Time for an "official" bio....

It was inevitable that I would have to break down and do the "write about yourself in the third person" bio at some point ;-)

And...begin!

Background/Work Experience

Karlyn has been tinkering on the web in one form or another for over a decade. She created her first website when she was 16 to ridicule a boy she went to school with who she thought was a pompous ass (no, she didn't have a crush on him) and got her 15 minutes of fame at 17 after taking honorable mention in a fan website contest for WWE star Chris Jericho. She continued to build professional and personal websites throughout college, though found herself getting burnt out on the web by graduation.

In 2002, Karlyn was bit by the higher ed bug when she interned at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the Communications office (where portions of her work are still available here and here, as well as credited photographs published online and in print publications). She liked the environment and the benefits and enjoyed the option of not being forced into working for "the man" at an evil corporation.

In 2003, Karlyn joined the admissions staff as an Assistant Director of Admission at Norwich University. Though her primary responsibility was to carry a recruiting caseload and college fair schedule, she started to tip-toe back to the web. She was a key team member in the website redesign the University completed in 2005 (honored with the MITX award) and was the catalyst for getting instant messaging and student blogs instilled as tools in the overall admissions communications plan. The same year, Karlyn left behind her caseload and was promoted to the newly created position of Interactive Recruitment Manager, one of the first positions of its kind in the country. She was responsible for maintaining the admissions webpages, managing the student bloggers and creating and executing an integrated marketing plan which included email, message boards, chat, MySpace, Flickr, institutional blogs, and video.

In late 2007, Karlyn moved to the next stage of her career, accepting the position of Web Producer at Dartmouth College in the Development office. She is responsible for maintaining multiple web properties (here and here and here), as well as advising the office regarding web, email and social networking strategy.

Karlyn's work with student blogs and admissions email marketing has been featured as examples of excellence at conferences around the country. She was acknowledged as an innovator in TargetX's Email Minute newsletter and was a presenter at the 2007 eduWeb conference on the topic of Getting Real Recruiting Results with Interactive Technologies. Her passion at the moment is giving practical, usable advice about integrating the web into the overall business strategy in higher education.

Education

-Bachelor of Science in Communication (focus in Public Relations) from Boston University, 2003
-Master of Business Administration from Norwich University, 2007

Computing

-Operates both a MacBook Pro and a sweet Alienware laptop, though she much prefers the Mac OS
-Browser of choice: Safari
-Email client of choice: Mail
-Project management tool of choice: Basecamp
-Tracking tool of choice: Google Analytics
-Secret Weapon: Simpleviewer
-X/HTML and CSS proficiency, prefers to hardcode in Textmate
-Software: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Visio, Mindmanager, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Flash, Final Cut Pro
-Basic knowledge of PHP, MySQL, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, which she's working on expanding

Personal

Karlyn lives in Norwich, Vermont with her two ferrets, Monkey and Scampi. She refuses to move west of Massachusetts because then she wouldn't be able to call herself a "northern liberal elitist" any longer. In addition to www.karlynmorissette.com, she is an avid blogger on the subjects of politics, religion and life in general on MySpace where she has consistently ranked in the top blogs on the network (though she only legitimized her blogging to her family when she out-ranked the Dave Matthews Band one day). Karlyn is minorly obsessed with The West Wing on DVD and has been known to have marathons of all 7 seasons that last weeks at a time. She's admittedly a bit sarcastic, opinionated and weird, but doesn't consider it to be a bad thing ;-)

-fin-