Susan C. Cooper

SUSAN C. COOPER became a technical consultant and architect quite through serendipity more than twenty years ago. Graduating with a BA in English from the University of Texas

at San Antonio, she had amassed enough premed classes to apply to medical school (but didn’t have the grade point average to get in), and she quickly realized that without a teaching certificate, she would probably starve. So in 1993, during a fairly serious economic

depression, she spent a miserable year working as a temp, or secretary, while applying to no less than ten thousand jobs.

How It All Started for Me: In the Author’s Words

People at my temp jobs would always ask me how do things on the computer. I was always a little surprised because I didn’t really have any special knowledge or training; I would just sit down and figure it out. One day, an IT guy came to work on my PC. I’d probably managed to tweak it a little too much, and I remember being in awe that there was this person walking around, not chained to a desk as I was. Imagine being able to use the bathroom without

having to get someone to watch the desk! That person also didn’t have someone looking over his shoulder the entire day.

So after a year and a half and hundreds of “Thanks, but no thanks” job application rejections, I got desperate and did two things: I moved to Austin, where the economic outlook for skilled

workers was brighter. And, in the midst of applying everywhere, I somehow managed

to apply for a job with Kelly Services to troubleshoot Windows 95, a new operating system (OS) that hadn’t been released yet.

Because it was a new OS, and because we would be trained on it, we were given a basic quiz—ten questions that were easy to answer if you were an IT person but might as well have been in a foreign language for me. Here are two examples:

* How do you print from a DOS prompt?

* How many SCSI devices can be attached to an SCSI controller?

Needless to say, I didn’t know the answers, but I did go to Barnes & Noble the next day, having memorized the questions, to look up the answers. Then I showed up at the competing technical agency in town to retake the test. Because Windows 95 was brand-new, the

agency was going to teach people they hired the operating system, and I knew with certainty that I could figure it out if I could just get someone to give me a shot, which the competing technical agency did.

The rest, as they say is history and I have enjoyed a varied and fantastic career since then.