“You’re going to come running back to academia,” a colleague assured me when I described to her my summer internship working in a Technical Communications department at a company in San Diego.

Maybe so. I received a whole packet of documents today with the types of reports I’ll be expected to write. And now? I kind of feel like this:

As in, wait: am I prepared to do something at which I could potentially fail?

So, OK. Wait. You need more information before you can understand my quick surge of panic this evening.

Potential projects for me include improving the usability of help information for breast cancer imaging software, creating a more interactive, educational platform for understanding electronic health records software, and collating a series of articles about electronic health records use into one more cohesive space.

This is all very cool stuff! These are the sorts of projects that could:

• Make doctors’ lives easier!
• Improve patients’ ability to get the results they need to be healthy!
• Save HR departments from having to lead terrible training sessions!

So, real world solutions! Cool! I don’t often get to say that my work inspires tangible change in a working environment that – and we’re about to get real – SAVES LIVES. (Though come on, my understanding of esoteric literary theory should clearly impact your outlook on your digital reading/writing practices. I wrote this great essay on lolcats, you should read it some time).

But I’ll admit it: I’m scared of doing in a field with which I am not comfortable and familiar. This anxiety is clearly the vestige of some serious “straight A student syndrome;” I’m compelled to pursue projects in which I feel that success is within my reach. This is the first job I’ve undertaken where I don’t feel like I am comfortable with what I’m diong. I’m going to have to learn on the job and – well – maybe fail a few times.

I could go into any number of hackneyed aphorisms about this. One must not try; one must DO. (I’m on a Yoda kick tonight if you didn’t get that already. Looking for inspiration in all of the right places).

What am I going to do?

1.  Get over myself. And promptly.

2.  Look for some points of familiarity. I will say that upon looking through the project documents sent to me, I did see some places that I could contribute my knowledge. Many of the documents (especially the step-by-step help guides for using the mammogram software) were driven very much by the logic of a page. That is, while they are conversational in tone (typically a good start to making help text accessible), they’re a little – well – verbose. Clearly, I can sympathize. Verbosity is always my inclination.

But I thought a lot about my discussions in my Literacy and Technology class concerning the relationship between content and design and there are certainly design issues at stake here. So, I could certainly do some re-design work if nothing else.

3. Employ my love of organizing and re-organizing. There’s probably nothing I love more than a great spreadsheet or a clean table. A lot of the writing could probably be organized into the sweet, sweet symmetry of a table! I suppose this is still an issue of design, but if my background in literature has provided me with one practical skill it is the ability to distinguish main points from blocks of dense text. So, while the language of these documents is difficult for me to understand, I can typically distinguish the purpose of the pieces I read.

So, those are my strategies for not being such a fail-fearing wimp. Who knows? Thinking though ways to work through these challenges is compelling. Plus, I have a new work environment to anticipate. I happen to crave novelty. Maybe the office will even feel like this:

One can only hope.