My life experience
I am turning a round 40 years old this year, a couple of weeks before the election. Time to write a few short paragraphs on my life, to see what, if anything, in my past makes me a good candidate to vote for in the upcoming Hillsboro school board elections.I was born in New York (in Queens, to be exact) from wonderful and caring Italian-American parents. My middle name John honors my Sicilian grandfather Giovanni Napolitano. My parents moved to Italy when I was 18 months old, and I lived in Rome and Milan for a large part of my life. I went to public school in Italy, and to a public university, the Milan Polytechnic, where I studied and graduated with the equivalent of a MS in Electrical Engineering. The Milan Poly was the second largest school of engineering and architecture in the world in terms of number of students, with about 30,000 students total and well over 1000 members of the faculty.
During my years at the Milan Poly I ran to be one of the student representatives on the board of directors of the university, and served one two year term. I was heavily involved in all the matters discussed by the board, especially the budget for research and teaching. As is the case with our own K-12 education school district budget, we had to make tough choices to stay within our means. It was an incredibly rewarding experience, but also a lot of hard work.
After I graduated from college, I moved to California and started working in the semiconductor industry, first as a process engineer and later as a manager of a department of about 20 between engineers and technicians. I got married to my loving wife Kathy and moved to Texas with her. While in Texas, my wife's older daughter was in high school, and I had the pleasure to see first hand the disaster that is the test-and-metrics-driven Texas school system (I will write about my opinion of Texas schools in a later post). I spent most of my evenings for three years to study at the University of Phoenix, where I earned a Master in Business Administration. After my daughter Anna was born, I left my job to take care of her during her first year of life, which was possibly the most rewarding year of my entire life. After that I started working as a translator for companies the IT industry, and later started my own translation company. I also served for two years as the Administrator of my professional organization, the Italian Language Division of the American Translators Association.
We moved to Oregon three years ago, finally settling in our wonderful community, where we plan to spend the rest of our lives helping Anna reach her potential and become a productive member of our community.
In my forty years I have learned to value the essential role that public schools have in our communities, as a student, a parent and a board director. I have seen first-hand school systems that are very different, in Italy, California, Texas and Oregon. Now it is time to give back to the public schools that gave so much to me, and use my experience to benefit of all us.
posted by Unknown @ 9:11 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home