Robert Deupree Jr.

The objective on my Microsoft resume was, "To manage a trout farm". One day while walking down University Avenue in Seattle, I noticed a temp agency, handed them my resume, and landed a job at Encarta. Some day all of this will make sense... but not yet. I was born in New Orleans where misspelled French names are common. My family moved to Branford, Connecticut when I was 10 years old and are there to this day. I took off to Hawaii to study marine biology at a tiny liberal arts college. While there I worked with dolphins, performed research in shrimp aquaculture, and worked nights cooking chili rellenos. More importantly, I met my wife who sat in front of me on the first day of Freshman Seminar class. Eight years later, we pulled up stakes and moved to Seattle so that I could pursue a graduate degree in fisheries genetics. Three days after defending my thesis (on Tasmanian oysters), I signed up with a doomed biotech company and eventually wound up as the timber, fish, and wildlife biologist for the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe. I was hoping to land a job at a local trout farm when Microsoft came along. At Encarta I wrote or edited several hundred articles including Animal, Mammal, Whale, and Toilet. During that time I studied geek as a second language until I was finally ready to serve as an instructional designer on an NT5 course. My passion is instructional design and my professional goal is to capture (and eventually transfer) any technical or artistic skill through simple yet non-conventional instructional design models.