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Subject:RE: How often is your resume read on job boards? From:"Sean Brierley" <sbri -at- haestad -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 20 Aug 2002 09:52:58 -0400
If you have in mind a particular career, you should tailor your training
towards it. Maybe if you were headed to the software field, some IT and
programming classes would have been good. For engineering . . . uuuum .
. . engineering classes <vbg>. Clearly, if you are a technical writer
some technical ability is needed or, at least, is very helpful. Were you
not able to use career counseling, or was that advice off-base?
What school did you go to that failed miserably to prepare you for your
career?
I would say, however, that you might not necessarily have had the
ability to write _well_ when you went to grad school. I've seen some of
the writing and papers undergraduate CS and Engineering majors have had
to prepare, and, in my experience, those documents were not well written
and professors focused almost exclusively on content and not how well
the content was communicated, etc.
> I'm a writer. I guess when my one-year anniversary rolls around
September 7,
> 2002, I shall truly rue the day I borrowed $50,000 in order to go to
> graduate school in 1995 for my degree in technical writing. Nobody
even
> hinted that one had to be a "techie" to make it in this field.
>
> I feel robbed.
What's really sad is that you could probably already write when you got
to
grad school, so I don't know exactly what they taught you there.
You have a right to be angry with your school. But some of the
responsibility is yours. Colleges can't teach you to think, nor should
they. It's up to you to determine your most likely course to success in
any given field, and a degree is only one part of that equation.
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