Re: Boring discussions

[burgamw1 <burgamw1 -at- TEOMAIL -dot- JHUAPL -dot- EDU>]

Willard-

Be assured that there are those of us out here who love our work. I'm a
scientific writer/editor in a research and development laboratory of a
university. I am never bored--tired, exasperated, or ready to pull my hair out
at times, but never bored.

I work on subjects ranging from space science to oceanography to biomedical
engineering to fabrication of electronic equipment. The documents include papers
for scientific journals, technical and administrative reports, books and
monographs, fact sheets, and brochures. My clients include engineers,
physicists, mathematicians, and administrative and upper management folk. I'm
usually the project manager on a job, leading a team composed of an illustrator
and a compositor/page layout specialist, with me as the editor/writer. I learn
something from every document I work on and, over the years (more than 20, not
all of them at my current place of employment), I've gained a broad knowledge of
many different scientific and technical fields.

In addition to working on documents, I've taught in-house courses in writing of
reports and scientific papers. I'm active in my local chapter of the Society for
Technical Communication, a charter member of STC's Scientific Communication
Professional Interest Committee, and I've presented papers at STC's annual
conference.

So--don't get discouraged before you've even begun your life's work. You might
be as lucky as I am to find that area of technical writing that is fascinating
and satisfying to you.

Murrie Burgan, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
murrie -dot- burgan -at- jhuapl -dot- edu