About Sebastian Antony

I am originally from New Delhi, India, and reside in Princeton, NJ, USA. My wife is retired, and we have two adult children. I was trained as an architect but pivoted into reporting and analytics.

School

I studied at St. Columbas' school from kindergarten through 12th grade. As a child, I was very good at art, while physics and geometry were my favorite subjects. I read a ton of books as a member of the Delhi Public Library, the British Council Library, and the American Library. As a teenager, I built telescopes by grinding custom lenses at optical shops, assembled transistor radios, and, in college, built huge loudspeakers both for home and for the college music society. The subject I truly excelled in at school was mechanical drawing.

College Years

Getting admitted to SPA (School of Planning & Architecture) 5-year B. Arch program was thrilling —3,000 applicants applied for around 30 seats. Here, too, Art and the history of art are two subjects I recall doing very well in. Next, I did a two-year Master's in Building Engineering and Management at SPA, focusing on energy efficiency and smart buildings.

I moved to the US in 1986 and studied at SUNY, Buffalo, for a Master's in Advanced Building Technology. I took every computer course available to me and bought my first PC, the IBM XT. For my thesis, I wrote CAD software in Turbo Pascal that used a Rule-Based Expert System, the type of AI in vogue then. The highlight of my college years at SUNY was marrying my classmate 😄

Early Career

Because of my CAD expertise, I had the opportunity to start the CAD department at William Tabler Architects, a leading hotel design firm based in New York City. Back then, the UNIX SUN-based workstations and software cost as much as a new architect's annual salary! I successfully automated several tasks via Macros and C-shell scripts. I enjoyed creating 3D models, which were a novelty at the time.

As the secretary of MAUG (Manhattan ARRIS user group), I produced the monthly newsletter for about two years. I became the second most technically adept user in the NY group, and networked with other user group leads throughout the country.

When Merrill Lynch acquired 18 SUN workstations for its facility management department, I was hired as the CAD/CAFM programmer based on recommendations from the user group. The floor plans were tied to databases, and I learned how to leverage MS-Access ODBC to connect to Oracle databases and link them with floor plans. Connections to data locked in Oracle made me nimble in report creation compared to the IT department and led to promotions.

I became the administrator of EMS, a room scheduling system, managing two servers—SQL Server and an IIS web server. I also wrote many custom reports in classic ASP.

Mid Career

Over the years in Corporate Services and Global Support Services, I’ve been lucky enough to work on projects that felt like mini-adventures. There was the high-stakes thrill of building the Y2K command center’s reporting system, were we waited in the command center, dining on surf-n-turf, waiting for responses from around the globe on disasters or system failures that never happened. The perk of designing corporate suite reporting was getting free tickets for family to the corporate box suites for sporting and entertainment events. There was the unexpected charm of creating a wine database for the executive dining rooms. I surveyed cafeterias, built the mailroom people locator, and developed a tool to manage consulting firms.

I evaluated offshore vendors in India for investment banking pitchbook production, visited our London offices to learn about integrating a room scheduling system with visitor management, and visited the corporate hangars during a project on corporate aircraft reporting.

Then came Covid—when many paused, I pivoted. I dove into Tableau and Alteryx, adding new skills that would shape the next chapter of my work.

Current Role

Upon my transition into Human Resources, I initially supported various Talent Acquisition reports, then managed some 400 dashboards for the Background Screening team. In 2025, I am focused on Real Estate reporting and AI via Copilot.

Hobbies

As a lifelong learner, I enjoy watching educational videos and reading nonfiction books. Since 2018, I have been heavily involved with iPhone photography and photo editing. AI-generated art in 2022 and since 2024, I have been a moderator and active member of Pixaroma's Discord channel.

During my six-week sabbatical in 2024, though I had considered a weeklong vacation in the Maldives, I finally opted to take Behavioral Science and Rhino-Grasshopper courses.