Melissa Sconyers has lived in Los Angeles, Austin, Las Vegas, New York, Paris, Beijing, San Francisco, and now resides in Hong Kong. She is currently working in finance, as the Sales Manager of Institutional Sales at Interactive Brokers, a proprietary trading platform that offers direct access to over 80+ exchanges across the globe.
Melissa began her career in New York in media planning at Neo@Ogilvy, the digital division of Ogilvy & Mather, and worked on a range of accounts including The Economist, Cisco, and Kodak. She then joined Wieden+Kennedy as a digital strategist, specializing in the areas of organic search, paid search, and social media. While at W+K, Melissa had the opportunity to work with clients such as Nokia, Disney, Pixar, Honda, and Nike, before combining her expertise in marketing and technology to join Snaptalent, a Y Combinator funded startup in San Francisco.
Melissa graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a BS in Advertising and a BA in Chinese with a minor in French. While in college, she was honored as one of the top twenty ‘Leading Longhorns’ out of over 50,000 students.
In addition to the coursework for her degrees, she completed research in number of diverse subjects including numismatics, banned literature, and trend-hunting. Melissa also participated in student organizations including Texas Entrepreneurs, the Technology Entrepreneurship Society, and the Solar Vehicles Team.
After spending a semester in Paris to study international marketing, Melissa lived in Beijing for over a year while studying Chinese. Achieving a native speaker level of fluency after only two months, Melissa went on to co-author a revolutionary system for learning Chinese via flashcards. Published in October 2007, the flashcards are now being sold in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Australia, and the United States.
During her time in China, Melissa worked as a consultant to the Chinese government office which handles the official website for Beijing, helping them prepare for the 2008 Olympics. She also worked a photojournalist for the highly regarded expatriate magazine “The Beijinger.” She is thrilled at the opportunity to live and work in Asia again.
Melissa doesn’t think in terms of what she wants to do ‘when she grows up.’ Rather, she decides what she wants to do next.
A self-proclaimed uber geek, Melissa blogs at http://gee.ky.