Technical Writing Internship - It can only get better from here...
Tags: writing, career, internship, beginners
Published: 2020-09-23 14:32:44

Most people will look at my history and say “jack of all trades, master of none”. I don’t blame them. I do have a wide range of experience and a few first semesters, always on the lookout for the next opportunity. From my perspective, however, I am just a really curious young man that loves to learn. 

Even though I have learned a lot from my past experiences, they quickly became boring. My most recent job was a combination between a “contact center technical lead” and “customer success manager” for Cisco contact centers. Over the years of trying out different occupations, I have developed quite a good idea of what my ideal job would look like. It was way more creative than drafting a low-level-design document for contact center deployments. 

After a year of contact centers, the boredom became unbearable and I knew that once again it was time to make a change. Only this time I was looking for something that I could commit to for longer, something that could stimulate my creative side. I have always had a secret dream to one day become a writer, and in my spare time, I found myself exploring and learning about the emerging IoT world. I even had a few Raspberry Pi and Arduino automation projects going when the idea struck me: what if I combine my curiosity for IoT with my dream of writing, and start creating educational content for a living? This would tick all the boxes of my ideal career, so I did what any optimistic young man would do, I quit my day job. 

I did have a plan. I would write at least an article or two per week, have a daily blog going, and even a YouTube video or two per month. Super excited to embark on my new journey as an aspiring writer I optimistically started working on my website and piling up first drafts. The pandemic happened, my savings started to rapidly decline and I realized that I actually had no idea how any of this content creation business works. I found myself blocked on every corner that I tried to cut, ruminating over every possible decision, not getting any words down at all. I had to face the hard (but obvious) fact that I was not ready to just be the writer I secretly thought I could be.

Just as I considered returning to my corporate job, an enchanting opportunity to work with a great mentor popped up. It was a technical writing internship at an educational content company that creates articles showing developers how to build technical solutions. It was such a perfect fit from my perspective that I knew I had to give it a shot. Quieting all the negative voices saying that I am not worthy, I reached out. It took me a few days to write and send the email introducing myself but luckily I did. This led to an interview, a week trial and here I am being mentored by an exceptionally talented writer working as an intern at [Ritza](https://ritza.co) a business that aligns amazingly well with my goals. 

I have accomplished quite a few things in the past few weeks and started using many new technical services. Everything from Markdown, a new way to format text documents, making a pull request on GitHub, publishing ebooks with LeanPub, building a Python game in my browser with Repl.it and PyGame, and gaining insight into the technical writing process. The best part is that half of my work is to practice writing and publishing my work along the way, which is also the reason behind this article. 

This is the beginning of my journey as a writer and I plan to keep writing articles much like this one, with the goal to get comfortable publishing my work and also to open myself up toward some constructive criticism. I hope that my writing gets to a point where I can inspire fellow aspiring writers through showing improvement with each article and sharing my experience as an intern. As this is the first one, I am confident that it can only get better from here.