Two years after graduation, Emily Pinkerton landed a job at Twitter in San Francisco—what she describes as “Geek Nirvana.” In 2009, Twitter had only 120 employees. The old headquarters exemplified “quintessential start-up life,” she says. “The office was full of light, with vibrant paint and art of all kinds on each wall, a DJ booth, plenty of comfy couches, and fridges that never ran low on Red Bull or beer.”
Today, Twitter has more than 400 employees and Pinkerton has advanced to content editor. She now oversees a team of writers who keep Twitter’s collective mind organized and readable.
Pinkerton grew up a mile from the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The parents of her friends were astronauts and engineers. Math, science and technology were part of the zeitgeist.
At Bryn Mawr, she won a place at the competitive Summer Multimedia Development Institute, a College-funded internship that gives five students per summer an opportunity to help faculty and staff develop web, video, or multimedia based projects.
Her senior thesis explored the way that digital media has changed the way we tell stories. “Now stories are told online,” says Pinkerton, an English major. But the art of storytelling is still prized. It does not matter, she says, how such texts are delivered—in print or online. “Traditional authors should not be threatened by the shift. It does not strive to kill the printed word. Texts that are canonically relevant will always remain relevant.”
Roopa Dhanalal ’89 at Oracle
Born in India, Roopa Dhanalal ’89 moved to Minnesota as a child. At the age of 6, she wanted to be a surgeon. At Bryn Mawr, Dhanalal majored in neurobiology and minored in Spanish—mentored by Margaret Hollyday and Nora Maggid: “strong women who were doing what they loved,” says Dhanalal.
Skilled in writing, she also had an internship at Working Woman magazine and free-lanced at various local newspapers and radio stations.
In the mid-1990s, software companies in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area were beginning to search for liberal arts graduates to serve as consultants because they were able to see the “big picture” in evolving digital scenarios. For Dhanalal, that was her call to adventure.
She began at a small European subsidiary and was recruited by a head hunter to play a bigger role in software consulting. From that point on, “my career evolved on its own,” she explains.
Dhanalal spent the last 15 years at Oracle, a multinational computer technology corporation that creates hardware and software systems. Neither a developer nor a programmer, she specialized in working with end products to help customers have better user experiences.
Today Dhanalal is about to start a new phase in her career. She wants to apply her business expertise to small start-up companies and also expand her consulting to larger European, Middle Eastern and African computer operations. In addition, she is on the Board of Directors of the International School in Hamburg, Germany.
“I believe my most valuable contribution is international know-how, and the ability to work well with individuals from different cultures,” she says.
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