Student Profile
Brecken (Lesniewski) Cutler, 1997
After graduating from Miami in 1997, I began work as a Management Consultant with PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Chicago. My job offered many opportunities to leverage my writing and editing skills, including: documenting software problems, creating software user manuals, developing operational benchmarking reports, and preparing multi-media instructional materials. In doing these assignments, I discovered my BATSC background gave me two distinct advantages over my peers: (1) unlike many computer-industry professionals, I actually enjoyed documentation assignments, and (2) because I eagerly accepted these assignments, I acquired new technical skills in the topics on which I wrote. I cannot emphasize enough how valuable an asset writing aptitude is in technical industries—not because writing is essential, but because an affinity for writing is rare among employees in technical fields. In addition to the many writing and editing projects I accepted, client training became another aspect of my job. Although training itself was not part of my BATSC curriculum, it was a logical extension of the instructional documentation techniques taught extensively by BATSC professors.
In my second year at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, I conducted software configuration training courses for our clients from distribution facilities across the country. From that role flowed an opportunity to manage system configuration at a distribution center in Reno, Nevada. In early 2000, wanting a break from weekly travel and considering graduate school, I accepted a short-term position with Telution, a small Chicago-based telecommunications software provider. As the only technical writing professional at Telution, I found the skills I learned in the BATSC program—particularly interviewing and document design techniques—essential to my day-to-day activities. During the six months I spent at Telution, I created and maintained both paper and web-based training materials, user manuals, technical specification documents, and network administrator guides. I also developed the company’s first style manual and an online glossary of our telecommunications software terminology.
In August 2000, I left Telution to begin law school at the University of Illinois, where I focused my studies on the transactional side of business law. Unlike software consulting, in the legal profession most of my peers enjoy exercising their writing and communication skills. Still, I found the disciplined drafting techniques taught in the BATSC program much closer to legal writing style than those taught in traditional English or Journalism courses. My writing skills were rewarded in my second year of law school with a teaching assistantship in the legal writing program.
After completing my legal studies at Northwestern University, I joined the law firm of Ungaretti & Harris in Chicago, where I have been practicing corporate and intellectual property law…a position promising plenty of drafting opportunities!
In 2006, I added a new project—a baby boy, Owen Sutherland Cutter.