Entry Level | Meet Our People | Theresa – Human Resources

Meet Theresa from Human Resources

Name:	Theresa
Company:	arvato digital services UK
Title:	Human Resources Administrator
Location:	Birmingham, UK

My life in a nutshell:

Growing up, I helped count pennies to buy groceries. I was grateful to exchange military service for a chance to go to college. I think it is important to give back and make those chances happen for others.

Describe your educational background. Where did you study? What degrees did you receive?

Defense Language Institute (and other government schools); B.A., Flagler College. My undergraduate work was skewed toward multinational business and computer science. My post-graduate work is more oriented toward communication and technical applications, CRM and information management. I intend to do continuing coursework throughout my lifetime and stay forever “in school.”

What are your current roles and responsibilities?

Assistant to the Vice President, Operations, Client Services and Production Planning. I provide reporting and support resources to senior management.

What has been your most memorable moment (so far) at your job?

I have an adult daughter who is autistic. We recently attended a lecture and book-signing event for a volume that included some of her original artwork. I was so proud.

If you could take a year off, what would you do?

Invest a lot of careful thought in deciding how best to use the time. Freedom is priceless.

What are the qualities you admire most in a person?

Wisdom, humor, passion, talent, character, resilience, generosity, perseverance, and moral courage.

If you were a cartoon character, who would you be?

I would want to be Jonny Quest (for a while at least), because his life is always in sensory overdrive: adventure, suspense, exploration, disaster, discovery, desperation, resolve—even his downtime seems larger than life.

If you could meet anyone from history, living or dead, who would it be?

Noam Chomsky: prolific, stubborn, controversial, and complex. His corpus on syntax, cognition, and psycholinguistics is extraordinary. It definitely stretched contemporary thought and midwifed the kind of AI research that, among other things, makes it possible for me to talk to my computer (yes, I was a Trekkie).
Runners-up: Tolstoy, Durant, Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Boudicca, Alexander, Morgan, Churchill, Carl Gustav, Keats, Pasteur, Lavoisier, Curie, Maria Theresa, Gandhi, Fermi, Szilard, Westinghouse, Edison, Newton, and Elizabeth I.

What is your favorite book, movie, and artist?

Book: Little Brown Book of Anecdotes, by Clifton Fadiman—great encapsulated bios and vignettes.
Movie: Midway—a good exposition of a fascinating and decisive battle.