Meet Antony Neale

One recent Friday afternoon, rather than heading for home (Basel) at the end of a busy week of work in Zürich, Antony Neale, ISB graduating class of 2002, instead kindly extended his journey and dropped by Reinach Campus to bring us up to date on his life these past 14 years.

Accent on the vernacular

Although Antony’s cultural roots are British, he has lived in Basel since the age of two and speaks Baslerdüütsch (Basel Swiss German) like one to the manner born, as Shakespeare would say (although when Antony communicates in Swiss German, he says he gets a certain amount of abuse from his Zürich colleagues for speaking a foreign dialect!). After achieving his IB Diploma, Antony took a gap year before university, working as a praktikant (intern) at Syngenta where he gained valuable experience in database-handling and working in an office environment (“It wasn’t just making coffee!”). He then began an undergraduate IT course at the Fachhochschule in Basel, before transferring to the University of Lancaster in the UK.

Bridge and buffer

After being awarded his BSc in Information Technology, Antony returned to Switzerland as a project-based programmer for several companies. He gradually made the transition to Business Analyst. Nowadays, he commutes from Basel to the Zürich-based IT consultancy company, AdNovum.

His job involves bridging communication between technicians and clients during negotiations over a potential project. He works to ensure that the project is technically feasible, that the concept and likely timeframe are realistic and to prioritise requirements between different stakeholders. Antony enjoys being the “buffer” between his clients and his workplace. One of the projects on which he is currently working involves the facilitation of an online payment app – an innovation in mobile payment options that we are likely to see a lot more of in the next few years.

Touring, exploring

In 2014, Antony and his wife made the trip of a lifetime, first travelling across Canada, and then taking planes and trains in the Far East (Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia) before moving on to explore Australia and New Zealand. During the nine months that they were globetrotting, the couple often found themselves meeting up with ex-ISB students now resident in several countries visited along the way. (Proof, if any were needed, that students at international schools tend to maintain connections as adults – wherever they are in the world!) Although now settled back in Switzerland (which unsurprisingly required a certain amount of adjustment after spending the best part of a year abroad), Antony quite frequently travels abroad for work, particularly to Budapest.

DIY and TOK

In his spare time, Antony enjoys jogging and recently finished a half-marathon – although the scenic appeal of taking part in a race around the perimeter of a lake quickly lost its flavour (“Running around a lake is theoretically a nice idea, but after an hour you’re still looking at the same lake!”). He often meets up with friends, some of whom are also ISB alumni, to play squash and to cheer on FC Basel. He would like to try his hand at Robotics, but having recently moved into a new house, he says that his current hobby is “going to IKEA.”

Antony was among the last group of ISB students to graduate in the months before the opening of Reinach Campus in late 2002; a development which concentrated—for a few years at least—all ISB students at one location. Although he missed out on studying in a purpose-built campus, he enjoyed being a high school student at Picassoplatz, right in the heart of the city. His experiences at ISB are otherwise similar to those of many current Senior School students. He talks fondly of belonging to the boy scouts troop 681 (still going strong today), inwardly digesting the TOK diagram (“bane of our lives!”) and enjoying the experience of writing an Extended Essay (on the works of Terry Pratchett). However, one thing strikes him as different: “I’m amazed at how big this school is now.”