My Education (DSP--08/23/06)

Gosh, my most recent degree was a Master of Technical and Professional Communication, which is what they used to call technical writing. Of course now it included multimedia and document design and web design and so they gave it a long, fancy name...essentially it is all the kinds of writing that are practical and useful. I think it says a lot about me that I chose this degree and loved it so much...

When I was younger (like a teenager and even undergraduate), I liked to read literature, or at least pretend to read literature. I thought of myself as an artsy English major type, but I wasn't really. The truth is this: I love to read, but I found a lot of what is taught in Literature classes to be, well, pointless. It was not practical to me, and after many, many literature classes as an undergraduate, I finally realized this. My other undergrad degree was in history, and I found it to be more to my liking--it was more concrete to me somehow, although I would venture to guess that most history professors would debate that with me.

So, I graduated and didn't go back for a graduate degree until like 6 years later. And by that time the English Department had a new degree--technical and professional communication. IT WAS MADE FOR ME!!! It was while I was working on this degree that I first got to teach, and that has become my real passion, but that is probably another blog.

The long and short of it is this: I learned a lot as a Literature major and as a graduate student in Tech & Prof Comm, but what I really learned is that I am fundamentally a really practical person. Writing with a practical purpose appeals to me, and I love that what I chose to do encompassed my love of practicality along with my love of the written word...