LinkedIn to the Job

I started my doctoral program at the ripe age of 22. I was only 2 years out of college. Because of my writing center experience, I was fast-tracked to act as a senior consultant and to teach an English class immediately. Needless to say, I was nervous.

The only picture from teaching ever,
and it's awful, but I loved this class.

I was especially nervous about being respected by my students. They were not that much younger than me, and I knew I would have to earn their trust. I was worried about being labeled a "novice" and being excluded from professional conversations and opportunities.

I also had some skeletons in my closet. Facebook came out my freshman year of college for college students only. I was a freshman learning to use a new technology, and the ramifications of this technology were still years away from really being considered. Not to say that I ever really did anything that bad during my college years, but I didn't want my students or colleagues to see my personal life and judge me. I didn't want them to assume I did drugs because they saw pictures of me at nightclubs and raves (I don't do them and never have, by the way). I didn't want them to assume I was unintelligent-- or worse-- because I enjoy mini-skirts and makeup. I didn't want them to assume I was wealthy because I was on the Equestrian team. I wanted to be able to develop my own persona and for their judgement to be based on my actions in a professional environment.

Luckily, I realized that social networking profiles could be more about who you wanted to be than who you actually were. Even more so, that who you showed you wanted to be on social media attracted like-minded people. I wanted to be a well-educated professional and a competitive scholar.

Case Study # 1 

I went to work. I made sure that when you Googled "Nicole Papaioannou" my history of horseback riding and college parties didn't come up. Instead, you'd find a slew of academic-related profiles and my work (and perhaps a few articles about the other Nicole Papaioannou, over in Cyprus-- she's a ballroom dancer). Go ahead, try it!

I saw how my online presence shaped my offline life. My students read my profiles and saw a professor, rather than a grad student.

Colleagues thought I had something worth saying. They asked to work on research with me. They extended learning opportunities to me.

And years later, a professor in the department read my blog, reached out to me, and eventually became my dissertation chair, despite not ever having a class together.

Then I decided to go to California. Before I made the move, I snagged a well-paying job in a month (pretty unusual for LA, I hear) mostly based on what they read in my LinkedIn profile, as well as looking at my instructional design philosophy via my course website. It was what set me apart at the starting gate.

Social media is important to becoming a professional. I know this beyond a doubt. 

Case Study # 2

My (then) boyfriend and I made the move out West together. He left a full-time job to try to create a better life out here, including finishing college. Without a degree, though, in a city full of actors and part-timers, it was really a challenge for him to find work. Eventually, he turned to me for help.

The first thing I told him was to create a really good LinkedIn profile and a professional portfolio.

It took a little, but he landed his ideal job. He works alongside like-minded individuals at a company committed to continuing education for its staff. It's a place he is proud to work.

The funny thing is... he NEVER APPLIED for the job.

During his first interview, he learned that the hiring manager reached out to him based on what she saw on his LinkedIn profile.

Pointers for Professionalizing Online

Here are some things I learned about developing an online presence along the way:

1. Make as many profiles as you can... keep up with. It's great to have an all-encompassing social media presence, but it doesn't serve you well if information becomes outdated. It makes you look uninterested. 

2. Have great taglines! We all have short attention spans. If you can capture your essence in 40 characters, you have a competitive advantage. 

3. Show don't tell-- build an ePortfolio. Whether it's a formal online portfolio, a website, or links to work that you've done, people want to see what you can do, not just what you say you can do.

4. Engage in the right conversations. Share and discuss issues relevant to that image you want to create. If you like photography, post resources for other photographers, comment on photography blogs, and show your pictures. Engaging in the right conversations might also mean you have to apply self-censorship. For example, fact-checking when you want to post something that seem too crazy to be real is important to maintaining credibility. If you post that Tupac was sighted, you better be ready to provide legitimate resources to back up that claim. Think of all the internet hoaxes that get spread by people who are too lazy to do a quick internet search on"giant squid hoax."

Ultimately, this doesn't have to be about a job. It could be about entering any community that you want to be a part of.

Your social media presence is a self-portrait, a piece of art. It's like the lighting in a painting. It can make an object attractive and beautiful or cast it into the shadows. You are the painter, here.

Choose what you want to highlight and what you want to hide in the dark.

Problematizing Problematizing

The last time I wrote a post was almost 9 months ago. Since then, a lot has happened.

• I moved from the suburbs of NJ to the city of Los Angeles. 
• I left my job as an adjunct and writing center consultant and took a job as an Instructional Designer at a startup EdTech company.
• I developed courses about automobiles, medical compliance, and all things aviation (aircraft systems, aviation regulation, inflight service, etc.). 
• I got promoted from Instructional Designer to Content Manager and now oversee a team of Instructional Designers and Subject Matter Experts. I also interface with executives from the client company.

So what's the biggest thing I've learned during this transition?

There's a problem with problematizing. 

From the time I took my first graduate Writing Studies course until I taught my last writing course, problematizing became a central focus of my life. Authority was demonstrated by the ability to find flaws in others' ideas, to be able to "make an argument." It transitioned from academic analysis to social analysis to picking apart every little facet of my life. To be smart, it seemed, I had to see the loopholes and the weaknesses in every theory, practice, and action, and to be socially just, I had to make sure to bring up the problems I saw in every space. I had to spread awareness.

Things could never be simple, and you could never take them at surface value.

When I became an Instructional Designer at a startup, there wasn't too much to problematize. I was given the content. I turned it into instructional materials, and I moved forward. I wasn't an expert in the content, and I didn't have enough authority to poke holes. I could learn without trying to be an authority on the subject matter. I was also too much of an authority on pedagogy for my colleagues in video production and animation to challenge. It was freeing.

When I was promoted to manager, however, I was given new authority. As I transitioned into the management role, I found myself problematizing everything. I'd essentially complain to the Director of Curriculum Development about everything that "wasn't working" and tell her why it wasn't working. On some level, I thought that showing her I saw that our system was flawed was demonstrating authority, intelligence, showing her I was smart enough to be a good manager. Now, I'm sure it was just irritating. It definitely wasn't good management.

Good management requires making decisions, taking action, and ultimately risking being wrong. These are not skills that are advocated in the current educational climate, where we are pushed to always be right, to make "arguments," and to strike at the weaknesses in other's theories in order to bolster our own, where we are taught that we need to make people more aware of their misconceptions.

Spreading awareness used to be difficult. It used to require action. Now, it's mostly kids whining from behind a keyboard, claiming that you "just need to like or share" to save the world or expressing offense over non-PC language (I've done this myself-- totally guilty).

What I've learned is that outside of academia there is little place for problematizing without action. There is only a need for solutions. Someone who can analyze then think beyond the form of the problem is valuable.

While I know the idea of using knowledge to take action was built somewhere into my education--  mostly in relationships with mentors-- it became buried in the layers of problematizing and reestablishing the hierarchy of experts and novices. It became the reason I left academia. I felt that everyone always needed to leave a mark on an idea and only did so by deconstructing it, by finding what needed to be improved, rarely by an act of support.

To take action is to take a risk, a risk that you might be wrong, a risk that someone else might exercise their "authority" by exposing your action as imperfect or faulty. Theory is, after all, built on ideal circumstance. Action is based in complex reality.

What I've learned from crossing the boundary is that it is much harder, but also much more necessary to become an authority through action rather than argument alone. That is true leadership, and I hope to be a true leader some day.

As of this week, I also traded in the car I drove across the country. It started to "problematize." 

IWAC 2014: Considering "Discipline"

As promised, I'm diving into some of the things that the 2014 IWAC (International Writing Across the Curriculum) Conference presentations prompted me to consider. Today, I'm going to talk more about the wonderful talk given by Melody Pugh, Naomi Silver, and Anne Ruggles Gere called "Interrogating Disciplinarity in WAC/WID: An Institutional Ethnography."

The scholars framed the discussion around what began an institutional review of the Upper Level Writing Requirement (ULWR) at their university, which lead to interviews with faculties and students about their expectations and experiences with these ULWR. What they found was a real struggle with defining disciplines/disciplinarity and whether their concepts of "writing in the discipline" would actually serve students. Many students and professors expressed a desire to explore more genres, but felt that was outside the bounds of "writing in the discipline," which largely seemed to boil down to write academic-journal-style papers. They also recognized the tension between forcing students to learn to use disciplinary writing as a researcher in the field when most of them would not be going on to do that type of work. Students questioned value while professors questioned ethics. It was extremely interesting.

The trio will likely continue working with the extensive data and perhaps publish some of their findings, so I don't want to give away all of their secrets, but I do really want to use their work to think about what it means to be "in the discipline," as they asked the audience to think about. What does it mean to "write in the discipline"? Is "the discourse of the field" only the work published in journals and books? Where do disciplines start and end? How does the way we conceptualize discipline affect how we assign writing?

I thought some of the audience members' questions and comments were very insightful. Here's just a few:

• Would it be better to consider disciplines as centers rather than closed-off spaces with boundaries?
• Is the WAC/WID version of disicplinarity just a selling model that positions us in a power relation  over other departments?
• Is the WAC model more useful than the WID model? Does wider help, or is "honoring of the occasion more helpful"? 
• It seems that when we consider disciplinarity in writing courses, we get the rhetoric and epistemology stuff, but we seem to miss the "activity systems" part. How can we/should we be more focused on activity systems in the disciplines?

As I prepare my own Writing in the Disciplines course, where my uses of multimodal texts have been minimal and semi-traditional in that they are fairly linear and usually called "papers"-- write a blog, use a screenshot and hyperlinks in an essay, etc.-- I wonder how my own notions of disciplinarity have shaped and possibly limited my students' learning experiences. I thought they should be learning to write as scholars in their disciplines, learning to mimic the style of academic journals, and that there were other types of writing courses to prepare them for those other types of writing (business writing for memos and executive summaries, for example), but I'm not sure they really are getting it elsewhere., especially if this narrow idea of discipline is pervasive throughout the university.

Though I say I focus on genre diversity and teaching students to address contextual/situational elements, I'm now beginning to question my own understanding and application of these terms in my pedagogy. Am I simply (as a panelist said in another presentation) "putting old wine in a new bottle"? What are the alternatives that come with a new definition, especially one that would be more focused on disciplines as centers or conscious of activity systems?

I will be teaching Writing in the Disciplines again in the fall, and while I thought I had pretty much got my syllabus together, I'm now prepared to go back and scrutinize the application of my conception of "discipline." I'm also considering how I can informally replicate some of the work these women did, finding out what they expected from a course called "Writing in the Disciplines," what they learned that was unexpected but valuable, and what they wish they had learned. Suggestions are much appreciated!

IWAC 2014: Where did the currents take me?

I just returned from the 2014 IWAC (International Writing Across the Curriculum) Conference at the University of Minnesota, and I have to say it was one of my best conference experiences yet. The presentations were engaging, the people were open and friendly, and Minneapolis was a great city.

During my brief two days there, I managed to sit in on 5 panels, one in which I presented, a keynote, and an incredible plenary session. In truth, it made me a little sad that I'm not a WAC WPA because I would have loved the opportunity to implement some of the ideas that were discussed at the universities where I am involved in writing pedagogy.

The Panels

Here is a brief overview of the titles of the panels that I attended:

• Role Reversal: When Students Teach Faculty in WAC Programs - Deanna Daniels & Brandy Grabow, Kate Ronald & Lucy Manley, and Greg Skutches
• Writing Beyond the Curriculum - Nicole Papaioannou, Dan Reis & Caroline Klidonas, and KaaVonia Hinton & Yonghee Suh
• Interrogating Disciplinarity in WAC/WID: An Institutional Ethnography - Anne Ruggles Gere, Naomi Silver, & Melody Pugh
• Teaching Meaningful Writing: What Faculty Say About Writing Assignments in Their Disciplines - Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, & Neal Lerner
• Multimodal Literacy: Writing, Reading, & Transfer - Andrea Glover, Maggie Christensen, and G. Travis Adams

I will take some time to address the larger issues in each of these panels in separate posts, but I wanted to recap some of the big questions that I've started to ask as a result of these panels and some of the discussion that followed. I picked one large question that was sparked by each.

• Does the campus culture empower students?
• How can on-campus organizations make use of student writers and also enhance student writing?
• How do we frame disciplines? Should we moving toward a theory of centers rather than a theory of boundaries?
• What makes a writing assignment meaningful?
• Should we shift to a WRAC model (writing and reading across the curriculum)?

These questions may be brief in text, but responses are complex, and the ways in which those responses shape student learning experiences and faculty development are important.

The Plenary

The plenary session focused on creating sustainable WAC programs and was led by an A-team of scholars-- Chris Anson, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Chris Thaiss, Linda Adler-Kassner, and Bob McMaster-- who role-played how they would deal with a failing, under-resourced WAC program (a very cool divergence from the traditional plenary talk). Anson would propose scenarios, building the complexities facing the school bit by bit, and the 5 others would respond on the fly. They did not know what they would be asked beforehand.

 As some who hopes to be a WPA one day, I was really intrigued by how the scholars embodied the different thought processes, concerns, and strengths of each individual involved in a WAC initiative, ranging from department chairs to WAC directors to provosts to students. I thought, aside from having a bit of fun, they were incredibly in-tune with those that they served and incredibly empathetic. It helped me see what I might come up against should I someday be invited to try to enhance or save a WAC program.

The speakers reminded the audience that sustainability went beyond a current context and a current moment and planned for the future. The solution also had to be built within the framework of the local context with input from all stakeholders (as much as possible, that is). Top-down initiatives would feel imposing and oppressive and often fail to effectively use the strengths of the parties involved. Collaboration, where possible, is a wonderful thing.

The most important things I took away were:

1. Understand the campus climate and be prepared to work within it, even if the aim is to change it. No model is one-size-fits-all when it comes to campus writing initiatives.
2. Be sensitive to people's fears and frustrations. See challenges as moments for reflection, negotiation, or collaborative education.
3. Bring joy into the work. Focus on the pleasures of learning from one another and the pleasure of writing.

What seems evident from these talks and discussions is that the people here really care about their students and their colleagues. While many people were doing serious research, it was easy to see how much of it could be put into practice and was largely aimed at contributing to a positive learning environment for everyone involved. IWAC really made me excited about the work I'm doing, the field that I intend to contribute to, and continued interactions with the people who I am privileged to call my colleagues. I'm looking forward to (fingers crossed) attending again in 2016.

I would love to hear from IWAC-attendees about their experiences at the conference and from those interested in campus writing initiatives what to make of some of these big questions and themes.

How to Lose a Job Before You Get It:

Cover Letters and the Consequences of Lacking Rhetorical Awareness

As I wrote about in my last post, I've been working part-time at an IT company as a technical writer for the summer. One of the tasks that have been entrusted to me as part of the technical writing team is to filter through applications for a full-time entry-level technical writer. I thought that choosing between the qualified candidates would be a difficult task. Instead, finding a qualified individual has been the harder job. It's shocking how many people claim "excellence in written communication," yet fail miserably at effectively communicating.

There are several composing models that I could use to think about these issues. I could consider Flower and Hayes' thoughts on defining a rhetorical problem-- better writers see more layers. I could consider Lloyd Bitzer's theories on about exigences, audiences, and constraints. These applications are ineffective because they seem to only consider exigence, the problem. I'd even argue that some of them are not consider exigence completely. They are considering their problem or purpose for writing-- finding a job. What is clear is that these applicants do not possess rhetorical awareness. Their focus is too narrow and sometimes inflexible.

So, let me share some of the things NOT to do when writing a cover letter, especially if you are writing a cover letter for a technical-writing position:

• Do NOT read only part of the job application. Read the whole thing!!! I will say that 9/10 cover letters that I received did not fulfill the requirements listed on the job posting. If you can't follow simple directions and did not read an entire short ad, I will have to assume you will be just as careless with your work if hired. If we're talking rhetorical concepts, I definitely am doubting your ethos.

• Do NOT explain how this job would just be a 9-5 to fill your pockets so that you can commit to other aspirations, such as working for another company or financing a book project. I am not looking to hire someone who does not really care about the job. I am not looking to spend my time training someone who will leave as soon as they can. I am not looking to build your portfolio. I am looking for someone who wants to do the job for which they are applying and do it well. Consider your audience. 

• With that said, do NOT tell me everything this company can do FOR YOU. You are supposed to show me what you can do for the company. I do not care if I can provide you with the education necessary to get you into your actual dream job. As a matter of fact, like I said before, I'm not going to waste my time on you if you've already told me you want to move on as soon as you've learned enough. People who send me lists of ways the company can help them are clearly not considering the rhetorical problem/situation/ecology in any complex way. They are thinking only of their own problems, not of what prompted the job ad in the first place-- a need for a qualified, dedicated applicant.

• Do NOT send a cookie-cutter letter, especially if it's only three lines long with a note telling me to call you. An obvious lack of effort will never be a positive selling point. Plus, hiring managers are usually employees who have other tasks to do outside looking for a new employee. In other words, I'm busy. I'm not tracking you down to chat. Tell me what I need to know, and then I might be interested in learning more. Make a logical argument for why you fit this position in this particular context.

• Do NOT forget to proofread. If you are trying to claim excellence in editing and proofreading, you look [insert a whole slew of negative attributes here] when you leave typos in your cover letter and/or resume.

Usually, I like to think about composing through a broader, more complex ecological framework. I could talk about all of the other issues that may affect composing processes-- who is typing their cover letter on an iPhone, who has been hit hardest by economic decline, etc. In this case, though, simply remembering to consider three things-- the task they are being asked to perform, the audience they are being asked to address, and the limitations of what they can share with that audience-- would have helped these writers immensely.

This is why it's extremely important that rhetorical awareness-- rather than just form or content-- is a center piece of writing instruction. Every writing event will not call for the same performance or product, even ones that seem extremely similar. Those who cannot locate the elements that influence the writing event and ask the right questions of themselves will be unable to perform and produce effective writing, and they may miss out on real opportunities as a result.

The Expert as Novice: Reliving the Freshman Year

image from techwhirl.com

For the past few weeks, I've been working part-time at an IT consulting & network integration firm in downtown Manhattan as part of the technical writing team (which is really just me & the existing technical writer). The thing is, even though I’m (somewhat) proficient at writing for academic purposes, technical writing is a whole new ball game. While my writing is clean and easy to read, I don’t always have the knowledge to write what needs to be written. It’s a bit confidence-shaking. I’m feeling like an intern rather than someone whose specialty is writing.

Feeling like a beginner isn't easy, especially when you've devoted your entire adult life thus far to studying English and Communications, and even more so when as a writing instructor and writing consultant, I’m supposed to be an expert writer. It’s true that I can write for many contexts. Heck, I can even teach writing in the disciplines! But writing in the professional domain about information technology has proven challenging, and my lack of content knowledge is extremely frustrating. I know if I knew more, I could write better.

This brings me back to some of the literature that I have been reading for my dissertation. Sommers & Saltz’s study “The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year,” for instance, talks about the struggle that freshman face as they are placed in a new writing environment, where they are expected to perform as experts without already having expertise. While it it is the process of writing that these freshman struggle with, it is also the writing that helps them to make sense of complex concepts and gain expertise. Furthermore, they find that students who embrace their novice status are the ones most likely to make the greatest strides in writing development and learning in general. Continued writing is helping me to gain an understanding of the IT field, but embracing my novice is still a challenge.

Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers by Lee Ann Carroll also speak into my situation. Carroll thinks writing assignments need to be redefined as literacy tasks because they require much more than just a handle on writing skills, such as grammar and organization. Writing tasks require some knowledge about the content area, an ability to negotiate the needs of the audience with the needs of the writer, to understand form, and perhaps to navigate information. Many literacies are involved in the composition of a single piece of writing. And with new roles come new literacy needs. In this case, my inability to perform as I would on, say, an essay for a Writing Studies course is directly related to being asked to perform a new role and a lack of information technology literacy. I am missing the necessary vocabulary and am fairly unaware of the conventions of the field. No matter how cleanly I can write, I will not be able to produce the quality of writing that someone who has in-depth knowledge of the field will be able to produce. My performance as a technical writer is affected by this lack of knowledge. Again, this is extremely frustrating to someone who supposedly has “mastered” reading and writing, with nearly 10 years of higher education devoted to it.

To cope with my lack of knowledge, I have been reading, taking notes on style, and asking questions-- and I am learning a lot-- but the process of learning to be an effective technical writer at an IT firm is still a much slower process than I’m comfortable with. Even when I feel that I’ve said something as precisely as possible, I am often told “that’s great, but here’s an even better way.” The person I am working under is great in that he tries to encourage me, but still, sometimes, I feel like my work is more of a burden to correct than a lightening of his workload. It can be totally disheartening.

It really makes me empathize with my students. It makes me see that they probably are giving me their best efforts and that my feedback to them may come as a surprise. It shows me that while they may understand my feedback in theory, they may not know how to put it into practice. Furthermore, encouragement is nice and may be genuine, but without specifics or if always followed by “but here’s what you need to fix,” it may wind up being meaningless. On the other hand, this experience also shows me that with time, effort, a willingness to research concepts and revise their writing, and a careful eye for rhetorical analysis, students will be able to make significant progress. Finally, this progress likely will not come in rapid epiphanies, but as a slow, non-linear coming into awareness.