BYU-Idaho
| Degree | B.A. English |
| School | Brigham Young University–Idaho |
| Period | 2004 – 2008 |
Background
I picked English because I liked writing. That's the whole origin story. No grand career plan, no five-year trajectory mapped to industry trends. Just a kid who was good at putting sentences together and figured he should probably get a degree in it.
What I didn't expect was how much of the program would turn into production work. Not theory-of-literature production work. Actual deliverables: style guides, magazines, newsletters, PR campaigns, edited manuscripts. By the time I graduated, I'd written and edited more than 500 pages of essays, research reports, and project campaigns in one year alone, all against the Chicago Manual of Style. The degree taught me to write. The coursework taught me to ship.
Highlights
Editing
I started picking up editing work early, mostly for friends and family who needed papers reviewed. A course on Chicago Manual of Style markup gave me the formal training, and I went looking for more practice. Over 200 pages of news releases, handbooks, and reports across my student positions at the university. The instincts got built here.
📎 Editing Sample 1 · Editing Sample 2 · Editing Sample 3 · See also: BYU-Idaho Employment
iThink Textbook
For a technical writing course, our class formatted and edited a course textbook. Each student laid out a section in Adobe InDesign using a class-developed style guide. My first real encounter with structured content, consistent formatting rules, and the discovery that InDesign has opinions about hyphenation.
OnWellness Newsletter
Our class handled formatting and editing for byu-Idaho's bi-monthly health and wellness newsletter. I was voted editor-in-chief for the November issue. We solicited articles from an anatomy course, edited them for publication, and managed the layout. First time running an editorial operation, even a small one.
📎 September Issue · November Issue
Rextainment Magazine
Editor-in-chief for a senior-level course project. We built a special-interests magazine from scratch: soliciting articles, editing submissions, and formatting them into a finished publication. The kind of project where you learn that managing writers is harder than being one.
Amici's PR Campaign
Intro to PR course, paired with a student-owned restaurant. We assessed their current strengths, identified weaknesses, and developed a proposal for improving their public relations efforts. Presented the final proposal to the owner. My first experience translating research into a deliverable someone outside the classroom would actually read.
Key Skills
Editing · Proofreading · Style Guides · Layout Design · Adobe InDesign · Print Production · Editorial Management · Content Editing · Documentation · Collaboration · Research · Microsoft Word · Microsoft Office