Constance Etemadi

I started my technical writing career about 14 years ago when I began freelancing for a group of engineering students at Caltech (California Tech). I continued working with them to edit their grant proposals on an ad hoc basis, all the way through when they finished their PhD candidacy. My primary client was Dr. Nima Pahlovan, and I finished working with him at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering. I graduated college around 2010 during the housing crisis and initially worked in the financial services industry. After a couple of years, I decided to go back to school and earned my master's in English. I wanted to write and did teach English a little bit at the college level, but teaching is a calling and I wanted to do something different. I got hired again to work for a mortgage originator and servicer, this time writing policies and procedures for compliance teams within financial services. I did that for a while full-time and really wanted to transition out of financial services to do something different. For a little while, I actually worked in the marketing space and did a feature on Influential Women in USA Today, so I was familiar with the organization. I ended up interviewing with Reynolds and Reynolds because I wanted to get into a different industry but wanted to get back to technical writing, so I just recently started with them. As a technical writer, I currently serve in the functional safety space where I support engineers with their written materials, with editing and consolidation of voice, because these are usually authored by more than one engineer. I finalize them and prepare them for publication or submission to clients. It helps to have a unified voice and to translate some engineer speak for audiences who are not engineers.