The Old School Itch

I am thinking of going back to school. Again.

Some of you might remember last year when I failed calculus pretty decisively during my first semester of what was possibly going to be a computer science degree. I think I left out the actual failing part, but that’s what happened. That was an online class, though–I know I could have done it in a traditional class.

I’m driven by a couple of things–I want to keep advancing in tech comm or just build something new, and I just plain want to keep learning. I know there are other ways to avoid career plateaus than by going back to school. There are other ways to get technical skills. I can dream up plenty of innovative projects that don’t necessitate me taking a class, right? The thing is, I keep feeling this nagging limitation.

What if I want to build something completely different?

It’s like when I was trying to write songs, and I could sing, but I can’t play an instrument. I know there are singers who do it, but for me it was frustrating. I could find musicians to play with, but I wanted more input. So I learned enough guitar to sketch some songs.

Is it me or the tech comm industry that is at a plateau?

At the companies where I’ve worked (and from talking to people, this doesn’t seem uncommon) documentation is a by-product that is approached later in the product cycle, when the product is stable, and past the point at which people have any energy for the all the benefits it can offer if one is innovative.

When I talk about personas, and sales opportunities, they look at their watches and wonder why I am not just writing it, already. I’m becoming pretty well-versed in the benefits of good user documentation that is part of a larger strategy, but there simply doesn’t seem to be much space for making the argument.

So, I’m going to need more credibility.

And more technical skill. Where I’m at now, the product people and even some of the marketing people are engineers. My impression is that they think personas are cute, at best.

Some of that will be alleviated by me getting more experience. People out there are doing these innovative things with tech comm, and seeing the benefits, and it’s the company that’s missing out when I fail to get the message across, or when they just don’t have ears to hear it. But when the rest of the features in the product are being built based on intuition and domain expertise, why should I expect the help to get treated to more empirical methods?

I’m not oblivious to the fact that I got all wound up like this last time, and that it might pass as soon as I get another project that’s shiny to me.

For now, it’s giving me plenty of blog post ideas.

This is the question I want to answer: do advanced degrees (or additional degrees) for technical communicators pay off?

This can be broken into several parts/posts: how much do technical communicators make with various bachelor degrees or less, how much more do they make with additional degrees, how is that different in different parts of the U.S. and in different parts of the world? How do the degrees contribute to other factors of job satisfaction? Which degrees help the most for which jobs? Do other skills or circumstances play a bigger role in salary and satisfaction?

In the meantime, I’m looking at Illinois Institute of Technology or Illinois State for one of these degrees:

• Graduate Certificate in Systems Analysis
• MS or BS in Information Architecture (not sure which makes more sense, yet)
• BS in Computer Science

Squee!

Education is a Strange Deliverable

I have been taking online classes this semester; Trigonometry, Intro to Web Page Creation, and Java I. All three have been a challenge, but that’s what one expects from college courses. What I didn’t expect is that my experience with the online course format would suck so much joy out of the whole thing. It has taken me until now—three quarters of the way through the semester—to let go of the grade and just be happy learning whatever I can.

This is the first time I’ve taken online courses, and it turns out that studying all the material at home by myself can be done, but it’s not the most efficient. I finally went out and hooked up with some tutors (mathletic friends and, once, the school tutoring lab). For me, an hour studying with a tutor is worth five hours of studying by myself. But the tutoring is a limited resource, and I still have to get through the remainder of the semester mainly on my own. I doubt I’ll choose online courses again. There is almost no scenario I can think of that would make it worth the tremendous effort it requires from me.

I’m not totally “letting go of the grade.” I think it helps to keep in mind what score I’m aiming for, especially when I may not pass if I don’t get a high enough score, at this point. It’s good to have a number that I’m aiming for. But if I don’t hit it, that doesn’t mean I didn’t work hard, or that I’ve wasted my time, or that I’m pursuing the wrong degree. I’m not going to let my anxiety over the grade overshadow every part of my experience with the class. I’m detaching myself somewhat from the outcome and focusing on the process. Even though it takes me hours to finish half of a Trig assignment, it’s so satisfying to get those handful of right answers. I’m cramming bits of Trig into my brain, bit by bit.

This is different than what I do at work, and my work process keeps wanting to kick in—if a deliverable is at risk, evaluate and adjust one of the legs of the project. Add resources, add time, or reduce quality. The semester is a fixed length, of course, so I started cutting out more social time and rest; sometimes staying up pretty late to get to a certain point in my homework, planning my blocks of study time and how much should be completed after each session—and still not finishing everything. So I could feel better that I wasn’t slacking, but then I would wonder what was wrong with my approach that took so long. After every test and assignment, I reflect and tweak things. And I’m still turning in incomplete work.

But I’m learning so much. After pouring over chapter three of my Java book (which was after reading it once and flubbing the assignments), I had a grasp on some basic terms and methods. I could read a simple application and understand how the parts worked together. Last night I finally sat down and wrote one myself and it felt like writing a song, no joke. Loved it. I loved debugging the errors, and trying to condense things into variables. I loved answering the cheesy ASCII questions with my fake data. I love that the teacher has it set up so that you suffer if you turn in things last minute (every test has answers that you’ll want to dispute, for example). That’s just like the real workplace, in my experience.

After I turned in the application (I only finished one of the three assignments that were due on time), I indulged myself in some chat on the class discussion board, which we have to participate in for our grade. To hell with the fact that I’m probably not one of the best students. I still have something to contribute.