curriculum vitae

Personal

name

Branko Collin

date of birth

2 January 1968

location

Nijmegen, The Netherlands

virtual locations

http://www.xs4all.nl/~collin/ (private)
http://www.abeleto.nl (business)

qualities

I am a generalist. I am very quick at reaching solutions to complex problems, because I know a little about everything and so I always know where to start tackling a problem. I am not very good at work that requires a decent hand-eye coordination.

hobbies

Reading, writing (short stories, comic strips), sports (golf, athletics), computing.

Education

• Finished grammar school (Dutch: "Atheneum A"), with high marks for English and German.
• Finished English (Dutch: "propaedeuse", first year) at the University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
• Quit a master's education (Dutch: "doctoraal") Computer Linguistics at the University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. My specialisation was corpus linguistics (the study of large bodies of text). For my traineeship I researched certain elements of natural language and, based on that research, I designed and implemented an SGML-based natural language tokeniser for Dutch.

Job history

• Salesman of photographic equipment, video equipment and computers at a large department store in Venlo, The Netherlands (1988).
• Student assistent at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. In this capacity I had to be super user, video editor and multi media developer all rolled in to one (1993-1995).
• Trainee at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. See above: Education (1995-1996).
• Free-lance writer for Amiga Magazine (Dutch, 1995-1996).
• Free-lance comics writer for SjoSji (Dutch, 1996-1997) and Donald Duck (Dutch, 1996-1997).
• Editor of the Dutch computer magazine c't, license of the prestigious German magazine of the same name (1997-2000).
• Self-employed as a web designer (see http://www.abeleto.nl for a portfolio), translator (German to Dutch and English to Dutch), editor and writer (2000-?).

Another thing

Something I have learned a lot from is the six year period I worked for the Algemeen Nijmeegs Studentenblad (General Student Magazine of Nijmegen). This mag is run by amateurs, but you would not say that if you saw the output. The organisation is by far the most professional I have worked for. In those six years I have been writer, DTP'er and publisher.