I cannot believe its almost the end of the semester. Moreover, I cannot believe its almost the end of my undergraduate college education! One thing I am really struggling with as this semester winds down is how I am going to continue writing beyond college.
I intend to move to DC and continue contributing to neuroscience-related research at the National Institute of Health after graduation. This job will definitely come with a lot of writing tasks, however they will be scientific writing assignments and a lot of brief business-type writing. In an earlier blog, I discussed how I have had a problem in the past with balancing factual and creative writing, and I am worried that with this new job I will regress back into a writer without the ability to creatively capture a reader’s attention.
I think that the two courses I have taken in college that will help me the most in retaining the creative writing skills I have developed will be English 325 and the MiW capstone course. English 325 showed me that I can write in a creative and entertaining way that keeps a reader’s interest, and the capstone showed me that I can balance this entertaining quality with factual writing.
I think that in order to maintain my writing abilities beyond college, I will need to practice the skills I have learned (especially in these courses). I will need to keep writing outside of work so I do not lose the skills I have worked so hard to acquire the past four years. Writing has never come especially easily to me, and the growth I have undergone as a writer in college is exponential. It will be through continued individual practice that I take what I have learned with me, into the ‘real world.’