The Context of the Workplace

As an intern at Missouri Southern State University’s Student Success Center, I had the primary responsibility of creating a user manual for Tutortrac, a program recently purchased to help catalogue various facets of the center’s tutoring program. Like some internships, I never had an official job title (aside from “intern,” of course) because I was working in the department to perform an unconventional job, and my position would be unnecessary after my work was done.

Because I was designing a manual for a specific group of people, I had to understand how that group communicates and what their expectations are for the program. In the case of Tutortrac, many of its features were irrelevant to the Student Success Center’s goals, so part of the manual’s goals was to subordinate those features to the features that actually pertain to those goals. Because of this, I had to be able to interact with the administrative staff to learn how they think, how they communicate, and what they value in order to sculpt the manual to be user friendly. In a way, I was learning how to shape my writing to a specific audience, which was probably the most important skill for my internship.

What I did not do was follow the module in most academic communities. Typically, academic settings have students learning certain disciplines and then illustrate their knowledge in writing. In most humanistic programs, such as the English programs I had come from, the writing could take on any voice that the student writer wanted. Like many interns, I had to relearn the relationship between writing and its context, specifically because the environment had changed to one where my original expectations (that who I was writing for would know more about my subject than I did) we disappointed by the reality that I had to become the master of my own subject, and if I didn’t know about the subject (Anson & Forsberg 207-208), the student success center would only learn about it when the manual stopped working for them.

In some ways, I was not prepared for the freedom’s this position gave me. I expected to work on public relations and signage as part of my position, but I never really did much design work. Instead, when I was given jobs that related to something other than the manual, I would usually be working as an editor. I found that I entered the department with a level of prestige that came from my history as an English major because it gave me a level of rhetorical expertise (Katz 437). In a classroom setting for most English majors, this power dynamic is foreign because of the sense of equality that exists within English classes – while some students may be better than others, there is an awareness that most students are on the same or a similar level of expertise. The English classroom does not prepare students for the writing and editing I did as an intern because it only gives students the context of an English classroom and not the context of a department that has writing needs with only a limited number of members formally trained in writing (Driskill 59).

Though my appointment at the Student Success Center was for a position that would not really exist once the work was done, I appreciate the opportunity to have my expectations dismissed. While the classroom can give the student access to information that can be used in a variety of contexts (59), the opportunity to intern in limited positions that have no name, and that perhaps did not exist before the intern, provide an opportunity to work in a different environment and context, allowing the intern’s skills to be shaped in ways the classroom simply cannot.

Works Cited

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”