Since my last entry in November I've been crazy busy, which is good. I did another presentation at TechCon, still focusing on social media, but this time the topic was your general online presence. I believe it went well. Got a few good gigs coming, but here's what I'm thinking about:
Why did you decide to go into this business?
And when I say “this business” I mean whatever business YOU are in, but here I'm focused on the general machine steno profession.
Are you in this business because you want to make money? Are you in this business because you heard it had flexible hours? Are you in this business because you heard that training only took two years to complete and you'd be making six figures? Are you in this business because you heard you'd work with amazing people and hear interesting stories?
Why are you in this business?
Do you love the English language? Do you love converting it to text in the most efficient, accurate way possible? Do you love the record? Do you love knowing that the transcript is an excellent product that accurately represents the proceedings? Do you love hearing your Deaf consumer laugh as he reads your realtime feed of his coworkers BS'ing each other? Do you love knowing that there are dozens of Deaf/HOH persons in the audience who have complete access to the session because you have put in hours of practice and dictionary building?
Or are you just doing this for the paycheck?
I got into stenography because I've always had a love for words. I actually went to college for journalism and obtained my degree in it, but decided that I wanted to do something else with my love for words based on all of the negativity that encompasses the newspaper business presently.
ReplyDeleteI met a woman who is a court reporter in my town and she was so upbeat and positive and really seemed to love what she did. I did a lot of research and decided that this was something I knew I could learn, even though it would be difficult and quite costly in the beginning.
Of course the money part of it is nice, as in journalism school I was always told that I would probably be reporting more because of my love for words than for the payment I would receive. Being that court reporting is such a big financial investment in the beginning, the future paychecks are definitely motivating to get done as soon as possible, but definitely not the reason why I chose to enter the field.
The more court reporters and court reporting students I meet, the more reinforcement I get that I definitely made the right decision in choosing this career. I love writing on my machine! I'm so eager to be able to use these skills to provide such a great service that not very many people in the world have the know-how of doing! :)
Awesome! Thank you for sharing! Words are so much fun, and that is definitely one of the benefits of this profession.
ReplyDelete