After my first semester of college as a journalism major, I came to resent the strict, in-the-box nature of the field and changed my major to English. I carried a 4.0 in my major and graduated Summa Cum Laude from Liberty University in 2004. I spent the following year teaching core middle school curriculum in Richmond, VA before accepting a personal invitation from the Chair of Liberty's Department of English and Modern languages to return to the university and teach composition.
  Over the next five semesters, I had the opportunity to explore and share my love of all the parts that come together to make language work powerfully. I taught Basic Composition to freshmen as well as courses in grammar, speaking and listening, reading and writing, and American culture to international students in the English Language Institute. There was no wave to ride on; these courses were mine to assemble. I got plenty of practice in working autonomously and structuring an educational plan tailored to the needs of classes that were often very different from one another.
  After spending two years teaching at the university level and working for a short time as an agency copy writer, I turned to the IT world. I've worked on a variety of Microsoft projects for various audiences, including web developers, software engineers, project and program management, and business enterprise evangelists.
  From October, 2007 to March 2009, I worked for the Xbox Live Operations team casting my net as wide as possible and keeping a toe in every pool to understand and document processes across several groups within the operations organization. In March of 2009, I joined the Windows Assistance and Support Technology team to write user assistance content concentrated on continued improvement to the Windows Error Reporting experience. It's both exciting and humbling to have an audience in the hundreds of millions (even if my name isn't on everything), and I love working on my team here at Microsoft.