Month: January 2022

Reading, Writing and… Oh Crap, It’s 5.

Posted on by Matt

Orientation’s done, but I don’t have a lot of projects of my own yet. So, I’ll keep researching the thing I mentioned last week and trying to get up to speed on produces, services, and processes.

“I only know that I don’t know anything about [redacted]” — Socrates, when he took a job outside the Athenian Philosophy department

That’s a lot of research, right? Monday was Civil Rights Day, which we have as a holiday. I went down to help pack things up and drive a truck-full of boxes back with me. Both of my in-laws stayed down in Klamath Falls to help pack and take care of the kids, so I get to really focus on getting some work done.

That’s when things got weird.

Change of Pace

The research and writing I did this week was a lot like last week, so I won’t get into it here. Instead, I want to take a minute and verbalize something that’s been on my mind every commute this week.

(If you’re just tuning in, my commute is still about 90 minutes each way, mostly due to snow. In better weather, it’ll be 40-45 minutes until we get a place in the town where I work. Until then, crashing with the in-laws!)

When I taught, I would have killed for the time I currently have to devote to staying on top of my work. I cannot stress enough how weird this schedule feels. I mean, I get to work around 8:00am every day (if it looks like I’m going to get there early, I stop and grab coffee). I leave around 4:30pm because everyone else is leaving and there’s peer pressure to GTFO. The office is pretty empty when I get there at 8:00 (at least, the other Writers don’t usually roll in for another 20-30 minutes), and I get the feeling I don’t really need to be there so early.

I mean, that’s especially true now, since I don’t really have work to do.

But, there’s lots that I could be doing. I could be doing more webinars and online courses, reading technical papers, checking out textbooks from the library… I could be working like a grad student to really Get Good at this thing as quickly as possible.

I mean, I’m kind of doing that already. A lot of this week’s research went into webinars that are way beyond me (like, electrical and computer engineering that’s very specific to what this company does), but still, there’s an expectation that I just go home at the end of the day and not do any work at all. My supervisor told me not to take my laptop home this week — not because I shouldn’t be carrying company laptops around with me (lots of people do that), but because I will work at home, especially this week when it’s just me in the house.

I’m still not taking any reasonable kind of break, and I’m maybe stressing a little more than I should about getting a handle on all of the engineering stuff, but this is a far cry from what I’ve been used to over the last decade.

Lingo: “Just In Time”

It’s worth noting at some point (why not now?) that the founder of this company was a faculty member at the university in town. He invented the first product the company sold after he finished his PhD, then he started the company a few years later, and he still keeps pretty close ties with the school. A lot of the company’s structure and philosophy comes from best practices as described by academic research. That’s something that attracted me here — it’s not a company based on grift or making a quick buck off a new fad, it’s based around doing things the best way possible.

One of the major themes in our best practices conversation is World Class Manufacturing, a model for just-in-time manufacturing processes. “Just-in-time,” or JIT, is essentially doing only as much as you need to do when you need to do it, and nothing more. If you’re going to sell 100 widgets a month, you make 100 widgets. You don’t make 200 and anticipate sudden growth, and you certainly don’t just make widgets non-stop just to make sure you’re always making widgets. There needs to be time built in to every process for everyone to stop, reflect and talk about how well things are going and whether they could be better.

I was given a copy of the book by my supervisor. I read it. I have a lot of notes about how academia could do better, especially the required time to stop and reflect.

One thing we do (did?) in academia was put out fires. We put out lots of fires. In fact, everything we ever did was some version of putting out a fire.

  • Grading? Well, it’s a stack of 25 research proposals turned in today that need to be back to everyone by the end of the week so they can start their big project.
  • Institutional report? You’ll have your data from IR next week, a day or two before (or after) the report is due to the Dean, who needed it to send it to the Provost yesterday.
  • Course prep? Class is in 20 minutes. Didn’t you get those proposals graded?

The door swings the other direction, too. Students have way too much on their plates, so they’re always working to get work done. There’s never any time to stop and really reflect on what they’re doing unless that’s the assignment (and, even then, the reflection is like any other assignment: something that needs to be finished in order to get to the Next Thing).

My Very Own Fire

Here, I’ve been really happy with how few fires seem to be going on. Even when people say that something is a big rush or on fire or “a JIT project,” they aren’t the same kinds of fires I’m used to. If anything, they look well-managed and well-planned. For instance, I was given a new “JIT” (fire) project this week — write some web page meta descriptions for a few dozen pages that didn’t have a description at all, plus a few that had descriptions that needed to be revised.

If you don’t want to click that link, a meta description is a special bit of text in a webpage’s <head> that tells search engines what the page content is. It’s the description you see when you use Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo.

Having a page without meta descriptions isn’t terrible, but it’s something that shouldn’t happen if you’re a major business with a huge website. So, this was very much a fire to put out, or at least that’s how I thought of it. I was actually given this project last Friday afternoon, and I tackled basically all of it on Monday this week. I wanted to make sure it was done ASAP because that’s the pace I was used to.

I probably should have taken a little longer on it. Not because my work was rushed or subpar, but because I just went back to what I was doing before: reading and webinars.

Turns out, life as a professional writer is a lot more prep and plan than actually writing!

What *Should* I Do Here?

Posted on by Matt

Two weeks in the bag! Feeling more confident, figuring out what my job looks like, and I even remembered to start bringing a lunch with me every day.

That last one sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. This is a college town, so the places I can run out to for a quick lunch are limited (not least of all because I’m fighting a campus-wide lunch rush).

Clocking In

Excel’s color-coding skill leaves something to be desired

So, where’d the time go? Not to breaks, it seems — bringing my own lunch has shortened my lunch break. This week started a few tasks bigger than an email, so maybe it’s worth walking through each one. After all, this blog is partly my way of keeping tabs on where I spend my time and partly my way of explaining one version of what a professional writer does each day.

Orientation!

I mentioned last week that orientation here is a two week process, and that light-grey chunk of each day shows it. Tuesdays and Thursdays are “orientation on your own,” where we watch some video content and talk to our supervisors about specific processes — a portion of the orientation process goes through them, so they’re always checking up on processes and procedures as well.

I had heard that I might be getting a big project soon, so I decided to do all of the DIY orientation stuff on Monday to make room for the work. That might’ve been poorly planned, but we’ll find out. Either way, orientation is complete! I’m official! Last week, I was pretty happy with the way it was approached, and I still am now. I know there’s stuff I don’t know yet, but I also feel like the things I haven’t been told are just waiting until I have to know them.

Not in a bad way, like “Oh, we forgot to tell you that the system we use to submit grades times out sometimes, so you’ll actually want to submit them a day early.” More like “there’s no reason to walk through our time-tracking software because we don’t know if we’ll still be using it by the time you work on one of the projects it tracks.”

After learning Angel pretty thoroughly for a year before my grad program switched to Blackboard, then mastering my next school’s implementation of Blackboard right before it switched to Canvas, I’m pretty happy about this.

(P)Research

In comp classes, we talk about the research at the very start of a project — the information you gather so you know what kind of information you’ll need to gather later on — presearch. Clever, right? Well, I took that approach here when I was told about a project I might be taking on at… some point. No one is quite sure when it’s going to happen because it depends on a few other things falling into place.

It sounds vague, but the broad topic area is one that I’ll engage with plenty in the future, and it’s not like academia doesn’t have this same thing. (“Hey, we might need you to teach a class on [subject or process you taught for one unit several years ago]. Just a heads up. Nothing certain yet.”)

So, I spent about 15 hours this week scouring the company website, Google Scholar, the YouTubes and competitors’ websites just trying to wrap my brain around a thing that, honestly, I didn’t know about before this week. It turns out, a big part of writing professionally is reading professionally.

Writing

I don’t have an official project yet, but it’s hard to sit still. In academia, you’re always grading, prepping for classes, putting materials together for courses next term, writing reports… There’s always something that needs to be done.

As a grad student, I developed a pretty simple philosophy of productivity: I wouldn’t do a task unless it was actually three tasks in a trenchcoat. Grading was also prepping upcoming class sessions (as in, “let’s talk about what we wrote”), but it was also prepping courses for next term (as in, “what did the prereq course need to cover better? and what can I do in the follow-up course to take advantage of what they’re doing in these projects?”).

Reading? Course prep and presearch into unfamiliar subjects (or research into discourses I needed to do more work on).

Playing video games? Potential assignment design ideas and reconnaissance into the ways other people planned and executed stories/designs.

This week, as I read, I wrote summary content to connect ideas together and generate potential copy for the project I might do in the future. I compared my language to what I saw on the screen. When I ran into roadblocks, I used that as a signal to read up on a concept a little more.

Writing those little bits here and there got about 9 hours of my week.

Breaks

One of the reasons I left teaching was that I never felt like I had time off unless I was stealing it. (Playing video games with my wife usually followed the phrase “Just for a little bit, because I need to get X graded tonight.”) Taking breaks is hard. I used to eat lunch at my desk to get more work done, and my days were otherwise scheduled back to back to back, so there wasn’t a lot of time to stop. It got even worse when everything went to Zoom, suddenly your meeting could run over into that 5-10 minute window people usually needed to get to their next thing. I wasn’t shocked to find out that those few minutes were invaluable for switching my brain into the gear necessary for the next task, but I was shocked to find out exactly how hard it was to Do A Thing if you never had a chance to change gears.

So, there’s not a lot of break time here. Washington allows for a 15-minute paid break every 4 hours and a 1-hour unpaid lunch every 8. I should have an hour and a half of orange up there every day. Let’s consider that a goal going forward.

Retrospective: Prepping to Go

Posted on by Matt

Getting Prepared

This is the first part of a retrospective series on my trip out of academia. I want to document what I did to make the shift—and, maybe more important, I want to document what happened that made me need that change. I spent thirteen years teaching writing, composition, rhetoric and digital media creation, more than one-third of my life. Pivoting out into a different but closely related field feels like it needs a close look.

Groundwork

In technical report writing classes (and research-heavy academic writing classes), I would give a “groundwork” assignment early on. The idea was to require students to survey the field they were going to be writing about, but to do so from the absolute ground up. So, a student writing about new methods for disposing of solar panels (which is apparently a big concern) would look at EPA guidance on the topic and IEEE or materials engineering publications, but they’d also look for YouTube videos, podcasts, Reddit threads and anything else related to the subject. The idea was to get students casting a really broad net for information, so they’d know what kinds of conversations were important in a particular subject.

In technical writing, by the way, this is an especially important part of the research process. Academic writing classes focus on finding the best expert-written resources for a subject, then writing in a language that fellow experts will understand. Technical writing often includes the broader public or a system’s users as the audience. Tell a bunch of electrical or renewable energy engineers that it’s important to develop clean ways to recycle solar panels because of all those heavy metals that might leach into the soil, and they’ll be with you 100%. Tell the same thing to the general public, and they might exaggerate the danger.

So, the goal of the assignment isn’t just to get good information about the thing a student is going to write a big research report on. The goal is to understand the many potential audiences that could read and react to this report, whether or not they fully understand it.

Now, I didn’t realize it, but I started doing my own groundwork process in a lot of professional, technical skill classes I taught. There wasn’t always a lot of buy-in for the importance of stuff like the Adobe Creative Suite, blogging software, or even productivity software like Microsoft Office, or maybe it’s better to say that it wasn’t always clear how those skills would translate into a paycheck later on. I started compiling and sharing current ads for jobs that were tied to a given course’s content, and towards the end of the term, we would talk through the ways a course prepared students to do that job or parts of it.

Kairos

The kairotic moment came after several terms of doing this. I’d include job ads that had salary information if I could, and I’d find old but comparable ads if I couldn’t. The pay for a lot of jobs that students could do just after the course they were enrolled in was always better than what my own pay was, as were the hours and sometimes the benefits. One day, I was feeling particularly fed up with my workload. I didn’t like the tone in some emails I’d gotten from our upper administration that week. I got home late, and my daughter told me, point blank, that I needed a new job because mine was keeping me from spending time with her.

Full disclosure, that last part wasn’t new or unique to that moment. She had been telling me this pretty regularly for over a year, and she was right. Like many faculty, I spent my day at work, then I spent my nights catching up on work that I didn’t have time for during the work day, then I spent my weekends catching up on that night work or–when the planets aligned just right–getting ahead on the next week, so I’d maybe get a night off (I didn’t).

She was a pretty smart eight year old. (She’s now a smart nine year old, but this story takes place in the past.) I took her advice that night and put together some application materials for a job ad I’d just discussed with my students that day, a position writing marketing content for a big tech company.

Metanoia

The interview process was… lengthy. I sent application materials in April, and the first interview wasn’t until June. I got my final rejection in August. I recognize some of the things I did wrong now, and I’ll write about that in the next part of this series, but I want to focus in on that groundwork assignment from earlier.

I had spent years talking to students about ads for jobs that wanted the skills I taught. I taught students how to articulate their skills and knowledge in a way that would resonate with readers behind those ads. I was prepared to reach out and talk about my skills in language that would matter to my audience. Unfortunately, that’s really where the process ends in the classroom.

Since then, I’ve realized how helpful it was to have the background in reading and discussing those job ads. I didn’t start from zero when I began applying for other positions. Talking about those job ads with students also helped keep things important things in perspective—how much experience was necessary for a job? how could I prove I had the skills they needed? A lot of those little fears were answered as I thought back to the conversations I’d had in classes for months and years prior.

Getting out of academia is a big change, but maybe not so big as I thought that day.

What *Do* I Do Here?

Posted on by Matt

Well, this ends my first week doing writing as a full-time job rather than teaching it. Lessons were learned, good times were had, and I’ve gotten a chance to start settling back into a place that I enjoy living in.

How’d it go?

Time Is Different

Look at my Excel wizardry!

One of the first things I did was set up an Excel book to keep track of my time spent on different tasks. One one hand, I learned from life in academia that it’s important to have a record of all the stuff you do, so you have plenty to cry about when you are assigned more stuff to do throughout the year. But, on the other, I really wanted to have evidence for myself: was life outside academia really better for work/life balance?

On the whole, yeah. It is. For one thing, check out that Y axis. I clearly broke eight hours one time. A major reason for that was my first writing assignment, which I’ll get to in a bit. But, the biggest chunk of the day was getting acquainted with what I’ll be doing as a writer here.

Balance and Bonus!

Maybe I’m still in the honeymoon period, but things seem pretty balanced so far. Orientation (the yellow in the bars above) is taking up a pretty big chunk of this week. It’s all online (COVID), and it’s a pretty slow walk through the usual stuff (HR, benefits, getting to know co-workers) and stuff I’ve had to learn on the job in the past (company culture, who does/does not appreciate GIF-based responses in virtual meetings). I’m appreciating it because it feels like there’s an assumption that I’ll be here a while.

In fact, that’s one of the big things getting covered: how to navigate internal promotions and training. My orientation group includes everyone who has been hired recently: manufacturing assemblers and industrial engineers, marketing, human resources, R&D, everyone. One of the Writers I work with started in assembly. The Campaign Manager in charge of the first big project I’ll work on started as a Writer. I’ve met tons of people here that started as something else and transferred because they wanted to try something new…

…which is a segue into that giant blue block on Tuesday. The Writing team thought it would be cool to get Chipotle for lunch together (it was). While we had lunch, someone mentioned one of those internal training courses, an introduction to power systems engineering. Since I’ll be writing about power systems products, it’s a good thing to run through, they said.

I went looking and found it pretty quickly. I enrolled. It’s a self-paced online class with a good mix of reading, videos and exercises. I got through almost all of it, then I wrapped it up on Wednesday and took another course more closely tied to writing.

When I mentioned it to someone else, they said I should definitely take advantage of the slow times in my first few weeks to enroll in as many of those courses as I wanted. Get to know products, processes, terminology… There are a few non-engineering things mixed in (like a course on 3d modeling, a few on management, some personal accounting ones). It’s all part of the ongoing training thing I mentioned above.

I got paid to sit and take about 8 hours of useful classes in my first week. I asked about doing them outside of work so I wasn’t wasting anyone’s time. I was told no: learning stuff for work is doing stuff for work, so it shouldn’t fall on my time to get it done.

Balance!

First Writing Task

I’m still learning products, terminology, audience, etc. All the big things I really need to know before representing my employer in public-facing writing. But, still, I’m paid to write, so I got my first task on Wednesday: a short email announcing the release of a technical paper on the company website.

It’s got some restrictions that make the task interesting, and I needed to learn some of the technical details in the process. I’ll post a how-to about it over at rhetoricalstuff.com. But, about the time the email task was passed my way, the snow really started dumping outside.

I should mention here: I’m commuting up to this job from my in-laws’ house, 40ish miles away and about half a mile lower in elevation. They got about a foot of snow in the weekend before I started, which is eleven and a half more inches than they usually get this time of year. More snow was going to make driving interesting.

Everyone started saying I should “take my laptop” home with me. I didn’t realize I could. I didn’t have to sign it out or set things up with IT or anything. Someone walked me through the VPN process (easy). I put it in my bag and went on home, a little early. (It was still an 8 hour day because the snow wasn’t a surprise. There was plenty on the ground already, and I’ve been leaving with at least 90 minutes dedicated to the drive. I managed to get in around 8, and I left around 4.)

I spent basically all of Thursday in my in-laws’ basement working on a 100-word email and the core content of a 25-word Facebook post to go with it.

In academia, I’ve spent whole days doing email before, but never quite like this. My colleagues were on MS Teams all day checking in with each other on projects. My email got a fair amount of workshopping. I had the freedom (and the resources through the VPN) to look up some more information to understand the technical paper I was announcing. By the end of the day, I had an email draft ready and I sent it to the next person on the chain.

Week in Review

Overall, it feels like it was a productive week. I certainly did a lot of stuff. I never felt like I was sitting, watching the clock, waiting to get out of the building. I produced about 150 words.

Maybe next week has more text generation in store?

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