We recently spoke with Eric Iberri, an alum of the MA in WRD program who currently works at Amazon as a Technical Writer. Eric graduated in 2010 with a Concentration in Teaching Language & Writing.
So tell us about your work! What has your professional career looked like since graduating from WRD?
I’m a senior technical writer for Amazon in the Prime Air division, working on our drone delivery system. I’m tasked with any documentation or technical communication that is needed across the organization.
When I graduated from the program in 2010, I immediately started teaching. Eileen Seifert was the Associate Director of First-Year Writing, and I got in touch with her as I graduated to ask what I needed to do to teach at DePaul. She helped me put together a package to apply for a teaching position in first-year writing. I taught one course in my first quarter, then two courses the next quarter. I got to teach a special version of First-Year Writing for non-native speakers, WRD 103X, which was pretty awesome.
At the same time, I was also working in DePaul’s Faculty Instructional Technology Services. I specialized in Blackboard and D2L and worked as an instructional technology assistant, converting face-to-face courses to online courses. A lot of that work was technical writing, but under a different name.
When I graduated from WRD, I knew how to write, and I could teach people how to write. I took my background in teaching writing and tried to transform it into more professional writing. I worked at SpaceX as a Proposal Editor, and I was pulled into a project to help create work instructions for Falcon 9 assembly. I learned how technical writing was used in a manufacturing setting and how much of an impact it had on their day-to-day operations. SpaceX was at a very transitional period when I started, because they were trying to go from building one or two rockets a year to 10 or 15 a year. I jumped in on that project, working with manufacturing engineers to help write work instructions and decided that I liked it so much that I moved into a full-time position on the Falcon 9 team as a Senior Technical Writer. In my time there, I worked on Falcon 9, the rocket that SpaceX landed successfully in 2015 and Falcon Heavy, which just had its first commercial flight in April 2019. I was also tasked with helping the Crew Dragon team standardize their work instructions. Because of that project, I got to work on the spacecraft that just flew its first demonstration mission to the International Space Station in March 2019.
How have you used your experiences from WRD in your current position? How did WRD prepare you for the professional/academic world?
The WRD program taught me what writing is and what a text is. It doesn’t matter what kind of text you’re trying to put together, or if you’re working as a writer or editor, as long as you can break the text down to its fundamental parts. Who is the audience? What is this text trying to accomplish? How do we make it accomplish that? What capabilities do we have to enable this text to accomplish its purpose? I really took a systems approach to the program when I was there, and ever since graduation, I haven’t found any writing challenge that I couldn’t break down into those fundamental parts.
Teaching and working on rockets isn’t really that different. At the end of the day, I was trying to teach my students how to accomplish certain things with words and language. At SpaceX, I was creating documents that helped technicians build rockets. I was also challenging people to be better communicators. If someone at SpaceX tried to explain a concept to me and I didn’t understand, it was kind of on them to find a better way to explain it, or to learn how to explain the concept to someone else. I worked on writing and communicating with a lot of the engineers there, helping them explain things in a way that made sense.
In the proposal space, the people evaluating my proposal from the government’s side were not all rocket scientists. A lot of them had backgrounds in procurement or supply chain management. I had to communicate the important parts of my proposal so that anyone with a high school degree could understand.
What’s different about technical writing today? How can current students best prepare for the kind of work you do?
There’s more varied technology now. Being able to use the software or computer tools required for your role is such an advantage. If people in the WRD program are either afraid of technology or feel like they’re not that great with technology, they have to get over that hurdle and become more proficient. If I’m working on something, and I’m taking more time because I don’t know how to point and click, I’ll be slower than the next person. Knowing the technology and software tools made me more valuable and helped me become more productive. In the job market, I can tell people that I can get these projects done twenty percent faster because I know the software. There are courses in WRD that are focused on learning practical tools for professional work. Those are just as valuable as the theory courses, especially for students who want to work in technical writing
Describe your career and research interests as you were going through the MA in WRD/MA in New Media Studies program. How did you customize the program to meet your needs?
I definitely chose the Teaching Writing & Language concentration. That’s what I wanted to do coming in to the program. I think I took Composition Theory and Teaching ESL Writing in my first quarter. Those classes helped solidify my plan to stay on the Teaching Writing & Language track.
As I went through the program, I did get a lot more interested in theory and philosophy. My coursework was mainly about the day-to-day of teaching and theories behind teaching—but behind that, there was a layer of general philosophy that I got a lot more interested in. I became interested in continental philosophy, in rhetorical theory, in what discourse meant—so I tried to pursue that a little bit more and took some classes outside the teaching track. Public Sphere was one of the courses; Semiotics was another one.
What was your academic and professional background prior to entering WRD?
I got a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of La Verne in California. I had been working outside of LA at a newspaper as a copy editor, and went from that to doing substitute teaching. While I was substitute teaching, I decided this was kind of fun but I want to teach at the college level, so I better go and get a master’s degree. Figured out the area I wanted to focus on and started applying to schools.
What are your plans for the future? How will you continue to use your degree?
I’ve always had this lifelong dream of going back to academia and working in administration. I think my more practical plans are related to going to the next level in working in business operations. As a tech writer, you end up working with departments and teams across organizations. You get a really good sense of how teams can work more effectively together, because you are basically serving as a proxy for their communications. What I’ve learned and experienced is that teams that don’t communicate well don’t get much done. My current trajectory is to work my way up into management so that I can put more of that thinking into effect. If I’m just working on individual documents and requests from teams, I’m only able to affect something at a small, local level, but if I can put principles into place around team operations, then I can start effecting more change in a wider scope.
Do you have any advice for current and future WRD students?
Don’t be afraid to ask questions or ask for help. I got to a point in the program where I was curious about the other classes I could take at DePaul. I found courses in other departments; one was in the Communication Studies program. I think it was called Communicating Sexualities, but it was really about rhetoric and discourse. The professor was an expert in Kenneth Burke and could have taught in WRD. When I wanted to take that Comm Studies course, I could have talked myself out of it. I could have said: it’s not in my program, WRD won’t let me take the class, so I just won’t ask. But instead, I just went for it. I asked. I researched the professor and asked for an early version of the syllabus.
Even when I wanted to teach First-Year Writing, I had to ask the Associate Director of First-Year Writing for some time to meet. And she was totally happy to meet with me! I wouldn’t have had that opportunity if I didn’t ask. No one was going to come along and say, “Hey, you might want to teach! Let’s talk!” So my advice is to ask. Put yourself out there.