If you’d asked me anytime between age 14 and 18 whether one of my extracurricular activities would factor into my career, I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that it’d be Future Problem Solving. From the name, you might think it was a course, something silly like Underwater Psychology or Economics. FPS was our school’s equivalent of Debate, only it was a team effort, happened on paper and involved less Logic. We had teams advance to state competitions in a couple of those years, though, so we were fairly good at it (which is impressive, considering we were a small farming community with one high school for the whole county).
But what exactly is FPS, you ask? Well, you can look here, but to summarize:
Well, a handful of 4-person teams are given a “fuzzy”. That’s a vague description of a problematic situation, which might boil down to something like “Officials at Whatsit School District are concerned about the increasing truancy in the area,” or “The lead engineers of Rockets R Us have found that the valve seals of the SR23 rockets have been shipped to Siberia, exposing them to -50°F temperatures.” Then each team brainstorms problems, both those contributing to the situation and those arising from it, by writing ideas on slips of paper for 20 minutes. Ideas can be spoken and even discussed (in brief), and ideas can be based on others, but no critique is allowed. When the time is up, the slips are gathered and sorted by group consensus to weed out duplicates, then the remaining selection is narrowed down to 20 items. These 20 items are assessed by the team, who decides which one underlying problem they will attempt to solve. This is written up in more detail, then the team brainstorms solutions to this problem. These are also sorted and reduced to a list of 20. The team then writes 5 positive criteria (least cost to taxpayers, fastest to implement), picks 8 solutions and scores them based on the 5 criteria. The winning solution is then written into a one-page presentation covering all aspects of implementation (Who, What, Where, When, Why and How). We affectionately called this write-up the “Snow Job”. Guess who nearly always got chosen for that task? *beaming smile*
Four years of this.
Combined with one of the top high school English curricula in the state of Indiana, a passion for reading that started at age 4, and a love of computers that started around age 9, I was primed for a career in Technical Writing. I just wish I’d known in college that Computer Science (before “IS” or “IT” became the field-name) would be the way to go, rather than Physics and Linguistics.
