The English Major’s Guide to Practical IT: Introduction
There are dozens of guides published by highly trained engineers whose expertise far exceeds my own. Sites like these will provide more technical expertise than I ever could. The English Major’s Guide to IT (TEMGIT) isn’t intended to compete in that arena. Rather, this is for a different kind of IT employee that is ever more common in today’s workplace: the one who has unwittingly fallen into the job through no fault or intent of their own.
Maybe this sounds familiar. You’re nearing the completion of a well-rounded liberal arts degree from a prestigious institution when—BAM!—the economy suffers what some call “a once in a lifetime” crash. There you are, saddled with student loans equivalent to a 30-year mortgage in most midwestern states and entering the worst job market in a generation. You realize quickly your well-honed ability to pontificate on what Lionel Trilling referred to as our “certain minimum of intellectual and spiritual tradition” may help avert an unexamined life (and perhaps help land a date with a particular type of girl or guy), but no one is willing to pay you a living wage for it.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your world view), you live in a place where the 1% is able to lavish obscene VC funds on what people are calling “start-ups.” They’re hiring young, desperate, smart people with no experience (like you) to run through walls on a heavily discounted salary as part of a valiant effort to create something amazing. You’ve read Don Quixote, so you know this could be either (a) someone else’s horrible vanity project doomed to fail, or (b) your chance to help make a dent in the universe. You bet on (b) and get inspired.
So there you are, working at the startup (or Strtp, as they’ve branded), surrounded by a dozen or so others even greener than you. No one knows a damn thing, so things are generally a mess, but it doesn’t matter because you’re all figuring it out (and everyone is so blindingly drunk on Kool-Aid anyway, which is an awful lot of fun except when it’s not). But one day, after a particularly long morning of too much work and too little time, the loud-mouthed guy in marketing starts bitching loudly about his Mac running slowly. The sense of expectation is palpable: someone needs to step up and calm this young man. Wanting (no, needing) to contribute something useful and deliver a modicum of order into this chaos, you calmly drop a few nuggets you picked up during a late night visit to the Genius Bar when you were trying desperately to finish a term paper and your Mac wasn’t cooperating: check Activity Monitor to see what’s sucking cpu and memory, press command+option+escape to force quit, and try rebooting once in a while. The loud mouthed guy in marketing proclaims your expertise (loudly, as he does), and the rest of the office is elated by this small victory and return to lower volume. Suddenly you’re the de facto Mac Genius on staff. When Exec needs a printer setup and an access point or two installed and a conference room build out… they’re coming to you. And now it’s your job to do all these things. How did this happen?
You may not realize it yet, but you’ve started your career in IT. Welcome.
And congratulations, you’ve found a niche. You and your liberal arts skillset can be particularly effective in IT, an industry that is desperate for more people who think like you. But you don’t know that yet. Right now, all you know is the voice in your head is repeating, “what the hell do I know about this stuff,” as a scorching case of Imposter Syndrome sets in. You’re panicking, buried under countless browser tabs of SaaS documentation and MDM admin guides, desperately hoping to formulate a coherent plan for success.
Well, take a deep breath and calm down because here’s the good news: IT isn’t all about scripting, network protocols, and complex security models. In fact, a good strategy will be founded upon critical thinking, empathic instincts, and clear communication—traits you, as a liberal arts major, should be well practiced in. You already have the skills you need. You can do this.
This guide is for you.
The English Major’s Guide to:
Launching a Helpdesk
Implementing Apple MDM
Implementing Windows MDM
Identity Management
others