Summary: What's been the most valuable course you have taken?

["Lois Patterson" <lois -at- dowco -dot- com>]

I found the range of responses very interesting. I wasn't trying to make a
point of any sort, but it's interesting that the answers tend to focus on
both high-level concepts and tools. I have snipped some for brevity. I
really appreciate everyone's answers.

Lois Patterson
============

Sabahat Ashraf:
* User Documentation and Interface Design, a Graduate level course at RPI
[Rensselaer] [during my MS in Tech. Comm]. It was pretty much a summary of
good information design principles generally, good document design, and good
Interface design. I got to take it with Robert Krull. Others teach it as
well.

* I am not sure which course actually made me to it, but FrameMaker was
available on campus at RPI and having used it actually did help me get my
first job in the EDA [see <http://www.edac.org>] industry -- a sector that
has been my bread and butter [with a short break here and there] for the
last 4-5 years.

Lisa Bronson:
The most valuable courses I have taken include physics (impressed the
engineering managers who have hired me), AutoCAD (impressing factors again,
plus I use the software a lot in my work), and Visual Basic and C++
programming courses (I am using FrameScript to do some great things in my
current position).

Bruce Byfield:
Definitely my high school typing class. I was bored silly in the second half
of the class, but if I had known that my living was going to be dependent on
typing, then I would have signed up next year, too.

Other than that, my second major in Communications was important, become I
learned to think in terms of hierarchy theory and logical types, which means
that I have no trouble understanding inheritance and other peculiarities of
object oriented software languages.

Win Day:
The most valuable course I've ever taken was a Small Business Management
course put on by Continuing Education at a local high school. Taught me all
kinds of useful things about marketing, administration, licensing, and most
importantly tax implications of owning and operating a small business. I
think it cost about $50 CDN more than 10 years ago.

The course that had the most impact on my career wasn't a single course but
a complete program. In May I completed a one year post-grad certificate
program in Interactive Multimedia. For eight intense, stressful months I
learned information architecture; graphic design and manipulation; digital
audio and video creation, editing, and delivery; animation; web and CD
authoring languages; and project management. I'd be hard-pressed to say
which individual course was the most valuable.

Kay Ethier:
I can't ditto the typing class. In high school, I never got above 35 wpm! It
wasn't until I got my first office job and starting having *deadlines* that
I really got good at typing.

Most valuable university course -- An Introduction to the Internet night
course at Pitt waaay back...learned all about Archie and Veronica, Gopher,
etc. Was a lot of fun, and I got unlimited access to Gopher.

Runner up -- my Communications classes at Duquesne U by Dr. Arnett. He
really made sense and knew how to apply communication concepts to work and
to life.

Professionally -- the best was a Frame+SGML developing class (taught by N.
Schroer) in mid-1990s. She made it easy to understand what had at first had
looked like hard stuff.

Linnea Dodson:
Hmmm... THE most important, life-changing class I had in grad school was
"Rhetoric: The Art of Persuasion." Why is such an important subject left to
a single semester of grad school when it and logic should be drilled as a
requirement from middle school and up?

Nevertheless, I cannot point to a single specific job I've gotten just
because of it. However, that class and the reading I've done since then have
influenced everything I've done since then. After all, all we do is a form
of persuasion - hire me instead of the other guy, buy my product, accept my
article, agree with my changes, use my ideas, etc., etc., etc.

If I have to point to a career-specific class, it would be "Grant Writing."
Just to have the experience of writing a grant, albeit for a small
non-profit that hasn't used it, is enough to make HR people look interested.

A good grammar course is always useful. It gives you background to defend
your minor changes... and it taught me how to intimidate people by
diagramming sentences. I only did that once, but the guy who kept
rearranging my punctuation never argued with me in a meeting again!

But to tell the truth, the most career-changing class I ever took was
"Basics of MacroMedia Director." Not because I learned all that much about
Director (all I learned was that I am not now nor will I ever be a
programmer) but because the teacher was dyslexic. So he wanted someone to
sub-contract the writing part of the online tutorial he'd been hired to
create and liked the way I handled myself in class. That little subcontract
is the entire foundation of my career as a technical writer.

Laura MacLemale:
I think the most valuable course I have taken would have to be a graduate
course entitled, "Proposal Writing" at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
(RPI) in Troy, NY. (Though I didn't always agree with the professor's
methods,) this course really affected my approach to writing in general. For
me it was one of those courses that feels like a battle and when you get to
the end, you really feel like you've accomplished something. And my writing
definitely improved. (One of the texts was the great "Style: Ten Lessons in
Clarity and Grace" by Joseph Williams.)

Another challenging RPI course was "Typography," in which we immersed
ourselves in the topic and even created our own fonts. That one was tough,
but it definitely appealed to the creative side.

Jane Carnall:
The 4.5 day FrameMaker course I took three years ago. I'd already been using
FrameMaker for three weeks at that point, and (1) the first three days of
the course confirmed (rather expensively for my employers at the time) that
yes indeed, I can learn a package to "intermediate" level inside three weeks
all on my ownie-o, (2) the last day and a half of the course ("Advanced"
level) taught me a whole lot of short cuts and effective ways of doing
things, (3) because I had taken this course, I put FrameMaker down on my CV
right away as a tool I knew - and my interview-getting rate went UP like a
helium balloon on a fine day (4) and from one of those interviews, I got a
job that I was very happy with that paid me double what I was getting at my
previous job.

Laurel Robinson:
Here are the ones I think have helped me most.

Writing Software Documentation
Writing for Online Presentation (online help)
Intro to Technical and Professional Writing

John Fleming:
While it is hard to think of an individual course that stands out as
influencing my career, it is relatively easy to think of a program.

In my case, it's a four year program in electrical engineering.

Exactly how deep that influence is was driven home in an interesting sort or
way last summer. I was talking with the project coordinator for our writing
team on a project I was working on.

We were doing procedures for a company that does billing, and she told me
flat out that she has *never* seen another writer who can handle math the
way I can. And if there was a procedure that needed writing that involved
math, it had a nasty habit of finding its way into my In box.


Bryan Westbrook:
A graduate class title "Software Documentation" that I took a year ago,
shortly after starting my current job writing software documentation after
more several years of writing automotive manuals for the military. It helped
me get back to basics and start thinking for myself again after not being
allowed to for all those years.

Keith Cronin:
Two courses come to mind:

1. HTML - I took a course that lasted just a few weekends, and was
astonished to learn how easy it is. In the three jobs I've had since I
learned it, I've used it extensively at all of them, even though none of
them required it in their initial job descriptions. I am continually amazed
at how many extrememly techical people I know - including software
developers - don't know it! The world has gone to the Web - you should learn
what goes on "behind the curtain!"

2. A professional/business writing course - For those non-English majors
like myself who are strong writers more by instinct than by training, this
was a great refresher/cleaner-upper for me. Not literature, not creative
writing, but how to write in a _business_ context. I took the course
grudgingly (I don't need no steenkin' writing lessons) and was amazed at how
much it helped.


Karen E. Black:
In 2000, I took Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR), a 4-day course offered
in Toronto and other centres. Through role-playing we learned rudimentary
negotiation and mediation. A very varied group (lawyers, paralegals,
managers, HR persons, a military negotiator, and one technical writer). This
was partly for my own enjoyment and experience, and partly to remind me
think before speaking. And why can I continue to speak with both feet firmly
wedged in my mouth??

Costly, but worth it. And now they provide lunch.

Walden Miller:
Ditto on the typing class, but...

I think the most useful class was Graphic Rhetoric (or whatever it was
called) at Iowa State University (MA/PhD program). It was all printed page
rhetoric for color, arrangement, typography, design, etc.

The most fun class I took was probably introduction to Television at ISU-- I
got to play in a tv studio and shoot/edit film.

I work in the interactive television industry so all multimedia and tv
courses are very helpful.

Michael Maclean:
I would say that the most valuable course that I've taken was an Intro to
the Business of Telecommunications course. I took it in my last semester of
university and it covered most of the major networking protocols (ATM, IP,
TDM) in a business context. The course sparked an interest in networking and
provided a leg up when I was applying for jobs as a technical writer in the
telecom industry (despite coming out as a business major). It was a head
start in learning the technology I would work on, and more importantly
showed that I had a technical inclination. I'm not sure I would have gotten
a technical writing job out of university, with, a different backgroun, and
without experience, without that course.


Matthew Horn:
+1 on high school typing class as being important to me. In the early days
it landed me data entry jobs, then later office temp work, which all
inevitably led me to a career in computers.

After that, it would have to be my classes on World War 2. And then Art
History. Ooooh, then Jewelry Making. And Myth & Culture!

Lucie Levesque:
I have a degree in Graphic Design and currently work full-time as a
technical writer. The graphic design skills definitely come in handy when
creating page layouts, desiging UIs, selecting fonts, etc.





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