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.
