I am very pleased to welcome Neil P. Quinn as the latest member of the Editing team <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editing>, as our product analyst working alongside me.
I n his own words: I was born and raised in North Carolina—specifically the lovely, humid, famous-for-NASCAR city of Concord <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concord,_North_Carolina> (pronounced *kon-KORD*, not *KON-kerd* like the place in New Hampshire, thank you very much)—although my dad is originally from Cleveland and my mom from Gujarat <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarat> by way of Chicago. I have one older brother <http://davenquinn.com/>, who's putting me to shame by doing a PhD in geology at Caltech, and two younger sisters who were adopted from India. I went to college at Georgetown University <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgetown_University> in Washington, DC. I originally studied Middle Eastern history, which took me to Jordan for an eight-month study abroad program, but about halfway through, after I decided that life in a think tank wasn't for me, I switched my major to international economics. I spent some internships trying out marketing, including one in a "boutique thought leadership consultancy" located half a block from K Street <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Street_%28Washington,_D.C.%29>, where I did things like help the United States Travel Association <https://www.ustravel.org/> scheme to get people to travel more. I eventually found my way to software product stuff, including an internship at Appcelerator <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appcelerator>, which I have to say I liked a lot better. I graduated this past December. I'm a longtime Wikipedian <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Neil_P._Quinn>, so when I happened to notice that the foundation was hiring, I made that the very first application I sent out. The process did take 9 interviews and 70 days, but it was worth the wait! I'm very excited to meet you all, and to hang out in a place where I can talk about Wikimedia arcana without sounding like a dork. Obligatory listing of hobbies: biking, cooking, tennis, social science, and foreign languages (I speak Spanish and Arabic; Gujarati <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarati_language> is next up). Please join me in welcoming Neil, who started on Monday. Yours, -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, Editing Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. [email protected] | @jdforrester _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
