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Staff Profiles: Jihad Mukaddam: Thirty-Five Years of Service
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| Jihad Mukaddam |
Behind the patient smile of an employee taking students' pictures and
preparing their IDs lies a long history. With thirty-five years of service
to AUB, the sixty-year-old Jihad Mukaddam is perhaps the longest-serving
employee in the University.
Mukaddam earned a diploma in computer science in Paris in 1968 and then
worked in the Lebanese Army for nine years as a data processing manager.
Then, one day he was called upon by an AUB officer "to fix a malfunctioning
computer." That casual, two-year stint as a computer technician,
however, ended on July 1, 1977, when he signed a full-time contract as
the University's data processing manager.
The civil war interim marked a busy period for Mukaddam, whose job requirements
included a wide array of programming and software-related tasks in parallel
with changes and improvements in computer technology. When in 1990 the
central processor at AUH needed intervention, Mukaddam took over the position
as the processing manager of the American University Hospital. There,
he diligently performed various fiscal, programming, and billing operations
for twelve years before moving into his current position as the center's
manager in 2002.
Mukaddam explains that prior to his appointment, the center did not exist
as a centralized office per se. In fact, over the past six years, he personally
designed the holistic ID center currently located on the first floor of
Ada Dodge Hall. The center, Mukaddam says, serves the entire AUB community
and also issues identity cards for a wide variety of campus visitors.
Soon to be retired, Mukaddam lived on campus for almost a decade, when
his house burned down during the war. An AUB veteran par excellence, he
admits his long years of service have paid off tremendously on the personal
level and says he can only look back at his AUB experience with gratitude.
Mukaddam's leisure time is mostly devoted to computer technology in general,
but he also finds time to savor music and the arts.