I’m a little gob-stopped by your story, Sara. I thought I was the only one with a winding path that took me through political science to user experience and, eventually, I hope, to content strategy specifically.

I’ve begun to think that this path, though winding, is not a coincidence for me. I wonder if you’ll find some truth in my own story. I came of age during the aughts too and the political and technological climate of that time drew out of me this urge to build bridges with language.

Every career and job I ever wanted drew me in because I thought it would get me closer to something I dearly loved. Being a veterinarian would make for a life filled with puppies and kittens. Marine biology would surely put me among dolphins and shimmering coral reefs. If I were a hair stylist, I would be immersed in glamorous pursuits and spend my days making others beautiful.

By the time I went to college in 2004, I was set on becoming a US Embassy officer and studying social relations in a political science program. World travel appealed to me, but more than that, I was excited by the possibility to build connections between the US and other countries that I felt that job would provide to me. My first year of college had me learning about selfhood and communities, the history of history, nationalism, war and revolutions.

My world built on big-T Truth exploded into worlds of little-t truths that year. It’s a little cliche, I know. I was stunned when George W. Bush was re-elected as president. It was the first time that the sweeping potential for connection-making and bridge-building close to home became clear to me. I apologize for getting a little ideological here, but as I saw the Bush Administration chip away at things I considered basic rights everyone in the U.S. was entitled to, the need to build bridges where there were none and make connection felt urgent as hell.

I joined this website called theFacebook after a cute guy asked me if I’d heard of it in our French class. I found danah boyd’s blog, apophenia: making connections where none previously existed. I read Foucault for the first time. By the end of that first year, I was writing about how social networking sites, while they offered the potential for many social connections, could mediate and manipulate identity in ways that we hadn’t imagined. I wasn’t paranoid, but I was well aware of the capacity that theFacebook and other social networking sites could have for structuring meaning and identities and communities.

My urgent desire to connect paired with my fascination with the social web led me down a winding path that included website development, non-profit work, technical writing, academic research, software quality assurance, information architecture and now, finally, business analysis and user experience design. My formative experiences made me aware of the need to connect and the media available to do it. While our media today is highly varied, one thing that remains true for all media is that we use them to communicate meaning to other humans. If content strategy is about communicating with other humans with the same intentionality that we use to build bridges in our communities, then count me in.