Hello! Welcome to my blog detailing my transition from being a theory buff in an English Master’s program to a corporate work environment!
Beginning Monday I will be interning at a very large company, which I will refer to as ‘the corporation’ for the rest of my time writing here. The company is actually not the ‘corporation’ I am making it sound like, but a not-for-profit society centered around publishing scientific material and holding conferences. A lot of the work they do there involves keeping tabs on their specific scientific community and publishing various proceedings and books for consumption by its members or other prospective participants in the community. As such, the internship I have accepted is mostly a ‘professional writing’ internship – a term that for me here means: whatever kind of writing a large company like this would need. I am not sure what exactly I will be writing yet, but I’ll leave that for another blog update in the future.
I’d like to begin with an installment explaining why I’m doing this, so that my readers might understand why I’d make such a drastic decision. Part of the decision deals with my future teaching, and another part with opening up possibilities for the immediate future, but most of all it is an experiment. Following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notions of radical subjectivity, I’m interning in a corporate environment to open up new fields of virtuality – with a perhaps not-so-radical decision. Going corporate? Pfft.
First of all, in the grand scheme of things I plan on returning to teaching, perhaps soon, perhaps not. Regardless, I think this corporate experience will open up a lot of possibilities in terms of my teaching. Although my first love is ‘theory’ in its broadest sense, one of my own personal goals involves findings ways to teach theory to an audience that will find it applicable to their everyday lives. So that while I may teach Roland Barthes from his original writing, I want my students to understand why they might want to understand and apply his ideas to editing and publishing. In order to do this, I also want to teach some very practical writing courses: not freshmen comp, teaching students to enter the University, but technical or professional writing, teaching students to enter the world with a theoretically and well-informed approach. In order to facilitate this, I would like to do some professional writing myself – to experience what I might be preparing my students to go and do.
Aside from teaching, I’m not exactly sure how I am going to spend the next year of my life. The year after next I plan on applying to a Master’s program in Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam that I am very interested in, but that still leaves a year-long gap. There are a lot of things to consider: Do I want to teach? Do I want to stay in the area, or perhaps move somewhere like Seattle? In order to keep all of these things as ‘potential,’ I’m doing this internship in order to gain some practical work experience with professional writing. So that next year, if I choose to/am interested in at this point, I can pursue professional writing jobs.
Therefore, the choice to take on this internship is not random. I have a plan, and some clearly outlined goals, but it is still first and foremost an experiment. Who knows what ‘desiring-machines’ will stir to life once I’ve experienced life at ‘the corporation’? Perhaps I’ll begin following lines of flight leading towards career-track writing jobs? Or: establish lines of abolition, wrecking any desire for ever having a boss again! Though, a very productive solo-career might even emerge from this wreckage. The point is: I have no idea what exactly I want to do next year, so I will set an experimental machine into motion that might scoop up different networks of subjectivity and sweep myself along with it.
