Michael Chorost, '00
Michael Chorost Degree Information: Ph.D., UT Austin, 2000 Dissertation Title: “Designing Online Environments to Facilitate Classroom Management and Student Collaborative Work” Supervisor(s): John Slatin Current Positions: Freelance writer, teacher, and public speaker. Recent Publications: Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) “My Bionic Quest for Boléro”, Wired Magazine, November 2005. Subsequently reprinted in The Best American Science Writing 2006. “Risky Enough Business?”, The Scientist, February 8, 2006. “The Mind-Programmable Era”, The Futurist, May-June 2006. “The 22nd Century”, PBS pilot, airdate January 17, 2007. Awards/Honors (at UT and after): First Prize, Innovative Instructional Technology Award Program (IITAP), 1998 PEN/USA Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, 2006 Numerous positive reviews for Rebuilt in publications such as the L.A. Times, The London Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, Village Voice, Business Week, Reader’s Digest, and many other journals. You’ve been doing a book tour. What’s that been like? Book tours are tremendously overstimulating. You’re constantly on the go, eating overly rich restaurant food, talking to interesting people, and having to be “on” for press interviews and bookstore readings. I loved it, though I was often too overstimulated to fall asleep at a decent hour and wound up being exhausted much of the time. One of my “minders” actually let me go to her house and take a nap at one point, because I literally couldn’t stay awake. But it was a wonderful experience and I’ll never forget it. Obviously, winning the 2006 PEN/USA award is a major achievement. What other accomplishments in your career are you most proud of? I’m very proud of the fact that I’m making it in San Francisco as a freelancer. Just the fact that I have steady work and am staying on top of the bills is a major accomplishment. I love having the freedom to do what I want, when I want. I’m also very happy that I’m finding the sense of friendship and community here that eluded me in most of the other places I’ve lived. I have an office in a writers’ collective, and San Francisco is the kind of place where I can walk downtown and bump into people I know. And another wonderful perk of my life is that publishing my book was like getting a Golden Ticket into that world where writers talk among themselves. I’ve gotten to meet and correspond with so many writers that I admire. It’s thrilling to be part of that national discourse. What are your academic and professional interests, and how did they evolve? How did your work at UT help you develop them? My academic career’s evolved in surprising ways. I did my masters’ in Renaissance Drama at UT, then went to Duke intending to do my doctorate there in the same topic. But that didn’t work out, so five years later I returned to UT because in my absence they had developed a terrific program in using computers to support teaching in the humanities. That was much more closely aligned with my interests, since I loved writing software, teaching, and literature. I taught myself a programming language (ColdFusion) and developed an elaborate website to support online collaboration and classroom management. Essentially, I wrote Blackboard before Blackboard existed. That’s what I won the IITAP award for, and I wrote my dissertation on how such software aligned with constructivist teaching methodology. While I was writing that, in 1999, a dot-com in San Francisco offered me a job in interface design, and it was too tempting to turn down. I thought it was going to make me rich, and it would have, if I’d joined a year earlier and cashed in my stock options while the stock was at its peak. Alas, the job was a disaster, the company was in chaos, and it tanked in 2000. So much for that. I found another job as an educational specialist at a research institute in Silicon Valley and defended my dissertation at the very end of 2000. Then I abruptly went totally deaf in July 2001 and got a cochlear implant, and that pushed my career in an entirely new direction. I found an agent, got a book contract, and wrote Rebuilt – a memoir of the experience – over the next three years. A good deal of the book was literary-theoretical, discussing things like Donna Haraway’s conception of the cyborg. Its publication opened up all sorts of new opportunities, from writing for Wired and PBS to traveling the country as a paid speaker. In early 2005 I quit my job and went entirely freelance. Now I consider myself a science writer. I still do consulting in educational technology, but it’s only one of many things I do. What was the biggest challenge you faced in your graduate career in rhetoric? Seriously? Addiction to computer games. Writing a dissertation can be a very tedious, lonely experience. Playing Quake and Half-Life was far more exciting, and I got addicted – literally – to the dopamine/testosterone rush of blowing away alien monsters. I would say it took me six months longer than it should have to finish my dissertation because of those games. I finally quit cold turkey, and now I no longer play any computer games. I don’t even have solitaire on my computer. Looking back on what you learned here, what was most valuable? Unquestionably, the single most valuable thing I learned was how to write a dissertation. That set me up really well for writing my first book. In a dissertation, you have to learn how to sustain an argument over 200 pages. You have to learn how to build other people's arguments into your own. You have to think about how each chapter contributes to the whole. You have to learn how to do formatting and citation consistently in a document of that length. Once you complete a project of that scale, it becomes that much easier to think big thoughts. All those things helped me immensely in writing my first book. I’m very grateful to my dissertation chair, John Slatin. What advice would you offer prospective graduate students in rhetoric? The biggest piece of advice I’d give is not to lock oneself into assuming that only one kind of future is possible. Given the always-parlous state of the job market, the dream of getting a tenure-track job at a prestigious university is not always realistic. But the world is full of opportunities for people who are smart, creative, and entrepreneurial. Look at my life: I’ve failed exams, I’ve been canned, I’ve gone deaf. My life is not even remotely similar to the traditional one I envisioned when I was applying to graduate schools in 1987. But I’m far better off in life because I’ve consistently taken risks and tried new things. To learn more about Michael's life and work, visit his website at http://www.michaelchorost.com. |
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