Background

     I'm 25 years old. I've lived in St. Louis, MO, my entire life. When I have the money, I want to move somewhere warm, probably California.   I graduated high school with a 4.3/4.0 GPA, and in December 2007, I graduated from Lindenwood University with a 4.0 and Bachelor's in Spanish.  I taught Spanish for a semester at my old high school, and then I taught for a semester at another high school.  I was mostly interested in the career for the retirement benefits, and after a year, I decided they weren't worth being miserable for 30 years.  I wanted something a little less interpersonal, so I had to find a new career.
     I found out about court reporting by looking in the big book of jobs and how much they paid at the library.  I was already thinking about medical transcription, since I could type 100 wpm and I didn't think I would get bored doing it, but I really wasn't interested in anything medical. Court reporting seemed easy enough, and in looking into it, I found out about captioning, which seemed even better.  I love watching TV, so it seemed like it would be a pretty sweet gig to just type whatever I heard on TV.

     I found a school based on which ones were NCRA accredited.  I thought about a couple of online options, but I didn't like the idea of having to lay out $5,000 right at the outset.  The only school in Missouri that was even participating (they weren't accredited at the time, although they are now) just happened to be the local community college, St. Louis Community College.  I was able to enroll in classes about a week after they officially started, which turned out not to be a big deal at all.  I wound up doing the entire program online. I took the first theory class that spring, and the second and last theory class that summer.  Learning it was a breeze.

     I did very well in all of my speed classes, and managed to stay almost a full semester ahead.  Once you got to a certain point, though, if you were in the captioning program, you stopped doing the court reporter speedbuilding classes and started just using Realtime Coach for practice and testing.  My teacher didn't think I really needed to do that, so I just signed up for Realtime Coach and started practicing on my own.  I took both of the "Broadcast Captioning" classes at STLCC, but all they entailed was writing to TV and adding words to your dictionary based on what you wrote, as well as journaling about your reactions to each type of broadcast.

     The next step after that was a captioning internship, which I had the required speed for, but the professor didn't feel comfortable having me represent the college because I hadn't taken medical and legal terminology.  She suggested I talk to some captioning companies and see if I could work out some training with them.  I'm sure that would have turned out great, since I could barely write at 180 at that point.

     Ever since then I've just been using RTC to practice away on my own.  I've been practicing about 2 hours a day the entire time I've been student, which I know isn't much compared to some people, but it's also more than others.  I'm hoping to get in to the Caption Masters course, but you have to be at "court reporter speeds," and while I'm sure I'd easily be testing there now if I had kept taking tests, as it stands I've fallen out of test-taking mode and I'm not used to writing raw material even as slow as 180, although I'm practicing at 230.

     I got my LightSpeed writer about two months ago, and learning to write on that has been a challenge.  It allows me to write much faster, which isn't always a good thing, because I get tripped up trying to go so fast.

     Somewhere back in September when I was still in the broadcast captioning class, I discovered Mark Kislingbury's StenoMaster theory and thought it was the greatest thing ever. I even bought the $260 book. I tried to write everything as "short" as I could, and lost a lot of speed trying to get my fingers into complex positions for briefs.  That wasn't such a great idea, and now I just incorporate a few of the principles, like tucking K, R, S, and G.

     I had the opportunity to observe a CART provider about a month ago, and although at first, when I thought CARTing was just following a deaf person around at school, I didn't like that idea at all, now that I know more about what CARTing is, I think that might be a great way to go, too.  You can do remote CART from home, which I think I would like, but I also like being in the classrooms, so I think doing it in person would be fun, too.  It seems like there's less pressure than with captioning, although I know it's still important to be the best you can and provide quality text.

     I wrote this on my steno machine, and it's interesting how different my writing style is from when I type on a keyboard.