Thomas Brecheisen lived many lives before finding his calling as a professor at Texas Tech University.

As the sun set on another day on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, Thomas Brecheisen sat in his office. He’d been stationed there for two months with the U.S. Army. He’s not realized it yet, but it’ll be through this job that he finds inspiration for his future.

As an agent in charge of education for the Subversion and Espionage Directed Against the U.S. Army (SAEDA) program, the experience will unlock a passion for education that will serve Brecheisen 20 years later when he becomes a professor at Texas Tech University. 

Early Life 

Brecheisen’s grandfather gave him a trumpet when he was in the fifth grade. He started lessons and disliked it early on but when he was young, he didn’t know he could try other things. However, his interest in music grew once he reached high school. 

It was during that time Brecheisen tried out for a jazz band in Las Vegas. Not only did he get accepted, but he also was selected lead trumpet player. He got deeply involved in the performance industry, playing for the Las Vegas Symphony and even playing gigs on the Las Vegas Strip.

“We would sometimes do gigs at bars, which was funny because I was a 16-year-old kid being let through the back door at two o’clock in the morning,” Brecheisen said.

Brecheisen’s love for music grew. However, music wasn’t what he wanted to focus on for a living. 

“Growing up during the Cold War and having to go under my desk every Friday when the alarms went off and watching “G.I. Joe” made me interested in the military,” he said.

He specifically wanted to be an intelligence analyst for the CIA. 

Knowing he’d need a college degree to work in intelligence, Brecheisen went to the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. It didn’t matter what he studied, so he chose something he knew, music. 

While there, he got caught up in attending shows and playing gigs and lost focus in class. This resulted in him failing his first two semesters in college and feeling hopeless. 

However, Brecheisen was able to find another way. 

The Army 

Brecheisen took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery Test and scored high enough to take any job he wanted. There was not an intelligence analyst position open with the Army. However, they had a counter-intelligence position open, so, he went to Utah and talked with recruiters. He decided to go into counterintelligence.

“I dropped out of school and didn’t even tell anybody,” he said. “I just left and went off to basic training, followed by intelligence corps training in Arizona, then got assigned to a unit in Georgia.”

Two years into service, Brecheisen awoke one morning to the devastating Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He was still in Georgia when he got the call. 

“In 2002, I was deployed to Iraq, to support the initial invasion going up into Baghdad,” he said. “I went there to run the camp where we would bring all the detainees to interrogate and house them.”

Brecheisen says interrogation in real life is nothing like how Hollywood portrays it.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time interrogation is not what you see on TV,” he said. “Sometimes you could get answers by giving them a teddy bear for them to give their kids.” 

After his time in Iraq, Brecheisen was deployed in Oahu, Hawaii, where he ran the education side of a SAEDA field office operation, tracking espionage directed at the U.S. Army.

It was a suit-and-tie job traveling throughout the Pacific doing counterintelligence operations, ensuring battalions were gearing up to deploy. 

“My job was to make surthey were not giving out information they shouldn’t be,” Brecheisen said. “So, it was an easy job considering we were in the middle of the war.”

Returning to School

Brecheisen, a people person, got burned out quickly. He applied to BYU Hawaii, a hard school to get into due to in-state demand. That, coupled with his lackluster transcript, left him with quite a challenge. 

“I auditioned to play in the jazz band at the same time my application was originally rejected,” he said “What I didn’t know was this was an audition for a full-ride scholarship. So, while I was originally rejected for my grades, I was ultimately given a scholarship for my trumpet playing.”

It was during this time that Brecheisen met his wife. The two dated long distance and later were married. They’ve been together for 20 years and have two daughters.

When he returned to Las Vegas, he transferred to the University of Nevada-Las Vegas to finish his degree. 

When making music for student films, he encountered a challenge. The videos were bland. Specifically, they were mostly videos of two people talking in front of a white background. Brecheisen knew this did not lead to cinematic scores. So, he saw this as an opportunity to take film classes. 

With a scholarship and the GI bill to support him, Brecheisen decided to major in film. 

Understanding every video needs editing and not many people aspire to that part of the business, Brecheisen took an editing class and learned the ropes. This skill landed him job opportunities on big-name television programs.

During his undergraduate studies, Brecheisen worked as an editor for “American Idol,” the MTV network, and a poker website. 

“Phil Ivey, who’s a big-name poker player, wanted to do a tutorial,” Brecheisen recalled. “So, he hired a few camera crews, and we went to the Rio in Las Vegas. They gutted out a suite on top of the Rio and set up a green screen studio. They were having a tournament, so we were able to interview all of them.” 

When the person co-directing the project decided to leave his job with MTV, Brecheisen took the position. 

“I would show up to work at 11 a.m. on Sunday and wouldn’t come home until 9 p.m. on Wednesday,” he said. “I would be sleeping on a couch just burning a hole with my mouse through the desk editing. Then I would go home to sleep. On Thursday I would come back to record voiceovers. Then, on Saturday I would work the graphics for a football program.”

Brecheisen noticed he didn’t seem to have much of an interest in what he was doing. 

Brecheisen realized when he was in Hawaii in front of those brigades and battalions teaching them how to prevent themselves from losing information to foreign intelligence services, it wasn’t that he missed being in the intelligence corps, he missed teaching.

It was his interest in teaching that led him to an interview with the Art Institute of Las Vegas. When he went in to talk with a faculty leader there, he thought he was just looking into classes. 

“Because I am a chill dude, I wore flip-flops to this meeting and got questioned a little bit about that,” he said. “I was told I could do one class, and I was a little disappointed about that because I needed to support a family. The next week I got my syllabus in an email. I didn’t realize I was on a job interview, which was why he questioned my flip-flops.”

Eventually, Brecheisen went on to teach at The Art Institute of San Antonio doing visual effects and motion graphics before teaching at Missouri Western State University.

“I rewrote the entire program,” he said. “It was a cinema-theater program, and they brought me in to modernize it. Then we were immediately hit with a retrenchment. So, a lot of unpopular majors were taken out and the programs that weren’t making money were closed. One of those was our program.”

Lubbock-bound

In 2023, he landed at Texas Tech. His reason for coming was more than just teaching. Family members had moved to Lubbock and the surrounding area. 

Today, Brecheisen has made it his job to help students succeed and find their niche, like he found his. He also gives them a resume to build off and helps make their work visible. He shows this through his social media posts, such as his #IspyCMI posts on Facebook.

Wyatt Bray, a fourth-year Creative Media Industries major, is a former student of Brecheisen. 

“I believe Tommy is a great professor with a true passion for teaching,” Bray said. “He is someone who cares about his students and he always brings out the best in them.”

Wyatt Conway, another former student, talked about Brecheisen’s willingness to help students.

“Tommy was one of my favorite professors I had in my time at Texas Tech,” Conway said. “I have never met a professor who is for their students more than he is. The way he taught was engaging, even for an upper-level course. If I got the chance to take another course with him, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

Brecheisen allows students to do a lot of hands-on work within Creative Media Industries. This opens opportunities for experience they can use to kickstart their careers. 

“I started Raider Production House to give students what I didn’t have access to during college,” he said. “There is a huge difference between the classroom and the real world when it comes to film production.”

Over the years, Brecheisen noticed production companies didn’t see much value in the portfolios students would create in college.

“Usually because it was not original work, but step-by-step instructions from a textbook,” Brecheisen said. 

So, he created Raider Production House to provide students with opportunities to thrive and lead in the video production industry. He says having a reel like that would have been transformational for him after graduating college.

Brecheisen also leads groups to help students succeed in introducing technologies to others in the U.S.

“I’m running a group called ‘TechKnowledgy,’ where we research emerging technologies,” he said. “Last year we went to Cleveland with the University Film and Video Association for a conference where three students presented on artificial intelligence and its impact on creative media.”

Along with many things Brecheisen has accomplished in his life and career, including many short films and commercial productions, he has used his role at Texas Tech as a professor of practice to inspire creators and give them an outlet to promote their work.

What does “Strive for Honor” mean to Brecheisen? Being in the military and from his personal experience, he says it’s about being a just person and being true to yourself and others around you.

“Honor is a very important word to me. With media and advertising today, it is hard to know what is right and what is true,” he said. “So, that is a personal quest – that everyone should be a true and honest person. Be honorable.”

Brecheisen did not automatically find his niche. Even though he went through a lot, he eventually found what he was looking for: his own calling.