In this post I want to reflect on writing this blog, which has been part of the curriculum throughout all the four semesters of the master course of Content Strategy at FH Joanneum Graz.
I take this opportunity to look back a little bit on the challenges I went through conceiving, writing and editing the posts we were asked to create, by looking at some of the goals and achievements we were meant to reach and to make and diving into each one of them a bit:
Develop and hone your writing skills
Writing the posts for the portfolio contributed to become more fluent and experienced in producing articles or texts, as did the project work and paper handed in at the end of each semester. The steadiness of practice and the benefits it brings was definitely one of the effects. Writing in English also improved the usage of the language quite a bit.
Throughout the master studies’ course, writing for the web also has been the subject of some lectures. I summed up some of the learnings that were valuable for me in the first post of this series.
I could also observe that my process when ideating and conceptualizing a text has changed. A couple of month ago I still followed this approach when producing text, which I like for its playfulness. But the amount of other work that had to be done for the studies and the rest of my life happening “outside of them” sort of forced me into a more structured way. I started to plan the writing, instead of writing a lot to derive a structure. And I’m definitely going to stick to this approach.
Establish yourself in the professional field
I started to study Content Strategy quite spontaneously in the second half of the first lockdown. The drastic change of almost everything and the effects on my personal life brought me the decision to pursue another education to make the best out of the time. When I discovered the master studies of Content Strategy at FH Joanneum Graz, I was just excited to learn a lot of new stuff that mostly sounded exciting to dive into. So I entered the field of Content Strategy without a certain focus, and did not have an exact idea of what field I wanted to be working in when having finished. Unlike some of my colleagues, I didn’t come from a company with a specific mission in mind. Also I didn’t think I had a job where I would be able to apply much of the things I was going to learn. (Oh how wrong I was about that! Turns out I now would take a bet with almost everyone that it would be possible to easily find at least one thing within their organization that needs fixing and that one or more methods and tools within the wide field of content strategy could be used for fixing it!)
So when we were asked to start building a portfolio, I felt very reluctant about it. I didn’t want to position myself as a practitioner already when I was just starting to study the subject. The idea of starting to write a blog about something I was just beginning to grasp and slowly find my way around in gave me quite a hard time and heavy attacks of impostor syndrome.
Reflection of the subjects studied and the process of creating itself
The idea of writing (this blog) as an exercise to reflect a subject related to the studies really makes sense to me and also worked really well when doing it. Revisiting a topic to formulate an article about it made me rethink the underlying concepts. One of the learning techniques that work for me is the technique of summarizing the learning matter, so writing the blog articles deepened the understanding of the covered subjects.
Conclusion
To be honest, this part of the studies has not been my most favorite one. The amount of work in the extra-occupational curriculum of the studies brought a lot of us close to our limits, and the perceived extra-work of writing articles often felt a bit tedious and unnecessary. While writing this last article, I have to admit I almost sort of lost that feeling, as in reflection, it did help me improve in some ways : )
