That’s What I’m Talkin’ Bout

            Slowly but steadily, the weeks continue to march by as an intern. As I become more familiar with the U of A as a working environment rather than a study environment and responsibilities begin to mount, I feel like I’m becoming a more useful cog in the U of A machinery. I’m being introduced to more and more projects around the faculty, and my role in all of this is getting better defined each week.

As a psychologist, I will be more or less expected to go into either clinical practice or academia. Both of these prospects can be incredibly rewarding and diverse, but one common aspect they both share is that to make it anywhere, you must distinguish yourself by writing a lot of significant papers. Publish or parish is the first rule of being a successful and respected psychologist. The second rule is that you’re only as good as your next publication. These two rules are two good reasons why my current internship may be very important to me in my future career. Up until last year, I didn’t need to write any papers aside from a few short essays in English and history. Last year though, I had to write several lengthy research papers. I’m getting the hang of it, but I still need practice. Spending the next 14 months as a technical writer will most likely give me hundreds of pages in which to practice my writing skills. This isn’t just directionless writing either. Depending on the day, my audience and goal will shift drastically. I could be writing descriptively, instructionally, or just for the purpose of conveying information, and I could be writing for anyone from first year students to tenured professors to future web developers. Really, I’m being exposed to a pretty big chunk of the writing spectrum.

Last week, I attended a meeting about a project which is especially exciting for me. One of my team mates, Chunyan, is a flash programmer who is making flash animations of all of the first year Physics labs for students to play around with before they get into the actual lab environment. It is something that has been done in other labs around the world, but so far it hasn’t been explored at the U of A very much. The meeting was between Chunyan and myself, and it was to discuss the paper we will be writing to announce the progress we have made in virtual physics labs to various educational journals. Not only do I get some more writing practice in, but I also get my name in the “by” line of an actual publication. As it is my next publication, I’d better make sure that it’s a good one. Chunyan was telling me at the meeting that she has trouble just sitting down and putting pen to paper, so I will be over seeing the introduction and discussion/conclusion sections. It’s not all me though. I have already started to do research so I will know what all to write about, but I will also be pulling together tidbits from several other people around campus to create the paper. I’m pretty thrilled about the whole situation though. It seems like this job keeps getting better and better, even if I have to do some real work every now and then.