For a guy who used to go to the corner of Hollywood & Highland on Oscar Sunday to try to snap a glimpse of the red carpet, you can imagine the thrill of ending up getting an All Access pass for several years to document it on Instagram and Snapchat.

The rest of the year I covered our events; interviewed members; shone a light on the incredible archive, library, and forthcoming museum. And of course posted content on all our social channels.

But best of all I got to work with some of the smartest and talented people you could meet. Seriously. I learned so much from them from so many aspects of the history of cinema to what works (and doesn’t work) when building online communities.

Shout out to Josh Spector who hired me and gave me the freedom to post 3-4 times a day pretty much anything I wanted. He also set up a department that had creative graphic designers, an amazing video team led by the super cool Ryan Velásquez, and an IT dev team.

So when you see on my resume that our Instagram followers increased by over 4,000% during my 5 years it wasn’t just because I was posting pics of McLovin. It was a team effort in every way.

For a while I sat next to Nathaniel Thompson. At a place like AMPAS there are movie buffs, true geniuses of film. Nate not only knew his movies but also music, tv, and how to write about it quickly and cleanly. When I posted the Genie you’re free, it was after brainstorming a little with Nate and following the general instruction of Josh to try to start using movie quotes with a still from the film. It ended up reaching over 68 million people. My mom saw it on Good Morning America. I got emails of congratulations from the executive floor but it was a team effort – like all hits are.

Speaking of my mom, taking her to the Oscars was one of the best things in my whole life and I’m so grateful to the Academy for being generous to their employees with tickets. Pretty much the best perk a job could give.

The last year i was in the office I sat next to Rosalyn Hummel, another freaking brainiac and bookworm who just happens to know everything about the history of US presidents and presidential libraries (!?).

I’m grateful that I got to work with Matt Severson, and Anne Coco and everyone at the library. And I’ll never forget setting nitrate film on fire with May Hong Haduong.

This job was the longest one I’ve ever had. My third day George Lucas said hi to me. And as cool as that was it was just as cool talking with Joe Rendon and watching Lauren C Selman create magic.

I have no idea what’s next for me, but this one will be hard to top.