“How,” you may ask, “did a biochemist like you become an editor?”

There were several “springboards” that catapulted me into my current life as an editor.

The first one was back in high school. My senior year, I was on the staff of the school newspaper, where the faculty advisor had assigned me the role of copyeditor. Back then, I did not know what a style manual even was. However, I was excellent at spelling, punctuation, and catching typos even back then, and the advisor called me “one of the best we’ve ever had.”

It turned out that I chose to study the biological sciences rather than journalism, and my forte in writing and editing did not surface again until I  was in graduate school and wrote my master’s thesis. I wrote it so well that my advisor said that I should go into scientific writing instead of lab work. Alas, I did not listen to her, and after eight years of steadily working in labs, I found myself unemployed, thanks to an unbelievably ableist system.

To add skills to my resume, I began volunteering in the office of my church, and somehow after some time, it became known that I was extremely good at catching typos, misspellings, and such. So I was given the weekly programs to edit. Not only was I good at this, but I enjoyed it very much. Seeing how well I edited the programs, the staff began giving me other materials to edit—Bible study booklets, the staff handbook, a guide for children’s area volunteers. They continually told me how wonderful I was at editing. My highlight there was writing a letter to the state authorities so that the church’s bookkeeper could get a concealed carry permit to protect her when she took thousands of dollars with her to the bank.

In 2018, I took all these things into consideration and decided to be an independent editor. This is when I did research and found out about the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA), which gave me a ton of valuable information on starting an editing business. After a few months, I learned of the American Copy Editors Society (ACES), which was for folks who did exactly what I did. I joined both organizations and met really great people. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Fellow editors, what was your springboard into doing what you do?