The Technician

Robert Hayes: What sparked your interest in communication?

Professor Erwin: “I had some friends who were serving overseas (during the Gulf War) and I thought ‘well, maybe this is the best way to use my abilities’ because I was studying communication, writing, literature, and I had a fair amount of technical capabilities. The company that hired me trained me as an engineer for about of a year – they crammed 3 years of engineering work in to 1 year, and I became their technical communication manager for their military contracts.

RH: Hearing that, it seems kind of unusual to see you here now as a professor.  How did you make that transition?

PE: “What happened was, many of our military projects for the M1 Abrams Tank – we expected when the Gulf War ramped up that a great number of them would come back damaged, but what happened was that none of them came back – which is good for the company because their product really performed well. We had received reports even during some of the military operations that they been shot up and hit with 20 millimeter cannon shells and they still moved - they still operated. So it was good for the product, but it meant that we had a reduction in workforce, and, while I was not one of the “reductions”, at the same time I received an offer from Cooper Industries to become the director of their marketing and creative services, and it was an opportunity that I was crazy to turn down at such a young age – so I took it. From there my career just continued to go in that direction – it blended my graduate work, post-graduate work in communication theory. I was also teaching at a couple schools part-time and I eventually found my way back to southeastern Michigan and was hired as an executive at United Way for a number of years until I was approached by a recruiter from Kettering to come teach there – and here I am.

RH: You are also Kettering’s Director of Publication and Communication.Many students probably don’t know what that job involves.
PE: A lot of it is website development work; we do a lot of content development. We have a quarterly magazine with about a 150,000
reader circulation, and I am in charge of that. I belong to all sorts of committee groups – the Assessment Leadership Team, which is part

of the accreditation effort we have that we continuously work on to incorporate quality into everything that we do assessment, several other committees, a lot of feature writing, a lot of research and scientific writing. I review a lot of proposals and other things. Basically, anything with regard to communication as it relates to public awareness and exposure, as well as certain internal communication efforts.

RH: You have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize for your fiction. Do you still write?
PE: When I can. I’ve got a book at a few presses. Yeah, I publish fiction, essays and other things, but this year has been a little hectic because of family stuff and other things I’m engaged in, but yeah, I still write.

RH: If you could give one piece of advice to all Kettering students, what would it be?
PE: Develop your time management skills! What they need to do is manage their time to prepare for the rigors of Kettering, because it can be overwhelming and new when you have five, six classes, all these projects and all this reading. Kettering is not a place where you can procrastinate – its just not.  It never was built that way. It is a place where students gotta get going – they gotta move. Professors are more than willing to help the students. Its one of those places where we believe “lets help you succeed, lets not bury you”, at least I like to think it is. I’m certainly of that mindset.

Gary Erwin is a lectrer of Communications, and the Director of Publications and Communications for Kettering University.

Robert Hayes contributes a regular column for The Technician, as well as special features.

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