Hazard Mitigation Map/FEMA.gov
When I first got in contact with Pitt English alum Laura Duff, I was worried. Without knowing it, I had e-mailed her the week she was set to get married. I’d been hoping to schedule an interview within the week—maybe even early in the next one—but I’ve been told that weddings can be, umm, stressful for the people involved, and I didn’t want to add more to what was surely an already-full, catered-and-paid-for plate. Turns out I had no reason to worry. According to Duff: “I had one of my vendors tell me I was the most organized person she’d ever had. She said she’d never had anyone make a PowerPoint for her before.”
A wedding, I imagine, is one of the more precarious landmarks in a person’s life—one false move can spell disaster—so it makes sense to be thorough in planning for it. So maybe I should have known better than to be concerned, because planning is sort of Duff’s specialty: she’s currently in charge of nationwide communications for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Mitigation Planning Program, which coordinates preparation and response to crises across the US like natural disasters or other emergencies. In other words, her job isn’t simply to react to disasters, but to prevent them from happening in the first place.
Since Laura Duff is not omnipotent, working to prevent disasters means doing a lot of planning—specifically, writing, whether that be blog posts, newsletters, or communications plans that are updated yearly. The type of writing Duff does, in particular, requires using a variety of different writing styles and techniques. “Mitigation planning is a highly, highly technical field of writing. It’s data collection, and you’re trying to communicate all of these different aspects of risk to people who don’t necessarily experience it every day,” said Duff. But as heavy as the technical aspect is, there’s an important balance to be struck, too: “You have to keep people in there for at least whatever section they’re reading,” she said, which requires the ability to “spin the narrative” and “find the drivers in every story—something that really hooks people in and tells them what they should care about.” Fortunately, Duff’s education prepared her to do just that.
Laura Duff completed her undergrad at Pitt in 2011 with two degrees: English Writing (with a focus on fiction writing) and Public Administration. She then finished her master’s in Security and Intelligence Studies in 2015. When you take into account her educational background, her professional responsibilities, and her ability to catch wedding vendors off guard, you’d probably assume that Duff is exactly where she’d always planned to be. But when I asked her that question, her first response was laughter. “I came into Pitt under the molecular biology program, so it was a bit of a windy road.” (In fact, two phrases that came up when she told me how she figured out what she wanted to do were “by mistake” and “right place, right time.”) She didn’t switch to English Writing until her sophomore year, and she picked up Public Administration after a few summer classes on homeland security.
As for which degree she’s gotten more mileage out of? According to Duff, English Writing, and it’s no contest. She said of her work, “You have to be very attentive to detail, and all of these things served me well through memo writing, e-mail writing, but then writing giant documents”—giant documents like the 900-page(!) behemoth she wrote as her first professional document, which took her a little more than a year. “Just being able to sit down and proofread that and hit all the right deadlines is totally owed up to my English degree,” said Duff. But her English degree isn’t just making work easier to do, it’s making work easier to find. “Every time I went into a job interview," she said, "they didn’t even look at the other degree, they immediately focused in on the fact that I could write (and write well), and that I loved it so much that I got a degree in it.”
If you’re anything like me, the mere mention of getting a job with an English degree elicits internal shrieking. English degrees tend to catch a lot of flak these days, so it might come as a surprise that so many hiring managers were interested in Duff’s. Maybe it’s because she was in the same position not long ago (or maybe I was screaming externally too) that Duff offered me some advice on how English majors can curb their instinct to screech and find the bridge between job market myths and reality. “Don’t just look at traditional jobs when you’re thinking about how to use your English degree,” she said. “Be sure to explore those other fields that are tertiary but attached to writing, and highlight writing as a key skillset rather than actually having it in the title.”
Last year, when Laura Duff responded to T5F's alumni news form, one of the things she was eager to talk about was how her English degree opened doors for her that she didn’t anticipate. I have to imagine that there are still more of those out there—right off the bat, wedding planner and career counselor come to mind—should she ever go looking. But if not, the ones she’s walked through make a great roadmap to follow for any discouraged, sleep-deprived English majors who are having trouble finding their way. Take it from someone who, at one point, was working four jobs at once: “All those sleepless nights in college? They’re worth it. It doesn’t feel like it right now, but they're totally worth it.”
—Nick Trizzino
Nick Trizzino is T5F’s communications intern, a senior Public and Professional Writing major, and a failed podcaster. He’s hoping a writing career goes a bit more smoothly.