From Schoolroom to Workroom

Job Title

I am working as the assistant editor of the CEA Forum. I work closely with Dr. McDaniel who is my supervisor as well as the editor of the CEA Forum.

Responsibilities

I have had varying responsibilities throughout this internship, including designing and creating a promotional flyer, correcting website typos and errors, designing a workflow document for future interns to reference, learning how to navigate and use the CMS for the forum, as well as editing article submissions, communicating with authors, and applying a template to articles as well as checking the format against the style sheet.

Qualifications

Some qualifications for this job would include:

• ·      Upper-level classman in the technical writing emphasis
• ·      Completing of Technical/Professional Writing
• ·      Completion of Document Design
• ·      Completion of Technical/Professional Editing
• ·      Familiarity with Microsoft word, especially using review feature

Preferred qualifications:

• ·      Basic knowledge of InDesign or similar graphic design software
• ·      Previous experience with content management systems

New Skill Acquisition

The majority of abilities and skills I have needed during this internship are ones that I feel I have already learned in the classroom; for instance, skills needed to design and create a flyer incorporated knowledge from my previous learning and experiences in classes like document design and page layout software. Knowledge required to make an effective workflow document applies skills learned in my technical/professional writing, advanced technical/professional writing, editing, and document design classes. I was actually quite happy and surprised by how much my classes had helped to prepare me for a “real world” scenario. I had expected that much like Anson and Forsberg wrote I would be one of the students who went from my experience in the classroom to a position in an organization or company where the expectations would not line up with those of the academic world. It seems that this is a popular fear and warning that I hear, that even though going to school and getting our degrees is supposed to prepare us for a job in the corporate world what we are taught and what is expected from a company are two different things. I was happy that in my case they are not all that different, what makes a good document for a class project still makes a good document in a real world application of those skills.

Abilities and Skills I Expected to Use

I thought that I would use more graphic design skills in this internship, but they were very minimal. I also thought that I may need to work with social media but was unsure if that would be part of my responsibilities or not. The only thing close to social media I dealt with was the website itself. Other than those two things I feel that my expectations of needed skills was mostly accurate.

Writing Context, Work Atmosphere, Organizational Hierarchy

This internship experience was mostly informal; because the meetings with my supervisor were one-on-one and we worked through what each of my assignments was as they came up there was very good communication and I felt that I had a clear understanding of what was expected in my work. The writing context was still professional in most of my documents, perhaps with the exception of the workflow document, which had a very informal tone to the writing.

Works Consulted

Anson, Chrisand Lee Forsberg. “Moving Beyond the Academic Community: Transitional Stages in Professional Writing”

Driskill, Linda. “Understanding the Writing Contexts in Organizations”

Katz, Susan. “A Newcomer Gains Power: An Analysis of the Role of Rhetorical Expertise”