The Skeleton in My Closet

I have a shameful secret. I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Eng… ineering. Biomedical Engineering, to be exact. In academic circles, people recognize the name of my graduating program, and react with awe and respect. It is, after all, one of the hardest programs in Canada, and many of its graduates have moved on to immeasurable success (translation: very measurable and large quantities of money). But since I started looking for work in the publishing world, it’s become my dirty little secret. How exactly am I supposed to tell my authors, a few of whom have been published for years, that not only am I new, but that I come from a group of people whose communication skills are viewed by most people as only slightly above a cockroach’s? So I haven’t. I have made no comments as to how long I’ve been editing for (a little over four months for Lyrical Press), how much time has passed since graduation (a year as of a few days ago), or what I studied (if you wish to get technical about it, I have a Bachelor of Applied Science in Engineering Science, majoring in Biomedical Engineering). I’ve been almost terrified that someone outside of Emma and Renee, who have seen my resume, will find out, and I’ll be lynched and called a fraud. But not anymore.

No. Today, I come out of my self-imposed secrecy and shout out to the ethers of the internet: I. AM. An ENGINEER. And you can suck it if you don’t like it. Why reveal this, you may ask? To be honest, I have no idea. I guess it’s for the same reasons I wanted to move on to publishing in the first place. I love to read, I always have, and one of my earliest memories is having my brother, who is only a year older than me, teaching me how to read. The memory is mostly false, though. Apparently, this picture-perfect scene that I have in my mind - my brother, holding his Disney storybook that was almost too large for a five-year old, sitting with the maid, and carefully teaching me to string letters together - is an entirely fictional construct. We always sat with my mother, not with the maid, and if anyone went through the trouble of teaching me how to read, it would have been her. Not him, who was also in the process of learning. But the principle stands. This is a part of me that I have loved for many, many years, and not one I should hide. When I applied to jobs in publishing, I wrote an extremely heartfelt and convincing letter outlining the many ways in which engineering prepared you for the editing world. And I meant it. Whether the “image” of engineering I portrayed was too idyllic or not, the facts remain the same. I love to read, but I went to school to figure out how to improve things. I am now, as a copy editor, doing that. And I love it. Yes, there are days when I long for mammalian cells on a slide and a microscope. There are others when I wish I didn’t know the difference between ‘then’ and ‘than’, so most of my hair could remain on my head. But the vast majority of the time, I’m so very glad to have found this place, where I can carve my niche, where I’ve been welcomed and aided, and given a chance. So yes, I am an engineer. But I’m also an editor. And that’s all that matters.