A Light at the End of My Telescope

At the time I completed the MT certificate program, I was involved in a project that required my almost full-time attention that I had committed to follow through to the end. So, I did not seek employment in the MT field immediately upon graduation, although I closely watched for MT job postings and poured over MT job newsletters and related forums in an effort to both assist my fellow graduates who were seeking employment as well as identify those companies who might be the needle in a haystack…the exception to the rule of hiring newly graduated MTs for me personally.

In the May 27th, 2010, edition of the MTJobs.com newsletter, I found this ad:

Scoping Careers International

Jennifer Barrett

223 N. Guadalupe #498

Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501

judybarrett@primemail.com

www.ScopingCareers.com

Phone: 5054714134

Title: Other

Experience Level: No experience

Location of position: United States: Nationwide position

At Home or Company: At Home

Employee Type: Independent Contractor

Type of Transcription: Varied Types of Transcription

Specialty: Any Specialty

Train to work at home editing legal transcripts for court reporters in the lucrative scoping field. No experience necessary. Visit www.ScopingCareers.com, or call, toll-free, (866) 662-6686 for detailed information.

Hardware/Software: Varies.

File Transfer Method: Email and FTP transfer.

Compensation: Varies.

Scoping? What the heck was “scoping?” Needless to say, this sent me to Google to see what this was all about. Obviously, this involved some kind of training (more training?), but it also seemed to describe some kind of potentially viable income earning opportunity (“Like MT?” I couldn’t help but ask myself.) Thus began the journey.

My very first stop – and perhaps my most informative one – along the informational journey was the website www.Scopists.com which called itself “Internet Support Website for Court Reporters, Scopists, Proofreaders and Transcriptionists!”
On the website I also found an extremely informative and very comprehensive e-book (now a free HTML resource) entitled Scopistry, which I devoured “cover to cover” as it were.

For me personally, this was very exciting, since I had seriously considered – had even applied to – law school at one time in my life, and the project in which I was presently involved was also legal in nature. Equipped with my new vocabulary and my list of related questions, I finally emailed Jennifer Barrett from the ad for Scoping Careers International. She called me back a few days later.

Ms. Barrett could not have been more gracious. She very patiently answered all my questions in terminology I could understand. She even explained how being a certified medical transcriptionist was a huge benefit to professional scoping, as many of the transcripts involving medical malpractice and personal injury cases get extremely medically technical. (It should be noted that when I surfed the Net for ads by scopists, many of them did list “Certified Medical Transcriptionist” in their list of qualifications.) When it came to the matter of accessibility – both for her training course, as well as the CAT software utilized by professional scopists – she went exceedingly above and beyond.

Ms. Barrett actually contacted the software vender on my behalf and inquired regarding accessibility. In addition, she allowed me a free, “behind the scenes” test drive of the SCI training program and even emailed me numerous PDF lessons and documents for my review before enrolling in the program. The SCI training program has been producing scopists for more than 20 years now – first under Judy Barrett, SCI founder and Jenny’s mother, and now under Jenny as the result of her mother’s passing. As I scoured the Net for information about SCI, I found many professional scopist listing “graduated from Scoping Careers International.” I actually contacted several of them at random and asked them about their viewpoint regarding the training they received through SCI and if they felt they had been properly prepared to enter the professional scopist arena, and I received nothing but overwhelmingly positive feedback.

Between late May and mid-October, I intermittently researched scoping, depending on the time I had on hand while finishing up my previous commitment. During that time, I ran across an obscure reference to a training program taking place through the Center for Assistive Technology at the University at Buffalo, New York. They had partnered with the New York State Division of Blind Services in a project to train blind individuals to be scopists. So, I picked up the phone and contacted Tina Oddo to discuss the program.

She confirmed that they were indeed embarked on such a project and that – while it was ongoing – they were seeing some positive results, including several individuals who had already graduated and were gainfully employed as scopists. In order to accomplish this, the Center had partnered with BeST Scoping Techniques for the actual scopists training.

I’ll address the more technical aspects of what I learned through the various resources mentioned in this posting in my next posting, but suffice it to say, it was beginning to look like scoping was going to be a seriously viable option for a work-from-home career for me as a blind person. Only time will tell.