[Insert necessary comments about time since last post here. And it works, by the way–singing to the dog. He hasn’t pooped in the house since then.]
Shout outs: Congrats to Jenny McKeel, for making an appearance in Wired, my favorite magazine! (Double congrats for all the cool things she’s doing there!) And congrats to Claire Vaye Watkins, whose book I saw in the Salt Lake Airport! Way to go!
My current title is Enterprise Applications Analyst/Programmer at Pillsbury law. I’m an IT professional, which may come as a surprise to some of you. I’m also the co-founder of a small software company, Eunides Technologies. This has been a pretty big shift for my career. And another shift is coming.
Shai has been offered the opportunity to get her MBA from The Ohio State University. Of course, that means two more years of season tickets to Buckeyes football, so we have to do it. That means I’m looking for my next career opportunity. Yes, Ohio State does need a new President. And yes, I moved from Columbus to Nashville and am now coming back to Columbus. And yes, I’m Mormon. So, yes, I’m clearly the perfect candidate to replace Gordon Gee. But I’m still pretty interested in the IT thing. I’m staying focused on that right now.
In speaking to potential employers, I’ve been answering a similar question repeatedly, and it’s got me thinking about the wiggly-waggly path I’ve been on. That question is this: You have a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. How did you end up in IT? Well, here’s the answer.
Let me cliche this a bit and say that the real question might be how did I end up in English and Creative Writing? When I was in seventh grade, all I wanted to do was work with computers. My aunt Tami bought me a book on HTML 4 and I devoured it and started writing awful websites. I learned some Java and C++. I signed up for a class on BASIC at school, and I was pretty good.
It helped that my dad was a bit of a gadget guy. He wasn’t much of a tinkerer or anything, but we had a computer in the house, and we had the internet before Google was a thing. I was lucky he trusted me enough to let me play around.
Well, the army moved us to Germany, and I went from BASIC to QBASIC. A couple weeks into it, my instructor said, “I think you already know more about this than I know. Keep yourself busy.” The interwebs were much more expensive in Germany at the time, and so I didn’t have the access to the growing online knowledge base I had before. I had a harder time getting a hold of books and finding a like-minded community. So I started exploring other outlets. That’s when I taught myself to play guitar and wrote the classic hit “The Happy People Go” with David Barbee.
The happy people go
Around and round and round
And up and down
On their horsies and little swingies
Until one day
Someone blew up the park
And now they’re all dark
Because they’re all burnt!
You may not have heard it before. It was really only big in Belarus, although it was quickly overshadowed by Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping.”
I’d always been a bit of a writer, and writing songs really caught my interest, and then poetry. For a while I wanted to study music, but eventually I landed in literature. I’ve played it over in my head a few times, and I can’t figure out why I never really considered studying computer science in school. I’m definitely glad I studied English, though.
All this to say that while the shift from English and teaching to IT is certainly a big one on the surface, to some degree I’ve been on this road for a long time. In college, I worked as an AutoCAD designer. I built a database and website of Emily Dickinson’s references to the Bible as a graduate project (http://sapphirefellows.zzl.org). Granted, there’s a difference between a hobby and a profession, but mostly that difference is how much you get paid to do it.
You can see by now that the title of the post is a little misleading. I didn’t exactly turn a degree in English into an IT Career. Still, when you’re getting a degree in Literature and Creative Writing, a lot of people ask you what you plan on doing with that. IT careers aren’t on that list. It’s an unusual path. I recognize that. It’s kind of exciting, right?
There’s another question that doesn’t come up often enough, though and that is, IMHO, much more important. The way people ask the question of how I came into IT from an English background implies that the two skill sets are unrelated and possibly irrelevant to one another. Fair enough. Feminist criticism hasn’t had much of an influence on my C# code. But a lot of what I learned as an English major has been incredibly applicable in my current career and often has made me a stand-out candidate. I’ll explain why in my next post!
Love Calls Us... 