Title: Communications Specialist
Joined Arc90 in: April 2008
Most people don’t know that: I always have a pen and a notebook with me. It isn’t common at Arc90. I’m sentimental about papers and pens.
Prior to joining Arc90, Jen Epting spent several years of her life zigzagging between France and America. Whether she was teaching English to high school students in rural Clermont-Ferrand or working towards her Master’s in French Literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, Jen kept her career options open.
“I’ve never known the one job I’m supposed to do,” she said. “I keep following the things that I like and that’s a hard point of view to justify to your dad.”
Jen previously worked at the French American School of New York in Westchester, where she was responsible for alumni communications and marketing, and also taught English at insurance companies in Paris.
“I choose experiences that are going to add something to me as a person, that are challenging, and are going to awaken something completely different in my life,” she said. “Those experiences-whether it’s living in France or doing communications at a private school or helping to market software-are all adding up to this perfect storm of what I can offer to the world.”
The Greenpoint, Brooklyn resident, who shares an apartment with Oscar the cat, started taking French in seventh grade and had an epiphany on a trip to France during her senior year of high school.
“I realized that people wake up and say ‘Bonjour mama’ and not ‘hello mom’,” Jen recalled about the pertinent European journey. “It seems really obvious but actually being in the place where the language is lived made it feel like a game. My motivation for learning French went through the roof.”
Jen’s passion for linguistics is displayed in her degrees: she has a Bachelor’s in English and French and a writing concentration from Muhlenberg College and a Master’s in French Literature from Middlebury College and the Sorbonne. She currently spends two of her weekday mornings taking Spanish classes at the Cervantes Institute.
“I missed the presence of learning a language,” she commented on her return to formal education. “It seemed that if I was going to be living in the U.S for the foreseeable future, Spanish had the biggest possibility for street talk or random conversations on the subway.”
The classroom environment allows Jen to share her enthusiasm for learning with her peers.
“I like adults who like to learn languages when they’re adults,” she noted. “I fit in with that group-they tend to embrace the kid-like side of themselves and they’re not easily embarrassed or socially awkward. They are just really fun and interesting to be around.”
On the mornings when she isn’t conjugating verbs at the Cervantes Institute, Jen can be found at a Midtown Starbucks. She spends an hour working on her writing before going to the office.
“I have always wanted to write a book and be a writer,” she said. “It’s something I’m constantly working on. It’s difficult to always find the time, but it’s also difficult to not self-defeat.”
You can read Jen’s writings on her blog, Feast of Love.
Despite the chaotic schedule, Jen couldn’t see her life any other way.
“It feels really hectic but I’m most happy when I have my head in many different places,” she noted. “I am really tired at the end of the week. I do feel like I’m a person that has many different segments to my day; that extends from Spanish class to work to writing projects that I’m involved in.”
Although Jen didn’t grow up dreaming of working for a technology and design company, she used her previous experiences to adapt to the environment and excel at Arc90.
“If you had told me 18 months ago that I would be discussing software architecture, I would have laughed in your face,” Jen explained. “But I’ve been in a situation where I’ve understood very little about the environment around me and I’ve succeeded. It was a really intimidating prospect, but it wasn’t foreign; it doesn’t feel impossible anymore.”
Since she didn’t come to Arc90 with a technological background, Jen picked up a valuable lesson about the learning curve.
“This experience confirms the belief that, with attention, patience, and a desire to hit a home run, it’s possible to overcome huge, gaping holes in your knowledge base,” she said.
Along the way she discovered a love for wire framing, a term which was not part of her vocabulary until she joined Arc90.
“I really like having the opportunity to brainstorm in a visual way,” she noted. “I end up holing up in some conference room with a white board and a pile of markers. I need that space and quiet to imagine the experience as a user.”
Jen considers technology her fifth language-she also knows conversational German-since most of the words previously had different meanings for her.
“When I first started, people kept talking about REST and AIR,” she recalled. “I had a Post-it by my desk with ‘What is REST?’ and ‘What is AIR?’. It’s a hilarious philosophical question because of how obvious those things can be when you just think of sleep and oxygen.”
While Jen is still working on mastering the technological language, she admits she has learned a significant amount about the industry.
“It is an optimistic industry, one in which people show up to work every day to make something better,” she commented. “Before I worked here, I would have never said something like that. But it seems that, inherently, people who succeed in this field are optimists; it’s the nature of the beast.”
The positive attitude is also a reflection of herself.
“I don’t have much space in my being for negativity,” Jen added. “I understand that some people are not like that, but I don’t spend a lot of time appeasing individuals with that perspective.”