Ellen Campbell:
CLASS OF 1974
Del Mar High SchoolClass of 1974
San jose, CA
San Jose State UniversityClass of 1978
San jose, CA
Ellen's Story
Workplace
For a year and a few months now, we own and operate a Bed and Breakfast in Ashland OR -- the Chanticleer Inn. It's a lovely six room inn, 1920 Craftman, strollable distance to downtown and the OR Shakespeare Festival. The festival is the only reason anyone comes to Ashland, which is a pity because it is a uniquely beautiful part of the country. We like to say Ashland is where nature meets the arts. We have yet to promote this by-line to the Chamber of Commerce, but they should adopt it. It truly describes the best two virtues of the area -- Nature and the arts
This innkeeping thing is a completely new endeavor and quite a change from ten+ years of the high tech positions in the Silicon Valley.
The history in brief:
After getting my MS in Cybernetic Systems (what's that you say? -- yeah well that's what a lot of HR people said too) it took awhile to break into a high tech company. Finally, some guys at Silicon Graphics saw something that no one else did and hired me to be a technical writer for the Customer Support division. Well that lasted for about 9 months (not that I sucked at writing, but I disc...Expand for more
overed a group of engineers who were doing exactly what I wanted to do.), then I moved into an R&D group. I stayed 6 years at SGI -- I got to do a lot and learned even more. I worked for a boss who was wonderful and allowed a lot of lattitude for exploring new technologies, new theories of interface design and electronic information production. In our day we were doing ground-breaking work, in fact I was member of a team who were granted 2 US Pattens for our work in interface design and information search & retrieval.
I also did program management -- one program involved much travel in Europe (thank goodness for my French speaking abilities while not fluently stellar, I get by nicely enough). I got management experience too -- having a team of 15 engineers is like herding cats. Cats and engineers share a motivator -- food. I resorted to chocolate covered malt balls.
After SGI, I worked as a product manager for a few more companies, and then decided that the merry-go-around is for jumping off not staying on. So just in time -- before the latest crash -- I became a high-tech refugee and came to Southern Oregon.
Register for Free to view all details!
Yearbooks
Reunions
Register for Free to view all events!