Ben Pitkin

I also lead HEI's award submittal efforts, soliciting nominations for both project and individual awards, working with project managers and company leadership to determine what projects we will submit, and leading those submittals myself or handing them off to other team members as needed.

Some of the additional tasks/roles I have ownership of include leading the QA team for some of our internal libraries, serving as our style guide lead, and being the Communication and Marketing team liaison for HEI's Municipal Infrastructure business development sector.

How did your time as an English major prepare you for your current role or your career?

My awareness of and interest in technical writing started when I took ENGL 449: Usability and User Experience with Dr. McCall and conducted usability testing as a part of that course, eventually doing a usability study on the NDSU Center for Writers' website for my capstone project with Dr. Kenzie as my advisor. Before that course I had no idea that technical writing was even a thing, and I was getting an English degree without a super clear idea of what I wanted to do with it, and the course really helped me to narrow it down a bit more, even if I still wasn’t 100% sure what kind of technical writing I wanted to do.

Taking ENGL 301 - Peer Tutoring and Writing in the Disciplines with Mary Pull and working in the CFW after that was also a fantastic experience. It really expanded my knowledge of how to work with other writers in a way that is different from how I think a lot of English majors tend to give feedback to each other and gave me the tools to give much more effective types of feedback. It also helped me to understand how to work with and give feedback on writing where I don’t understand the technical content very well and how to ask questions about that technical content in ways that both helps me understand it better and enables me to give effective feedback on it. One of our assignments was to write a report on writing in a discipline outside of English, and I picked engineering, which was helpful in expanding my understanding of the field.

I also took multiple upper division writing courses, beyond just the one required to meet requirements, two of which were ENGL 321: Writing in the Technical Professions and ENGL 459: Researching and Writing Grants and Proposals. Both of these courses helped me to expand my understanding of the different types of writing and different fields of writing. The grants and proposals course was also really useful because there wasn’t a clear structure with a rubric assignment like I was used to because by design things were much more open. I absolutely hated that at the time because I love detailed instructions, but I came out of it much better at working with unclear or open-ended guidelines, which is something I deal with regularly.

Some of the courses I took with Dr. Maylath were also really useful in expanding my knowledge of technical writing and writing/English in general, those being ENGL 455: International Technical Writing and ENGL 453: Social and Regional Varieties of English.

What advice would you give to someone considering an English major?

This may or may not be the case still, but when I got my bachelor’s, linguistics wasn’t required, so I didn’t take it because I knew it would be a challenge, and I still regret not doing that as I know taking it would have made me better at articulating why something is incorrect vs just knowing from experience but not being able to explain it, so consider taking it.

English isn't all about creative writing or reading literature, so don’t rule out an English degree just because those aren't your favorite things. I am honestly awful at creative writing, and my literature background coming out of high school was perhaps not the best, but I am still a professional writer at the end of it all.

You don’t have to know what you plan to do with your degree right away, and there is a LOT you can do with an English degree as there will always be a need for people who can write and communicate well. Think about what other things you’ve done or tried and what else you're good at and how that might be melded with an English degree. To use myself as an example, I started as an engineering major and worked at a civil firm over the summers in college. While I switched out of that and into English, I did enjoy my interning and that experience. My knowledge of the field and some of its terminology made me rather rare and made it easier to find a technical writing job that I knew would be a good fit for me.

Don’t use AI to write for you. Even setting aside all the other issues with it, you still need to have those underlying writing skills.

Be careful around printing presses!

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

In addition to the English and writing skills you'll get from an English degree, I think that the research and problem solving skills you'll get from a degree at NDSU as a research university are invaluable and are skills you can apply to any and every job. It doesn’t matter if you aren't 100% sure of an answer or have never written a certain type of document before, because you know how to go find that information and understand it and the genre conventions. I look up stuff I'm not sure of all the time. Knowing how to search for information is an amazing skill, and one that not every university gives you as well as NDSU does.

For those already at the NDSU English Department, I would encourage everyone to take the peer tutoring class, even if you don’t plan on working at the CFW (which I also very much encourage). If you do, tell Stephen I sent you!

When you apply for a job, even if it says cover letter optional, write the dang cover letter please. Especially as an English major. You've written papers before that you didn’t enjoy. One more won't hurt.