Outstanding
Graduate Remarks
by
S.
Daniel Siepert
I wish to thank the faculty who nominated me for this award. Without the opportunities they provided, I would not have been able to perform the work that earned this award. I was privileged to work under three different assistantships during my studies, and each broadened a different horizon.
My first work at ECU was as a research
assistant with Drs. Donna Kain
and Catherine Smith during the
summer of
2008. They brought me on
their team to help interview residents on the Outer Banks about their
hurricane
risk perceptions and how information is distributed during severe
coastal
weather. This role was a test of my interpersonal and verbal
communication
skills as we had to approach strangers in parking lots and public
libraries and
convince them to be interviewed.After the summer interviews were complete, I stayed on for the next year to help with data management. I learned practical skills like audio transcription and file sharing in SharePoint. And I also learned about academic research: how to collect data and how to code, analyze, and categorize people’s responses to open-ended questions. This project involved a lot of collaboration and has better prepared me for future workplace environments.
My second assistantship was under Dr. Kirk St.Amant who enlisted me as an editorial assistant. Through this work, I learned about copyediting, substantive editing, and the publication process. Dr. St.Amant entrusted me, still a student, with increasingly difficult and sensitive editing projects. I edited the manuscripts of well-known professional authors who were submitting articles to the very journals I was reading in class. These real-life assignments challenged me as an editor and as a diplomat, and more importantly, proved to myself that I was more accomplished than I had thought possible, that my talents could be appreciated and valued.
In my third and largest assistantship, I worked as the publications specialist with Drs. Donna Kain and Tom Allen at the ECU branch of the Renaissance Computing Institute, or RENCI. There I designed and wrote content for newsletters, brochures, presentations, plasma screen displays, and three websites. The websites were the greatest learning opportunity as I had virtually no previous experience with web design or knowledge of HTML. All of what I learned, I had to teach myself through my own research and trial-and-error. The year-and-a-half that I worked for RENCI provided me with the in-depth training and prolonged practice I needed to develop these skills to the level that would be applicable in the workplace.
For all this experience and opportunity, I am again grateful. But my success also comes from the support of my loving family: my parents, grand-parents, and in-laws who all cared enough to be here today, but especially my dear wife who put up with me and encouraged me when I was feeling down or just plain lazy. I love you, Sandy. Thank you.
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