Technical Communication + STEM = Iowa State University

Breehan Gerleman, a senior manager of communications in the College of Engineering, was on a path toward Iowa State University for most of her life. As the daughter of a proud Iowa State alum, and with an early interest in STEM topics and technical writing, it is not surprising that she found her way to ISU after her undergraduate studies at Winona State University in Minnesota. And once she arrived, she stuck around.

Gerleman attributes her 22-year career at ISU to the skills she learned in the Department of English graduate program in Rhetoric, Composition, and Professional Communication.

“I think that the good prep I got here was being comfortable not being a subject-matter expert,” she said. In technical communication, you have to “communicate effectively about topics that you don’t know much about.” This self-awareness, according to Gerleman, is a key component to technical communication that has helped her a lot in her work writing for the engineering department.

After getting her start at Iowa State in an internship with Iowa State Extension and Outreach, Gerleman now writes and manages marketing and communications for the ISU College of Engineering, writing extensively about the STEM topics that originally fascinated her and making recruitment materials for the school where she decided to stay.

“Any English degree … is teaching you to communicate effectively in a whole bunch of different ways, for a whole bunch of different audiences, for a whole bunch of different purposes,” she said. “And I’m grateful now to have that flexibility of capability that I don’t know that I would have gotten in another major.”

She also listed retired faculty members Dorothy Winsor and Rebecca Burnett as encouraging forces in her education.

About her career here at ISU, Gerleman said that working at a university may not keep you young, but “it keeps you hopeful because you get to be around young people who are smart and driven and caring and collaborative, who are going to take on every challenge that we have in front of us.” This attitude, along with her belief that working in academia is challenging and rewarding, has reaffirmed her chosen career at her graduate school. “If you’re lucky like me,” she said, “you get to continue working for your alma mater, a place you love, for all of these years.”