If you had met Jack Labriola ten years ago, you’d probably find him walking the halls of the English department in Texas Tech, navigating graduate school, juggling coursework, teaching undergraduates, and planning for a life in academia. He loved the classroom, thrived in it, but like many of us with curious minds and evolving ambitions, Jack’s story took a turn when he ventured into a thriving user experience research career in the tech industry. Jack completed both his master’s and PhD at Texas Tech University, spending six years immersed in the well-structured Technical Communication and Rhetoric program. He describes the…
Author: Tom Deans
Toluwani Odedeyi, Thais Rodrigues Cons
Tom Deans directs the Writing Center at the University of Connecticut, where is also a professor of English.
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…
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…