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31 Days, 31 People Day 17: SUSIE
After a few years in the San Francisco Bay Area, I accepted a job at UNLV as a web designer. I was hired by Susie, and Susie was awesome.
We were a really small team, if I remember correctly, it was just Susie and me for a good while. The pace at UNLV was a welcome change for me, just coming out of the mad velocity of Silicon Valley and the “dot.com” boom. This new job brought me back to Las Vegas in May of 2001. I didn’t know how perfect moving back would be at the time but, unexpectedly, I lost my mom less than a year later and was never more grateful about being close to home.
When I really think about some of the things that made Susie so awesome, here are two big ones that surface for me.
Susie encouraged bigger thinking and supported new ideas.
I’ve been really lucky a few times in my career to step into roles like the one at UNLV. There was a basic job description and some basic responsibilities that needed to be met, but it was loosely defined and really needed to be filled by someone who could run with it and grow it into something bigger. In order for something like that to work, two things are required:
- The person put into that kind of role has to be that sort of personality. I like to think I was (am) exactly that.
- The person overseeing that kind of…
