Senior Member Spotlight: Garret Romaine

By Rachel Houghton

Meet Garret Romaine, Senior Member.

Garret started his involvement with writing when he wrote for the school newspaper at the University of Washington, while working on his Master's degree in Geography. When the jobs didn't materialize after receiving his degree, he utilized his writing skills to work at Willamette Week for a year.

Garret's first job as a technical writer was at Automatic Data Processing, where he documented inventory control software for automobile dealerships.

"I was pretty bad at it, but they were patient for awhile. I don't know if I was too young or too stupid, but I struggled. I think I still wrote like a journalist, thinking about the headline first or something."

Garret's road to his current job at Pixelworks started at Radisys. In his position at Radisys, he was responsible for everything: scheduling, tools, printing, maintenance, and more. As the company grew, Garret was able to create a team of senior technical writers.

A networking opportunity at an STC function led to Garret becoming a manager of a 12-person team at Tektronix. He enjoyed the opportunities at Tektronix, eventually ending up as a project manager for an XML-based content management system.

While he was satisfied being a project manager, he missed writing. He also missed being at a small company, so when an opportunity at Pixelworks opened up in 2000, he jumped at the chance. In the past year, his role at Pixelworks has expanded beyond publications management, to include customer support, applications engineering, and quality assurance.

Garret has been heavily involved in the Willamette Valley Chapter of STC. Most people recognize him as a former president of the chapter, but he has had his fingers in several different leadership areas. He started with the annual publications competition as a judge in 1993, and has judged almost every year since then. He became the Employment Information manager in 1996, and created the first WVCjobs list. He served as 1st Vice President of the chapter in 1996-1997, and served as President of the chapter in 1997-1998.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Garret continues his involvement with the STC, both at the local and international level. He was the program manager for the 2000 Pan-Pacific Region 7/8 conference and for the 2001 Region 7 Conference. He also participates in the Leadership Tips SIG with Suzanna Laurent, former Region 5 director-sponsor. Since 1998, he has served on the board of directors of the Center for Excellence in Writing at Portland State University. He also teaches courses on Computer Documentation and Project Management at PSU.

Garret's only association with professional organizations is the Society for Technical Communication. He has found that membership in STC is all he needs.

"I learned early on that you get out of your membership what you put into it. The different positions that I have held have each afforded me an opportunity to gain experience that I wasn't getting at work. Organizing programs, leading administrative council meetings, taking on strategic planning, coordinating volunteers -- all of these tasks were difficult at first, but quickly helped me as a writer and manager at work."

Rachel Houghton is a lone writer at Cypress Semiconductor in Beaverton, OR, with a focus in Framemaker, Acrobat and Windows online help. She can be reached at stc@rhoughton.com.