Jeremiah St. John

JACK OF ALL TRADES

 

“And master of none.” Or so the saying goes. And for the most part, I agree with it; you whore yourself out too much to the pleasure of multitasking, multidisplinary fields and your focus gets larger and larger, and you drown in the ocean that is knowledge. Instead, what I've grabbed from working this last semester at the Office of Communications at Florida State University, is that you may not be a master of one, but you can be damn good at a hell of a lot more. And in today's environment, where everything is almost closer to you than the click of a button, one is better being a Jack, than a master at all.

To illustrate my point, I went in to college as a musician. Granted, a musician that loved to write, loved to compose arguments, defeat laws and precepts using faulty logic, and then put it back together again just the way I wanted it. In my junior year, I gave in to the joy of deconstruction, I majored in Editing, Writing, and Media, and lo and behold, fell in love with the lopsided logic of Focault, Derrida, Burke and the like, who as me, rebuilt definitions and paradigms and then tore them down, or denied their real existence at all. As I took these classes, it became abundantly clear that to be a writer, is someone who is constantly evolving with their text technologies; the book is becoming outdated, not because of immaterial value, but because its place at the center of the literary world has waned, proliferated into other various technological formats. It was obvious that I had to still have good language, but also a knowledge of blogging, of being able to connect on LinkedIn, of being constantly inundated with news and stories from the constantly updated CNN, MSNBC, FOX, etc. I had to research my own material, write, compose it, use my own technologies, make it personal by using a third party site or blog, and then lastly, save a personal copy to my own computer, if not print it for a class if that was the case. By the time I was done with one assignment, I had created an astounding redundancy in a digital niche somewhere, and the likelihood of anyone falling into that crevice I carved out for myself on the net was unlikely and sad.

 

thought it was insanity. And it still is. But, what I wasn't ready for was, well, how ready I was.

When I walked into the Office of Communications and sat down across from Ellen Cole, I was wearing a wristband that housed a USB device that had an electronic copy of my portfolio (which I was also carrying in my lap, and in my laptop in my backpack). Before I even sat down, I googled the office to see what kind of accolades I could bring up in the interview, a congratulations on efficiency award maybe, and it paid off. And when I shook hands and showed up on my first actual day, and Mrs. Cole told me I would be working on research for GradSuccess, I was both appalled and giddy at how necessary and evil a research job had become.

 

The first task, GradSuccess that is, was the brainchild of Cole. Her impetus was to create an online space, separate, but also a part of VIRES, the alumni magazine produced by the alumni association, where individuals of merit could be honored and lauded out to the other alumni as paragons of Seminole character. The website itself was already up when I was given the task, and I was also working alongside a couple other interns who were doing more stuff along the lines of “profile building,” a journalistic task equivalent to cataloging the species. However, my job was to legitimately spy; I say legitimately because there was no illegal action necessary. I paraded around to the top 25 universities in America's websites and dove down. Way down. And sometimes, between the cracks of hyperlinks, drop down menus, and clandestine headers or footers, I would stumble across something similar, or maybe way off, and I began the process of putting it all into one cogent piece of information. It was frustratingly glorious. To use an analogy, it's like rebuilding a Jenga tower when all the individual blocks are on the other sides of the world, and under rocks, or in people's soup. I got the opportunity to divine what I was looking for, and by the end of it, I had collected enough information that I could actually make classes of website based purely on the type of information it conveyed, how well it was executed, and whether or not it bore any resemblance to GradSuccess and what we could steal from it or adopt if we presumed to do so.

 

Predictably, next came the PowerPoint. This is after all, a society of redundancy. But as I quickly learned, every new medium is a chance to reinvent the original. I still kept a lot of the information from the written work, but the change in tone forced me to truncate and exact my speech. It went from the elongated prose afforded to academia and the like, to the curt didactic of plain talk. It was a good reminder of how medium affects not only how it is perceived, but the way it must be transmitted, how it must follow the unspoken rules of genre.

 

Unfortunately, due to the thumb-twiddling and shoulder shrugging of some upper individuals, the director for the Communications department quickly and silently stepped down from the position. Nothing was explained because no one really knew anything, and due to the change in leadership, Ellen Cole, who had taken me in and mentored me to this point left for greener pastures. During this kind of awkward period, I started to do awkward things. Not awkward like, social things, or picking my nose or shouting stuff, but Jack things as opposed to Master things. I re-organized the entire office's copy, which was the collection of samples and products that the Office of Communications produced in house for other in house organizations. I also designed a site map for the law website, which I had never done before. It was beneficial two-fold, that being that I now know that I would never like to do that again (but would if I have to, and is not a bad skill to have if it illustrates the points of redundant information and bad organization), and secondly, that I gained a sincere appreciation for the art of digital space design. Plotting the clicks out onto a two dimensional space, no less paper, fails to capture the sheer labyrinthine spiderweb that is the internet. It further beat the notion into my head that as our methods of communication and notation have become entrenched in code and digital space, where traditional laws of narrative and natural motion can be defied, so must our occupational prowess mirror that fragmentation. At the very least, the ability to adapt to any task is required to succeed, and has also become the ultimate criteria for how well once can or can't do their job.

After the odd jobs, the most recent assignment I had been given was something of a trilogy. The common theme? The FSU License Plate. The first task was a matter of auditing. Again, not something I've ever done before, but thankfully, due to the fact that Florida keeps an excellent record of its driving statistics, more of a research task than I had had in a while. Aynalem Markos, my new supervisor wanted to know what universities out there were selling their plates like FSU, and by “like FSU” I mean as well. Due to whatever you want to call it, popularity, fandom, fanaticism, FSU was the second most selling License Plate in the State of Florida, second only to the University of Florida, located in Gainesville. This proved to be near impossible. Not only did most states fail to keep records of license plates by type on the road per fiscal year, they also didn't reveal the average cost of specialty plates, and universities that weren't FBS schools, or sell many plates in the first place, had no reason to brag on their websites about money raised so that I could at least attempt conjecture. Instead, the several schools I could hone in on, shared one big characteristic in common: they were all big football schools. Alabama had over 100,000 plates on the road (similar to Florida), but was grossing over 5,000,000 dollars; a fact due to the plates costing twice as much as Florida's. UF's plate was selling more than FSU, but it's money donated to student scholarships was about the same, due to the fact that their split of the profits was 60-40;60 percent going towards financial aid, while the remaining 40 went back into the advertising budget. While it was obvious that these schools' popularity was predicated on the strength of their football teams, FSU's recent win in the National Championship hadn't warranted the same success. Alone, without advertising, the plate was still steadily attracting consumers to its base, but it turns out, advertising does work. UF's ability to generate that many drivers on the road was in part due to its presence in the tax collector's offices throughout the state. One could find a poster that read, “Have the Gator Nation Behind You Wherever You Go.” Since FSU had yet to do anything of the like, my next task was to draft press releases.

 

Another Jack-job. I know journalism isn't a far cry from the world of writing, but my expertise up until this point had been solely academic. I didn't know the first thing about what went into a release, what the style was, or how to write one. I ended up reading a plethera of newspapers, just in an attempt to get the tone down. Finally, with a stroke of inspiration, I reached out to Seminole clubs across Florida in an attempt to get a response back about individuals who would fit the criteria that would write the best story. The irony here for me was that, even when I was looking for information outside of the digital spaces, it was still like trying to find the proverbial needle in the haystack; one person who could only be accessed through another, like a hyperlink. But, as fate would have it, I lucked out and managed to interview a recent alumni named Taylor Young. Her story was ideal, and I remember lying about it being my first interview. It was. I had never done it before, but the real surprise was how opened up we both became during the interview. I would ask throw-away questions to stall her so I could write her responses down in my notes, and we would fly off on tangents for 10 minutes at a time, talking about our work lives and the stress of being a student, and how money tends to rule our every decision. It became immediately clear to me why some people do this for a living; sometimes you just want to talk to people.

 

At the end of it all, my own warped view of enjoyment that threw me into topics like rhetoric and Jazz music in the first place – the disjunct melodies of be-bop, the side-slipping motion of chord changes, the strikethroughs of Derrida – was, is, happening to me and others like me who are experiencing real work for the first time in their lives. The internship was an opportunity to realize that there is always an opportunity to reinvent yourself, or rather, that the opportunity to reinvent yourself has instead became the reality, the necessity. That being a multi-faceted in your skills is the only way to prevent yourself from becoming outdated like the codex.

 

That maybe the saying should go, “Master of one trade, Master of None.”

 

GradSuccess Research -2941

PowerPoint -243

Slide Notes -3062

Interview/Finished Story -1600

 

Total Word Count- 7846