Moving with the cheese…

Ann Marie Olivo

When I joined the Tendenci team a year ago, I had just finished my PhD in Linguistics at Rice University. While I loved lecturing, researching, and expanding college students’ young minds, I felt like I wanted to do more outside the ivory tower. I had plenty of experience in public speaking, academic research, and formal writing, but I was pretty green when it came to the world of technology. Sure, I had done a bit of marketing for our graduate linguistics society and the Italian club. I even maintained a static HTML journal website throughout high school (before LiveJournal was a thing). But let’s be real–I didn’t even know how to clear my browser cache.

Needless to say, the learning curve was steep and grueling. Lucky for me coming straight out of academia, I was used to steep and grueling learning curves! I was quickly thrown into the world of website project management. I was meeting with clients, collecting DNS info, and making CSS changes.

Within a few months, I was put in charge the Programming Team. It became my responsibility to look after the product, ensuring feature updates responded to our clients’ requests and reported issues. I was crowned “client advocate” and a passion for user experience grew in me. One of the best parts of my job has been calling a client to let them know that we’ve implemented a feature they suggested or fixed a bug they uncovered. We love our clients here at Tendenci, and it was such an honor to foster such a unique relationship with them.

After a whirlwind of a year, I am moving on to my next adventure (or moving with the cheese, as one of our required New Guy readings goes). I’ll be combining my expertise in language and communication with my newly gained web marketing knowledge to step up as Marketing Manager for a local engineering solutions provider. Having been raised by an engineer who had a passion for precision and efficiency, I’m looking forward to working with folks of the same engineering mindset. Learning a whole new industry will be intense to say the least, but after all, one doesn’t go complete 6 years of doctoral study because they hate learning. 😉

At Tendenci, I’ve had the opportunity to work with the most brilliant developers and project managers in Houston. They’ve inspired me and guided me, and I’m so glad to call them my friends. Our clients are lucky to have such a caring, thoughtful team of Tendencians that work for them.

I’ll be working with the Tendenci software in my new position and for that, I am absolutely thrilled. I have an idea of what’s in store (don’t worry–I won’t leak any spoilers), but I am especially looking forward to see where Tendenci goes next.