Sandy Jo Becker Hyman, Neighbor

Raised in Little Neck, Queens, and living here in Port since 1989, I have grown to feel like this is my true home town.  Since living here, I have been on the board of the Port Washington Children's Center, which gave me connections with people whom I otherwise may not have gotten to know.  This has served me well over the years, as I went on to work with Landmark on Main Street in its early days, and have been active in the community in a number of ways, including through school programs, Synagogue involvement, the Port Washington Education Foundation, The Photography Club of LI (PCLI), The Art Guild (TAG), Residents for a More Beautiful Port Washington, and, most recently, reporting for the Patch. 

I have a background in Business Administration and Accounting, although that was never truly my calling.  With an M.Ed in Business and Career Education, I started out as an editorial assistant at a small, "multi-media" (slides and tape) educational publisher, and moved on from there through the years doing things as diverse as program scheduling for HBO, system design and development, competitive analysis, and technical writing (documentation and training materials).  After decades in the corporate world, I began working with local, non-profit organizations, doing everything from office support to software and hardware research, to data entry, to developing web sites for individuals and small businesses. 

I rekindled an old interest in photography back in 2004, when I got my first digital camera.  This has opened a whole new world for me.  I have limited vision, and photography has opened up anew world to me, allowing me to see things in my images that I did not see when shooting them, and allowing others to see the world from my perspective. 

One of my passions, from the very first job search I did, was to interview people.  To ask someone to talk about themselves and what they do, from a standpoint of naiivete, not having a background in their field of expertise, allows me to ask questions that others may feel shy about asking.  This has always also been an important part of my technical writing toolbox.  It's much easier to ask about and write comprehensively about something, at least from a procedural point of view, if you come to it knowing nothing.  You make no assumptions about what your readers will know and therefore you can do a more detailed job, retracing all the steps that it takes to get from point A to point B.  I always said that I would love to be able to get paid to interview people, and here I am!