A Life
Coming Full Circle
By Michael
Abrams
Clues that Beth Peisic would grow up to be a technical writer used to arrive at her family's Long Island home with the new gizmos.
Two examples
were the Super 8 camera and a stereo system. Making electronic things
operational just fell to her.
"Look,
I come from a very nontechnical family. It used to drive me crazy,"
she says, laughing at the memory. "Let's face it— they were
klutzes. They never had the patience to read the manual and get things
to work. But I liked to."
It can be
a blessing to like what others don't want to do.
Beth was
reminded of that herself, when—as an adult with an MBA and a master's
degree in accountancy (both from NYU)—she was contemplating a career
shift. Her mother had died, and Beth decided to take a leave of absence
from her Manhattan job at Citibank to spend a year rethinking things in
Israel.
It was 1994.
Prospects for peace in the Middle East seemed tangible. American and European
companies were opening R&D centers, eager to tap a highly educated
Israeli workforce recently seeded with immigrant engineers and scientists
from the former Soviet Union. Lots of companies needed native English
speakers who were technically oriented, and she remembered the manuals.
She enrolled
in an innovative program run by an American émigré, Mati
Schwartz. He taught desktop publishing and manual creation and gave briefings
on technical concepts.
After Beth
graduated, it was easy to find well-paying work in Israel's then booming
high-tech sector. Other good things happened to Beth, including meeting
Doron Peisic, an electrical engineer, whom she married.
Her life
seemed to be coming full circle in more ways than one. She was working
for the developer of on-line banking software, and the firm's major client
was Citibank. Then Doron landed work at AT&T. The couple moved to
New Jersey, where Beth became a developer of documentation for Lucent's
microelectronics division.
Last year,
Doron and Beth came west to work for broadband chipmaker Mindspeed, where
Beth is senior technical writer. They settled in Mira Mesa, where they
now live with their three-year-old daughter Sarah.
Mindspeed's Sorrento Mesa office unfortunately fell victim to the telecom bust, and commuting three days a week to Mindspeed's Orange County headquarters is wearing thin. But Beth doesn't regret her shift out of finance to technical writing. If you're a word person, she reasons, you're just not going to be happy unless you're smithing words.
