Report on My Interviews

Overall, I think that my interview went pretty well. I acquired a good amount of information plus I think I may have made new contacts with professionals in my field. Here are the base results of my interviews with Dr. Jerzy Rozenblit, and Dr. Kelly Potter.

Pasquini, Laura. "Curating Job Interview Questions" 8/14/2006 via flickr. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

1. Significant Genres
The genre that kept on coming up over and over again was the genre similar to a lab report that I called the technical report. According to Dr. Jerzy Rozenblit, it is crucial to learn how to write these.

Another important genre that came up was that of patent law. These are critical for professionals working in companies or laboratories. However, for professors such as Dr. Kelly Potter, patent law is not really of concern.

A third genre that came up was that of conference presentations. Both Dr. Kelly Potter and Dr. Jerzy Rozenblit stated that they do about 3 to 4 of these a year. They are important because it can help them get support for their work.

2. Differences Between Genres
The patent and the technical reports are actually quite similar in conventions. They have a very similar format. The only difference is probably that the patent does not really have a results section. The conference presentation, however, seems to be somewhat different. It really is not divided into an abstract, introduction, results, conclusion, and citation. They all appear to be structured with an introduction, a problem, and a solution.

The purpose of these three genres differs. The purpose of the technical report is to report on the results of an experiment or derivations of theory. The purpose of the patent is to claim an idea. Finally, the purpose of the presentation is to inform and possibly gather support.

The audience for the presentation is typically a bit more broad than the audience for a patent or technical report. As for the context, presentations pretty much happen anywhere. Technical reports mostly appear on academic journals or as conference proceeding. Patents go more into the legality of the electrical and computer engineering profession.

3. Difficult or Challenging
Some of the difficulties that were stated by the professionals I interviewed were meeting deadlines, collaborations, and going through the revision process. Meeting deadlines is sometimes difficult with so much going on in their professional lives, but of course they have to do it. Collaboration can be difficult depending on who they are working with. Finally, the conference revision process. Dr. Rozenblit stated that only 10 % of all submitted work to conferences gets published.

4. Exciting or Rewarding
One thing that is rewarding is actually getting their work out there for people to see. Furthermore, it is even more rewarding once people actually start responding to their work.

5. Mass Media
Examples of presentations are somewhat generally available on video sharing websites such as Youtube. The patents are not really on mass media, but there are various websites, such as Google Patents, where you can see patents. Technical reports sometimes appear on websites such as Wired.com, but they are mostly on academic journals and professional sites such as IEEE.