg and his father have returned to a normal father/son relationship. While still strained at times (like Tom Paris & his father), they are on the whole loving of each other, with Owen generally impressed with his son's career accomplishments. |
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Until the time of their move, Greg attended 1st - 9th grades at the Decker Preparatory School, excelling in all academic areas, and consistently ranking in the top 25 students of his class. The same was true for his dual studies at the school, and in the Early Engineers Guild. The move was particularly hard on Greg, moving away from his friends and companions, including a sparked love interest, just as he was entering the high school age. On Mars, he attended the Meridiani Academy for his last three years of schooling. It required a fair bit of sheer willpower for Greg to return to his academic excellence. In the end, however, he graduated 11th in his class of over 400. While Greg participated, and many times held officer positions, in many school groups, and enjoyed playing in the musical performance groups, he never felt completely "in".
At Starfleet Academy, Greg was determined to change himself into a more rounded person, hoping maybe to become more athletic and only slightly less concerned (or rather, anal-retentive) about being nearly-perfect in his studies. In the end, the Academy ended up being much like high school. By this age, Greg had the sense of achieving total excellence drilled into him so much that he almost burned out on schoolwork. He was desperately ready to enter the world of fleet service, but knew that he had to get through the Academy with top honours in order to achieve the top positions in the fleet. He could easily prove his engineering skills, having already been regarded by his friends and most of his professors as a natural in normally-complex engineering principles. But in the end, it still mattered whether or not Greg had received that "piece of paper" commissioning him as a certified officer. In the end, Greg graduated summa cum laude from the Academy, and in the top 10 students from the Engineering College.
Despite numerous academic awards to the contrary, Greg held a somewhat sadistic and disdainful view on academic institutions, seeing them merely as a necessity to an end-goal. He greatly
preferred the applied engineering studies, as compared to theoretical mechanics. He takes a low regard for material that takes form only as a mess of equations in a book or paper, much preferring real life implementations of new technology. His personal motto is "don't show me a paper, show me a working component". The same personal distaste holds for Greg's view of Starfleet Command, and politics in general, much preferring split decisions based on the information at hand and the sense of independent decision-making starships have, compared to the
bureaucratic report-pushers of the brass. |
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As noted in his physical profile, Greg is rather thin for his age group, which is an after-effect of never having much interest in participating in athletics. The standard Academy physicals have proven him to be in excellent shape, with high endurance. But on the whole, Greg is not athletically built at all. This may change in time, as Greg has a slight interest in distance running and amateur soccer.
The single biggest issue for Greg may be his psychological health. His paternal grandmother's family had a history of high anxiety, which has resurfaced in Greg. Couple that with the emphasis on excellence that Greg grew up with, and Greg has a high degree of trepidation when it comes to others doing things that he, himself, would rather be doing. The same goes for group competitions that Greg would participate in in school. Greg would always come down with a bad case of anxiety (referred to in previous centuries as "butterfly stomach") right before competition-time, even though he always knew he, or his group, would always perform the best and usually win the top awards.
Combine this anxiety with the drive for success, and Greg has a controlled, but inevitably short, temper when it comes to handling stress. He has an uncanny ability to tolerate single situations that are extremely stressful to some people. But once a group of problems occurs, or a stressful situation prolongs, and especially if he's constantly asked for a status report when situations probably have not changed, then Greg's temper tends to break.
The short temper extends to being a teacher and delegating responsibility effectively. Greg enjoys, almost, teaching the finer points of engineering, or "best practices" in applied engineering. But his short temper has, in cases where he was a student teaching assistant at the Academy, shown that he has no tolerance for people who have no business being in engineering, or act like they know fundamentals but don't. Greg views it as a waste of resources to attempt to teach fundamentals on-the-job, especially while enacting repairs aboard ship.
Despite his short patience with others, Greg does
possess a quite dry, almost sadistic, sense of humour. He was noted by many teachers and professors as having a witty retort or smart-aleck comment to go along with any debate or presentation he participated in. |
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