~Thursday~ I went to catch the Wolfline bus at 8:00 to meet a student in the MS in Technical Communication program at 8:30 at Reverie coffee shop on Hillsborough Street, just down the street from my office. Not two minutes after I arrived at the stop, I remembered that it was Easter Break for the students today and tomorrow and that the university buses weren’t running.
Knowing I wouldn’t make it in time if I tried to wait for the city bus, I just drove to work and used one of my dozen or so free parking tags offered to public transportation users to use whenever the convenience of having a car at work for a day is paramount.
I met, Valerie, who is working on her capstone project for ENG 675, which is the course everyone has to take at the end of the program, and in which you work on a semester-long project whose purpose is to showcase all you’ve learned in the MS in Technical Communication program. Then, at the end of the semester you have to do an oral presentation both explaining and “defending” your project, together which take the place of writing a thesis.
For her project, Valerie is writing a paper to get published about the paths to, and draw of, working in technical communications specifically in higher ed. She taped our 35- or 40-minute conversation, during which she asked me a bunch of questions such as:
- What’s a typical day like in your job?
- Why did you want a technical communication job specifically in higher ed?
- What was your path from computer programmer at IBM in 1980 to technical communicator at NC State University in 2010? You know that took a while to articulate!
- What advice would you give technical communication master’s students who would like to someday work in higher ed?
As, always, I wasn’t short of things to say, and now she’s got about 40 minutes worth of mind dump to sort through and from which to cull salient points.
When I got back to my office, I sent a note to the professor in charge of the defenses this semester and asked him for the schedule. I’d like to attend Valerie’s presentation and defense, and might very well find some of the other projects of interest to attend those as well.
I only had one work meeting today and it, mercifully, got canceled. Before heading out to lunch, I devised my initial greeting e-mail to my South African guest, and fired that off.
I met Susan Katz at noon at Sadlack’s, where when we first arrived, Steven and Jamie were there having lunch as well. Susan and I caught up on a whole bunch of things, and we had a nice stroll back toward my office as she was parked up that way. The weather was beautiful and the Hillsborough redesign project is coming along nicely.
I had to force myself to go to the gym tonight as evidenced by this tweet:
| I am totally not feeling it, but I’m forcing myself to go to the gym. I’m having a mini Milky Way® bar after eating a Lean Cuisine®. #hot #mess |
At the gym, I did upper body work today, which felt pretty good. I know I’m not going to be as sore tomorrow as I was after doing my upper body last week after having been away from it for a couple of weeks. I closed it out with 300 (15 sets of 20 reps) ab crunches.
I met Phil at The Borough at a little after 10:00, but when I got there, he hadn’t yet arrived. However, Steve Nelson was there along with Jason (whose last name I don’t know), and their friend Chris. Jason and Chris both play in the NC Gay Marching Band. I joined them, Steve bought me a drink, and we kibitzed about everyone in the place, having lots of laughs in the process.
Phil and I walked over to Flex sometime between 11:30 and 12:00, where the price to get in was a little more than usual with “out of town” Edith Pitts from Atlanta emceeing Trailer Park Prize Night. I left shortly after the show started at 12:30.
