Zheng Liu

ENGW 3301
Aug 11, 2014
Project 4: Interview Report


Why the Person Was Chosen
The person I conducted an interview with is a Northeastern University student named
Huisheng Hu. After graduating from high school , Huisheng came to United States, She has
pursued an Accounting and Finance degree in the past four years, and now she is obtaining a
Masters degree that involves two years of advanced courses of accounting and finance. She
reportedly did well on her first Co-op. Until meeting with her, I did not know that she was a
successful graduate student. The report aims to inform students about the writing in financial
career. Additionally, the report will explore the connections between professional writing and
financial writing within the framework of class lectures and concepts that have been discussed
throughout the semester.

Narrative of Interview
She used to have a fund accounting job in Finance area. She thinks it is a basic step of her
career path to understand how Finance and Accounting works. It also brought her knowledge of
an actual work environment, and made her think about whether this is the career she wants.
When I asked her about what kinds of writing and reading she has done in her job, she indicated
that she didnt have too much writing or reading to do for her job as it was just checking and
accounting. If there was any reading, it was largely about the equity news that mainly consisted
of headlines. However, she wrote a large number of emails to tell other staff about the situation
of the fund. Her colleague writes some of the companys daily equity news, and focuses the
language for people in the finance sector, which is typically short and direct. The frequency of
writing and reading was everyday after checking the funds. The writings that she did for her job
were tailored for the audience like other fund accounts and senior managers. Before they were
about to write, they checked the everyday- based fund, Writing was not part of her job area, but
items like the daily equity news would be reviewed by the supervisor about twice before it is sent
out. When I mentioned what kind of challenges of writing where you learned from difficulties,
she said, when in doubt, the best way is to free yourself from the situation and a new idea
(solution) will emerge. The hardest part of writing is when someone does not know what to
write, because of a lack of ideas. Calm down, take a walk, talk to a friend, and the challenge is
likely to be resolved.
The respondent's advice were "Be open to anything." This is an extremely good advice
for both professional writers and amateur-level writers in working place since there are so many
avenues that can be explored with writing. Even though the job prospect does not seem very
strong now, I am very confident that taking some professional writing class will lead to many job
offers.

Reflections
Writing is not necessary for all careers, but the process of writing is essential to building
good communication skills. It improves on how to communicate with other staff and it is
important to communicate with potential client and working partner effectively, especially for
short and formal e-mail communication. This experience provided us a good practice of how to
communicate work with others by e-mail, and this experience would also help us in the future for
creating emails in workplace. Some of the job does not require much writing, though good
writing and persuasive skills enables people to better communicate with supervisors and
efficiently seek approvals to complete tasks.
Overall, I think this interview was successfully done by me and Huisheng. I learned more
about a career path that I am interested in from her, and I was able to explore broader
possibilities in the field of professional writing. I hope my research enlightened people on a
career path that they had not considered before, in addition to providing them with more
information about professional writing careers in general.