This is the second post of our Let’s Talk Academia, Industry, and Career Transitions. In this special edition of the DRC Talk Series, we chat with professionals in Rhetoric and Composition or Technical and Professional Communication who have successfully transitioned beyond academia. Our goal is to learn from their experiences and gather practical advice and resources for graduate students and early career scholars exploring similar paths. Thais Rodrigues Cons (1st author) Toluwani Odedeyi (2nd author) When Dr. Charisse Iglesias joined the Zoom meeting with Toluwani and I, there was a sense of connection right away, not just because she’s an…
Author: Thais Rodrigues Cons
Thais Rodrigues Cons, Toluwani Odedeyi
Thais Rodrigues Cons is a PhD student in Rhetoric & Composition at the University of Arizona, where she currently works at the Graduate Center Office of Fellowships and Writing Support. Her research interests include Technical and Professional Writing, Critical Digital Literacies, Multilingual Writing & Identity, and Writing Centers.
Addison Kliewer did not initially plan to become a technical writer. As an undergraduate honors student majoring in English at the University of Texas, Austin, he envisioned an academic career in publishing, teaching, or even writing books. He was drawn to how storytelling can be enriching and insightful, fascinated by how clothing symbolized identity and status in classic literature like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. Multiple visits to his university’s career center where he learned about technical writing, along with his parents’ guidance (two former technical writers), changed everything. It wasn’t the writing career he had originally envisioned, but the…
Writing and technology—either together or separately—have always played a big role in my identity. I was a middle-class Brazilian kid in the early 1990s. So I would write about my feelings in a journal, read and replicate poems, play the synthesizer, and eventually type on our family Windows 98 computer. As a teenager, some of the first times when I remember finding genuine community were not necessarily in school environments, but online, and to the sound of the dial-up internet. It was the early popularity of email and MSN; RPG online forums, Myspace, Orkut (a proto-version of Facebook, owned by…
During my formal education as an English and Portuguese language and literature undergraduate major in Brazil, I learned English through traditional methods like timed exams, grammar drills, and textbooks, and was mostly discouraged from using technology. This approach left me feeling inadequate, and I soon internalized that “writing in English was not for me.” Despite teaching English to Brazilians, I never felt confident in my written pieces in English. Everything changed when I started volunteering at CAPA, the Academic Publishing Advisory Center— a writing center in southern Brazil where I acted as a translator and tutor, translating faculty and graduate…