Traveling the world is on everyone’s bucket list, but for City of Phoenix Research Specialist Joseph MacEwan, it was part of growing up.
MacEwan was born in Egypt but quickly moved to Southeast Asia, where he spent most of his developing years.
In total, his family moved to six different countries, sometimes moving back to countries he previously lived in, all within the first 18 years of his life. Moving this often when he was younger provided MacEwan with an experience different from many Americans.
“Obviously in hindsight you always realize just how valuable that experience was at the time. It’s just normal, but living in a foreign country was an experience in that itself,” he said.
MacEwan’s current role working for the city culminated from his time as an intern for the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, or GPEC. Community and Economic Development Director Christine Mackay noted the city needed a research position after seeing MacEwan in his job at GPEC. While working there, his duties included running reports and putting property search criteria together.
His specialist position entails research, report building and packet building for potential businesses to view. He said his work is tedious and very challenging. This is due to client’s requests for research that doesn’t exist, the need to be creative in telling the city’s story to companies, and being responsible for bigger-picture policy-related items.
He attributes his success in the role to an upbringing that made him a personable and good communicator.
“The most valuable thing I’ve gotten from my upbringing is moving around a lot, meeting different cultures and people is how personable I think I am. I can get along with any type of person of any background and any career or skill,” he said.
MacEwan’s father still works for a hotel company that focuses on upgrading older hotels all across Asia. The company would send his father to different countries to fix up these underperforming hotels, and his family moved with him.
MacEwan said one of the many drawbacks to living abroad was the lack of having the freedom to go anywhere.
“Safety was a big part of growing up,” he said. “Not talking to anyone that’s a stranger is typically what you expect growing up, but it was more so where we had chaperones at any age. Going anywhere, malls with friends, movies, you always had to have someone with you for safety reasons.”
MacEwan was enrolled in the Jakarta International School and the International School of Kuala Lumpur which allowed him to experience American culture while living in Asia. This in turn drove him to choose to apply to U.S. colleges upon high school graduation.
His family finally settled in Scottsdale, Arizona for some time in the summer of his senior year of high school until his father was called back to Bangladesh.
With his sister two years younger than him and looking into colleges, his mother decided they would stay.
MacEwan ended up attending the University of Richmond in Virginia. He met his wife and his best friend while attending school there.
His then-girlfriend and now wife, Ellen MacEwan, first met him while helping out their mutual friend shoot a music video for his film class. She had never met anyone as well-traveled as him because of her small circle of friends in her hometown of Kentucky.
“It’s another part of who he is. He always had interesting stories, and I grew up in a small town in Kentucky. I was fortunate to be able to travel around the states a lot, but I’d never really been out of the country, so meeting someone who’d seen all these different places and experienced all these different cultures, I always love hearing the stories about the places he’s been and the people he’s met, and it’s just another interesting thing about him,” she said.
MacEwan’s best friend from college and best man at his wedding, Matthew Eley, first met him when they were living in the same dorm at the University of Richmond. He connected with him through their mutual feeling of not fitting in with the social scene of the dorm.
Matthew has since moved away from MacEwan, but the two always find ways to catch up one way or another. He is not surprised with the success MacEwan has achieved because of how studious he was in college.
“He has a great capacity for meeting new people, for quickly understanding the dynamics of a conversation of a relationship and making those people feel like he’s interested in them, which is 99% true.”
Contact the reporter at hcblakem@asu.edu.
