Education & Work History
Certificate in Medical Transcription, class of 2007
Music journalism and media management were something that I took up after moving to Finland. However, my professional history was a bit different before I swapped countries. Back in Canada, I had worked bussing tables at a country club, serving customers in a supermarket deli, doing shipping and receiving and data management in a clothing warehouse, and housekeeping in some summer resorts in the Rocky Mountains. I was even offered the assistant manager position at EB Games at one point, though I sadly declined in order to pursue other endeavors.
Back: what the workload looked like one day after I had done “some” overtime
Front: from a photoshoot my work friend and I did to show off our staff’s personalities for a joke/project we were doing for Insight Medical Imaging’s 2007 Christmas Party
My first bout of upper-secondary education was in Medical Transcription, completing my training at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT; 2006-2007)
While I was always encouraged to pursue my passions, I was nevertheless also encouraged to study something more practical. I was initially enrolled in medical coding, which I ended up hating because I’m not a logically-minded person. I swapped majors to Medical Transcription, as we shared most of our classes with them, and ended up finding something that I really enjoyed! At both of my workplaces, I gained a reputation for being a quirky little weirdo, but my bosses loved me for how dedicated and hardworking I was. Since medical transcription is extremely strict grammatically, I credit it for making me into a dedicated and diligent Editor. I loved my positions at both Insight Medical Imaging and the University of Calgary Medical Group, which I had until I moved to Finland in 2009.
Eventually, I felt the need to get a degree…
While life in Canada back in the 2010s was not such a challenge, finding work in Finland with a certificate that only had value in medicinal English was nigh impossible and I was told that, in Finland, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any professional work without a degree, so in 2013 I enrolled in Tampere University to study English Language, Literature, & Translation, with a focus on language and literature, and full minors in Pedagogy and Intercultural Communication.
After doing summer school studies in the Internet & Games department, where I had come up with the idea for the best board game developed in class, the professor requested that I do a Masters in their department, but I wasn’t interested in continuing my studies any longer at that point.
CrossFit
One of my other random endeavors was opening a CrossFit gym. Due to my whiplash injury, my poor physical state became aggressively apparent to me towards the end of university, so I took up CrossFit thanks to a recommendation from a former friend. I was a very enthusiastic athlete from around 2016-2019 and eventually did my CF-L1 and opened a gym called CrossFit Red Arrow with the same friend.
Unfortunately, having the right team for any sort of project seems to be of critical importance and we didn’t have a very cohesive group of people and the communication between our “departments” was nonexistent. I learned a lot in this time period, but ultimately found myself so dissatisfied with how things were being managed that I left the gym a year or two after it had opened.