* Education + Intelligence
Owen is smarter than he leads people to believe; mostly because it’s none of their business. Masrani Global and InGen’s Security Division spared no expense in hiring the most qualified animal handler for the job. INGEN’s genetically engineered raptors were complex, lethal animals with a rich history of maiming their creators on Isla Nublar. Victor Hoskins, head of INGEN’s Security Division, was not going to repeat Hammond’s mistake by hiring an unqualified warden. With Owen’s unique academic and military background, he was the only man qualified for the job.
He often dons a dry but easygoing persona. A little crude, a little unassuming. Assertive, and paradoxically noninvasive. As a veteran, transitioning into civilian life is complicated, at best. Painful, at worst. And it is easier when he makes every effort to seem harmless. At the end of his military career, he had no desire to be feared. With his past and extensive skill set, Owen is hardly normal, but he’d like to pretend to be.
When his military ranking reached E-5, Owen was eligible to attend the Special Operations Independent Duty Corpsman Course (SOIDC). SOIDC is a 24 week course taught at an army installation in South Carolina. The course trains Petty Officers in advance medical skills. These skills are very broad, and include: surgery, anesthesia, nursing, dental, and veterinary. On clinical training, the students rotate through various departments: Obstetric/Gynecological, Emergency, Labor and Delivery, Surgery, Radiology, and Orthopedics. The courses were offered upon his rank promotion to Petty Officer, and Owen took them, having already received a comprehensive emergency first-aid course while undergoing qualifications training and SERE.
In addition to his training as a Navy SEAL and DEVGRU operator, Owen is an official animal behaviorist (specializing in Behavioral Ecology). Educated by the Office of Naval Research’s (ONR’s) Marine Mammal & Biology (MMB) program, in association with DARPA, he predominately studied and researched Marine Biology, Monitoring and Detection, Integrated Ecosystem Research, Effects of Sound on Marine Life, Behavioral Response Studies (BRS), Diving Physiology, Physiological Stress Response, and Population Consequences of Acoustic Disturbance (PCAD).
Owen has a fairly impressive eidetic memory, which allows him to have an almost faithful mental image of the event in his mind. For example, out of the approximately 50 persons he meets regularly and weekly, he can recall facial features right down to their blemishes, scars, eye color, hair color, and beauty marks; maybe around five different sets of clothing each have worn, as well as jewelry and tattoos. Details and events can be remembered with perfect clarity for up to five years. Essentially, it allowed him to be a very quick learner, picking up skills just by watching and carefully repeating the actions. Owen’s eidetic memory is extremely useful in memorizing schedules, maps, faces, numbers, memos, body language, and facial expressions.
He was always acutely aware of the person his attention was on. It nurtured his empathy, and shaped his emotional intelligence.
Owen’s memory is stronger with smells and visuals, and less potent with sounds and taste. While he can remember speeches and dialogue, he can not always remember the sound of a person’s voice after long periods of absence. He can recognize an animal by phenotypical features, but not always by the sounds they make. His eidetic memory is not perfect, but in certain aspects it is precise enough to be useful. Sherlock Holmes calls his mind an attic. Owen Grady calls his mind a packrat, eager to hoard information. Math and numbers were especially comforting for him, as it was a science that encompassed everything, from something as mundane as balancing a checkbook, to the more complex math in physics. Math was in everything. No matter what language, culture, or country, math remained the same.
As a boy, it was fairly difficult for him to concentrate, and he had had terrible studying skills due to the convenience of acute memorization. He would get bored easily due to an insatiable drive for new information, annoyingly curious, asked too many questions that Teachers were too lazy to answer. It alienated him from his peers. Most assignments felt repetitive to him. His particularities made it rather difficult to socialize. He often came off as a know-it-all, and even bossy. “He only thinks he’s smarter,” Claire Dearing had said about him.
Owen is unapologetic about his own intellect, now. But he is not the bragging type. Too solitary. Too private. He did not enjoy school, but the work was not objectively difficult. Socializing was the only part he did not always succeed at. It was only when he joined the wrestling team in high school that he actually made some progress, enjoying the rigorous exercising and functional teamwork.
He can remember very specific details of memories with family and loved ones, but understandably they did not always remember, in turn… which was initially hurtful during his developmental stages as a child, before he understood that his personal experience with memory was not common. But he had help from his grandfather, who had raised Owen’s similarly-minded mother. Owen learned from a very early age to mentally compartmentalize and organize his behavior in order to manage his very particular memorization skills.
