Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional


The Writer and the Storyteller with Brianna Blacet (1/2)

May 25, 2021

Welcome to episode 121 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two Pre-Sales Technical Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share part 1 of our interview with Brianna Blacet in which Brianna shares her experience being a writer, moving into Science and Technology, and what it really takes to write a book.
Original Recording Date: 04-21-2021
Topics – College Years, Science and Technology, Writing Books
2:20 – Meet Brianna Blacet

* Brianna Blacet is an Innovation Storyteller at VMware, which she says is the best title in the entire company.
* The title has become chic in the last few years, and depending on where you are, might just mean you are a writer. There could be much more media as part of it.

* There is a difference between writing a datasheet compared to telling a story.
* Stories move people. In Brianna’s job, she tells stories of innovation within VMware’s Office of the CTO.

4:22 – College Years

* Brianna was one of those kids who started reading super early. She used to immerse herself in books to feel safe and to let her imagination wander.
* Sometimes being a writer chooses you. Brianna doesn’t think she ever wanted to be anything else but did not feel it would be something she could do as a career.

* Both of her parents are physicists.
* She went to UC Santa Cruz and studied Environmental Studies to make her parents think she was studying Science.
* Page Stegner was one of her professors during her senior year, and he taught a class on Environmental Writing that Brianna ended up taking.

* To be in the class, you had to take a 10-day river rafting trip in Arizona. He wanted his students to immerse themselves in nature.
* There is a big difference between reading about the Grand Canyon and floating on a raft through a canyon. It changes you.
* This reminds Nick of reading about the way Pixar would have the folks making a film immerse themselves in the details of the story, often times visiting a specific place to do research and ensuring every small detail was correct.
* How can you write a story until you let yourself feel those emotions and see those images? That is what separates writing from a story according to Brianna.
* Brianna found something special here. She found that being a writer was not what her parents believed it to be. This professor changed something in Brianna forever, and she believed she could do it.

* Before graduating, she talked herself into a job writing about water politics at a paper (a reporter).

11:38 – Science and Technology

* She then decided to go to Graduate School as was part of a Science and Technology Journalist program.

* She had learned that being a general reporter pays very low and had taken a Science writing course that same year in school, which is not what her parents thought it was.
* It’s not looking through a microscope all day.
* Brianna is great with general concepts but does not go deep.
* She referenced The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks.

* This is a book about curious stories of medicine.