the matochak pages

I can only look like this after many hours of preparation

Welcome to matochak.com

April 6, 2001

Welcome, and thanks for visiting. There are a few different parts to the site, as you can see below.

  • Professional - Information for those who want to hire me, work with me or work for me, or just want to find out what is going on in my professional life.
  • Personal - Though my personal and professional lives are highly intertwined, if not grossly overlapping, this area offers a broader scope of my life beyond work.
  • Page List - For people who want to know what information is here and make their own decisions about how to categorize it.

Latest News:

  • I have done a number of presentations lately, and I've found that I enjoy public speaking tremendously. I'm particularly interested in speaking at more colleges to undergraduate audiences. These are the kinds of presentations I've given so far, but am writing many more, on a wider variety of topics.

    • Columbia University - Fall of 00 and Spring 01 - Guest Lecturer in IT4126, Web Strategy, Structuring and Marketing, part of the new AITM (Advanced Information Technolgy Management) Program. The module I prepared and presented was on Profiling, Personalization and Attitudinal Data. Thanks to Ron Lamprecht, the instructor of the course, for the invitation.
    • New York University - Fall of 00 - Guest speaker to Undergrads in the Marketing core class. The speech was entitled "Start-Up Shock: The Surprise on the Ground Floor," discussing Marketing in an early-stage entrepreneurial, ebusiness setting. Thank you to Professor Sabine Kuester for the invitation.
    • New York University - Spring of 01 - Guest speaker to Undergrads in the Marketing core class. Presentation was entitled "Those First Few Weeks: Surviving in a Busy Marketing Office," which was a "real world" lecture involving strategies and tactics to make one's self useful, initiate meaningful projects on one's own and "manage up" to ensure an enjoyable, successful experience as an entry level marketer. Thank you to Professor Jack Jacoby for the invitation.

  • I have been on a creative upswing this Spring, and I've probably done more writing in the past month than I did during all of 2000. See my writing page for descriptions of the many projects I'm working on. I've had many recent inspirations, among them,
    • My wonderful, supportive partner Tim
    • A new home in which it is a pleasure to write
    • Swing dancing, which keeps my blood pumping
    • Gardening - I've found that watching things grow is terribly inspiring
    • Great music (specifically Soulfly)
    • The great people I've met on Written By Me and Epinions, sites on which I regularly write. These people have been an important, encouraging force in my life, and I am very lucky to have found such great communities.

  • In addition to my writing, I am a Director of Marketing at an online research firm that studies the effectiveness of online advertising effectiveness.

Old News:
If you have a lot of catching up to do with me, here's the very short version of the past decade or so:

  • I went to Penn State and got a degree in Exercise and Sports Science.
  • While there, my passion was being a heavy metal program director and DJ. I also worked on a radio comedy show that kind of defined my life for those four years. Reading A Primer of Higher Space by Claude Bragdon shifted major paradigms in my life and helped start my love-affair with theoretical math. This, and a series of significant relationships lead to much new age reading, reality-questioning, and a decade of vegetarianism.
  • The radio gigs led to me working in the music business in NYC after college, where I continued to live with "my veritable goldmine of a roommate," Liz, and some other friends.
  • In the early 90's, I was part of an artist's enclave called SICPA, which was one of the most important influences in my creative life. If it wasn't for those people, who became my family, I may not have developed my passion for writing and performing.
  • After switching careers and working in advertising, I moved to Manhattan and did some performance art, spoken word performances and acting whenever I could fit it in.
  • I started on a five year journey at American Express, where I was dealt several rewarding career challenges and met some of my best friends. It was a time of stability, learning, creative bankruptcy and much airline food.
  • In 1994, I discovered BBS's and the Web, started hand-coding my own websites, and miraculously, the world opened up to me. I was fundamentally changed and hopelessly seduced by the cult of technology.
  • Soon thereafter, I met fellow technophile Tim and we became partnered for life.
  • Completing my MBA at New York University's Stern School of Business somehow led me to getting back into writing and pursuing my dreams, and that's where I am today.
    alison
    rev. 4/6/01
    Copyright © 1999-2001 by Alison Matochak. All rights reserved.
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