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Member Spotlight: Cinnamon Melchor

Cinnamon Melchor is August's spotlighted wrrl. This former desktop publisher and comedy club hostess is now an Information Architect at Sapient.

Cinnamon has an undergraduate degree from the College of William and Mary in English with a minor in fine arts. She also holds a master's degree from George Mason University in English, concentrating in professional writing and editing. Her thesis focused on e-mail usage at a small site, looking at trends in tone and content over the course of two years.

After obtaining her BA, Cinnamon finished the Radcliffe Publishing Course and moved to the DC area to work at a small printing company in Rockville. This Mac diva had her work cut out for her: "They had literally just ordered a bunch of Macintoshes—they were still in their shipping boxes the day I started—and were preparing to figure out Quark. I'd had a Mac since the 128K ones and already knew PageMaker (2.0!)."

From there, Cinnamon went to an association downtown where she handled the desktop publishing their newspaper. This savvy wrrl quickly ramped up to publishing the newspaper on the association's dial-up precursor to an intranet and became the Systems Operator of their forum on CompuServe. Cinnamon made the final leap to full-time webdiva when the association rolled out a web site for their 100th anniversary.

Before joining Sapient this summer, Cinnamon spent two years at Booz, Allen & Hamilton where she was a writer, editor, and content webmaster.

In addition to DCWW, Cinnamon gets professional pointers from Women in Technology International, and by reading Red Herring, Slashdot, and Wired News "to follow the scoop on who's coming out with what and when. CIO is also a good site for reading about the trials and tribulations of enterprise-scale applications." But don't think she's all work and no play—Cinnamon counts The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook and Bizarre Stuff You Can Make In Your Kitchen among her more than 800 bookmarks!

When Cinnamon can tear herself away from her Mac, she's an amateur ice hockey player. Though her mom has made her promise to wear a mouthpiece, Cinnamon is enjoying the complicated game. "Not only do you have to know how to skate, jump and generally keep your balance, you have to know how to handle the puck and shoot it. Add to that the basics of knowing where your teammates are and then what play to make in what situation, it turns into a pretty intricate game for something that has the reputation of just being a fist fight!"

Contributed by Davina Sashkin

Curious to see who our previous member spotlights were? Check out our archives!

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