Tech Comm Student

Everything is about to begin once again, and I am certainly very much looking forward to it.  I’ll be moving back to the Mankato area for school in under two weeks and entering my first semester in the Technical Communication graduate program at Minnesota State University, Mankato.    Having spent my previous semester studying within the Information Technology master’s program at MNSU, and with an undergraduate degree in Management, you could probably guess that I have had difficulty finding my niche.

However, I feel that I have finally nailed down the best program to take advantage of my talents most effectively.  I love the internet and all of its capabilities.  I like to be creative and invent solutions to problems.  But I also have the annoying tendency to want to jump into as many new projects as possible, spreading my time across several interests, acquiring a good amount of knowledge in much, but mastering little.  The obvious disadvantage is that I sometimes struggle at “being the best” at any one sole procedure.  The advantage shows up when I am presented with a problem and am able to draw from my larger experiences from many fields.  For example, if I were asked to create a solid content management system with Ruby on Rails, I would definitely need more time to acquire the knowledge to do so.  But if I were able to utilize any web language (or languages), I might consider using PHP and/or JavaScript and XHTML/CSS to solve the problem.  This isn’t a perfect example, but hopefully is understandable enough.

At this point, imagining myself spending all of my working hours programming a single software application, using a single programming language, and being responsible for only a small piece of a greater project, sounds like I would be missing out on a good portion of the fun!  I am an idea person, an entrepreneur; let me dabble in many areas and provide insights as they come.  But trust me, I am definitely striving to focus down on one process at a time; I’m just not naturally good at it.  Oh yeah, and I also enjoy writing. :)

So what is this site all about, you ask?  This is a record keeper, a journal, a personal diary of my progression through a Technical Communication graduate program.  I will likely write about the technical communication field, technical writing, the work environment for technical communicators, professional/business communications, visual communications, web programming and scripting, my thoughts on the different assigned books I read throughout the program, and eventually, maybe even provide some reasonable advice.

While I cannot promise to always be interesting, I have made it easy enough for you to find what you’d like.  Check out the right-hand sidebar to select your current topic of choice.