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Mark Boyer <boyer -at- OPENMARKET -dot- COM> wrote:
>One can actually get a decent level of satisfaction in a real >job equvalent to what one is looking for. I've found that the >urges for the intellectual life that I thought could be >satisfied only by an academic career are in fact better
>satisfied by following my own interests and ideas and reading >in my free time
One of my biggest shocks when switching from academia to technical
writing a couple of years ago was the discovery that there's an
intellectual life off campus. Tech-writing is really an intellectual
job: you need to be curious, and quick on the up-take, and have a
genuine love of problem-solving.
I also found that teaching interferred seriously with my intellectual
interests. Ironically, since I quit teaching last December, I've had
more poetry, fiction, and academic articles published than in the last
four years as an instructor combined. I believe that all my creativity
was going into teaching. Now that I'm in writer's mode all day, I get
more of every sort of writing done.
Best of all, when I read the classics, it's because I want to. It's an
incomparable luxury to curl up with something by Dickens or Charlotte
Bronte or Wilkie Collilns, and read it entirely for pleasure.
In other words, I think I made the right choice. When I meet
ex-students, I tell them to go into tech-writing.
For years, arts students have worried that the world outside academia
doesn't want them. Well, now it does, and it's willing to pay - if not
always in as much cash as we'd like, at least in job satisfaction.
"If you hear not, hear me never,
If you burn not, freeze forever,
If you hunger not, starve in hell,
If you will not, then you never shall."
- Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Song of Sirit Byar"
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