Persistence is key

"Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it.  The time will pass anyway." - Unknown

This is a quote that I wrote down on a Post-it and stuck on the front of my theory binder when I very first started my court reporting training.  So far it's been almost two and a half years, and I am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of completing my steno school.

Like I said, I've been doing the Court Reporting at Home program, and I've really enjoyed the self-teaching nature of the school.  In college I was always looking for ways to take classes online rather than "in person" since I have always been able to stay self-motivated when it comes to school.  However, for anyone who isn't a self-starter with schoolwork, this program may not be the best for you.

I learned steno on a student writer, the Stentura Protege.  Her and I have gotten closely acquainted over the past couple of years, but sadly I will need to be upgrading to a professional writer soon.

My writer with my favorite plate on.  I usually switch the print to a light blue when I shadow on jobs to be more profesh.

I would love to stick with the writer I have (being that new writers are so expensive), but I can't because this one only holds 50 pages of memory.  Honestly, for anyone considering going into court reporting school, I would recommend buying a professional machine from the get-go, even if it's an older model.  Because really what's important to have post-school is your ability to do real time with it, it's memory capacity, back up memory, and being able to write clean notes with it.  

If anyone else reading this has any pointers when it comes to upgrading to a professional writer, I would love to hear what experiences you've had.  I thought about going with a refurbished Mira, but for not that much more I could have the oh-so-pretty Diamante.  I really, really want the pink Diamante so I'm (fingers crossed) hoping  that they bring that one back.  

So beautiful!

Another thing I kind of wanted some feedback on is what kind of jobs have you other steno students held while getting through school?  I spent the first year of my training working at a radiology office doing filing and reception work.  That was fine in the beginning, but later I realized that I needed more time and energy to devote to speed building.  I spent about six months doing mostly speed building and shadowing a reporter at some of her jobs.  In that six months I went from 120 wpm to 180 wpm.  

Since the beginning of this year I have been doing legal transcription work, which pretty much makes the same product as a court reporter, but it's done my means of pre-recorded audio.  I had originally hoped to use my writer while doing this, however because of tight deadlines, I never successfully used my steno writer to complete any of those jobs.  Although I've felt like I've learned a lot about transcript production in the past couple of months, it really has been very time consuming and has put a hold on my speed building.  And being that I am so close to the finish line, I've been trying my best to balance the two so I can finally start reporting live jobs.

A couple of months ago I discovered a group on Facebook called Encouraging Court Reporting Students.  When I found this group I felt like I had won the lotto because for so long I felt like I was the only court reporting student in the whole world.  I've come to realize that having other students to communicate with is such an important element of this whole learning process, especially because the amount of people that I've come across locally that have any kind of knowledge about court reporting are few and far between.  If you haven't been to the Facebook group page, I insist you check it out here: http://www.facebook.com/groups/ECRSgroup/.

I hope everyone is having a great practice week so far.  Happy steno-ing, steno friends!

Do it!