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The
Full-Circle Route
of Judith's Career
for insatiably curious readers
Before she
began freelancing and not long after getting a BA and an MS (ABT) in psychology,
Judith was an executive director for a county unit of the American
Cancer Society in her birthplace, Ohio. From there, she went to MD
Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where she wrote foundation and
corporate grant proposals for basic and clinical research and patient
treatment. She left when, as fate would have it, she got cancer herself
and wanted the daily awareness of cancer out of her consciousness. (She's
been fine for many years, thanks to MD Anderson's great care.)
Over the
next several years, she worked full-time or part-time in fundraising
and marketing positions:
- Development
and Marketing Director for a United Way social service agency
and a jazz concert and education center
- Community
services director for the CareUnit Hospital, a chemical dependency
treatment center, then for a chapter of the American Red Cross.
- Intermittently
and in addition to these staff jobs, she was a fundraising or marketing
consultant for the Multiple Sclerosis Society, Muscular Dystrophy
Association and National Kidney Foundation, all in Houston;
Westwood Hospital, in Portland, Oregon; and the National SIDS
Foundation, in Atlanta (that last one was as a volunteer, and you'll
know why when you read this story)
As most freelancers
do, she began her freelance
writing career as a sideline, writing mainly about the jazz,
blues and contemporary dance for local and regional magazines
and daily newspapers. That was so much fun that she started writing feature
articles for national
magazines full-time. Most were about the Internet and small
business management, with a few about health and psychology
when she got the chance (every freelancer who doesn't want to be a travel
writer wants to write about health or psychology, so getting those assignments
is very competitive, especially at the national level).
In 1995,
after somewhere between 300 and 400 published articles (she stopped counting
long ago) and her first book,
she switched to editing and writing for corporations. Because
her book was about the Internet and online services, and she'd
published an online subscripton newsletter for freelance writers
for five years (plus started then led the Freelancers section in the Journalism
Forum on CompuServe for three years before that), she understood Internet
technology. So her passport into the corporate world was her knowledge
of the Internet, and most of her corporate
clients until 2000 were in that field.
Alas, she
just couldn't get passionate about Internet routers, as one technical
marketing publications manager told her he wished she would. She is still
avid about Web publishing, though, and chairs the Web
Content SIG of the Silicon Valley WebGuild, which she also founded
in 2002. Nonetheless, she longed to return to the health field where,
no matter what aspect you're involved in, you have an impact on a central
concern of people's lives, which makes the hours you spend working each
day more meaningful.
So
she has returned to
working in the realms of health and psychology, where she started. But
now she has the advantage of combining her longstanding commitment to
those fields with her experience in the publishing and tech industries.
And she is
living happily ever after.
(For irrelevant
but personal stuff that is more fun, check Personal
Proclivities. Or, to get back to work, go Home.)
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