Re: teachers turned tech writers

[Christine -dot- Anameier -at- seagate -dot- com]

I spent five years working on a PhD in English, and left for several
reasons:
(1) Teaching even one course at a time was hard work--teaching 2 or 3 or 4
at a time plus committee work plus writing for publication would have been
a recipe for exhaustion. There's no way I could have given my students all
the attention I felt they deserved.
(2) The job market for English PhDs was (and probably still is) horrendous.
You're lucky if you manage to find a part-time temporary position in some
distant state, paying maybe $30K.
(3) Tech writing satisfies my "teaching urge" pretty well and has an added
advantage: I can do it in writing, which comes more easily to me than
public speaking. I'm an introvert who had to practically undergo a
personality transplant to survive in the classroom. I really liked
teaching, and I'm told I taught very well, but it took enormous energy.
(4) Now I get to play with computers, I'm not grading papers at 2 in the
morning, and I make a pretty good living.

To teach at the college level, which is what I had wanted, you don't just
teach; you write books, present papers, deal with department politics...
and I had no interest in those things. By my last year in grad school, I
had abandoned my own studies and devoted all my time to teaching. I had to
either get back on track and write a thesis, or get out, so I got out.

Christine Anameier



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