Me, a University Lecturer?
Sometimes my life just throws me surprises. Check this out.
I got this email from my website. There is a “contact me” form there. It is not used often.
Name: Andrea K-W
Message: Hi Andrew, it's been a very long time since Deutsche Telekom language courses. Beate pointed out your website to me. Both of us work at the Technical University of Applied Sciences THW-S Würzburg Schweinfurt now.
I am looking for somebody interested in giving a talk/presentation on online media/homepage creation for our master's students.
Could you please get in touch with me?
Best regards, Andrea
Time Machine?
My first thought was “Who is this?”. By mentioning Beate I slowly pulled it together and saw that she had married and her name changed. I sent an invitation for a Zoom call the following week. We had last “seen” each other nearly 30 years ago. A few of us had taught English to managers at the phone company. It was a freelance job but it was a lot of fun and my first real paycheck too! I left in 1995 to start a new career and we had not spoken since then. I joined the call then she turns on her camera and says “This feels like a time machine!”. What a funny moment it was. We were both 30 years older but she was still Andrea and well I guess I was still Andrew.
She teaches technical translation at the University in Würzburg. We had originally met in the 1980s in Germersheim where she had completed her degree in translation/interpretation. So her career has stayed true to her studies while mine has, well, been all over the place.
At the university, she runs a series of “Fit for the Market” seminars for her Master’s students in their final semester. She told me that the students are solely focussed on their thesis and this lecture is a required module. Here is the description of the course of studies:
Course Description
The program focuses on technical translation in technology and life sciences and media translation with courses in software localization, subtitling, audio description, and voice-over translation.
During the Spring semester every Friday, a specialist comes in and gives a talk about their business or topic of interest demonstrating to the soon-to-be graduates what business life is like. Topics like “managing clients”, and “writing contracts” and one topic which a former professor from the university had given was how to build a website. This is what Andrea wanted to talk to me about.
A special feature of the program is the "Fit for the Market" module, which is taught by guest lecturers from the business world and is geared to the current practical requirements of the profession.
After she had explained for a while how this series comes together and the slot she had me in mind for I gave her a rundown of what I do, and it is more than just building a webpage. While I was telling her about my process with businesses trying to grow their business using the internet a thought came to mind, why don’t I present a real case study?
Document don’t Create
I planned to begin working with a professional service business the following week. Wilco is a conference interpreter business run by two friends and they have been in business for over 25 years. We had spoken at the beginning of the year about how business was going and how the Covid experience had changed it. One of their challenges was finding and winning new clients. Some of their older clients had stopped holding events where interpreters were needed and the older word-of-mouth method of gaining new clients was limited. This is where I came in.
I told Andrea that I was going to start work with Wilco to help them grow their business through a series of activities all using the internet and I could document the process and share this with her students. This was a great idea and much more practical than just learning how to build a webpage.
One week later I was working together with Wilco and documenting the process. To be continued.
