As a single mother with a full-time job, Linda Naughton entered Chatham’s Master of Professional Writing (MPW) program in the summer of 2015. At the time, Naughton was looking for a program that allowed her to have a flexible schedule.

“I’m from Pittsburgh, so I was already familiar with Chatham’s reputation as a great school,” Naughton said. “The MPW program offered an interesting variety of courses, and I liked the way you could specialize with the concentrations.”

Naughton entered the program in order to improve her writing skills and to learn more about professional writing.

Her favorite class while in the MPW program was Designing Digital Media. “Since so much writing is ending up on the web these days, it’s important to understand the particular challenges and opportunities of digital media,” Naughton said. During the course of the class, Naughton had to create a blog and post regularly to it. The blog she created was called Self Rescuing Princess, and now, over two years later, Naughton says she still posts to it regularly.

A year after beginning the program, Naughton graduated in the summer of 2016.

Naughton has twenty years of experience as a software engineer and web designer. For her job, Naughton writes technical documents and creates web pages.

“I can leverage the skills I learned in the MPW program when writing and when evaluating usability and graphics design,” Naughton said.

In addition, Naughton blogs and writes as a freelance author in her spare time. She said, “The social media classes have helped a great deal when promoting my work as a blogger and novelist.” She’s working on her second novel now.

Naughton says that her dream job would be to combine the two things she enjoys most: software engineering and writing. She’s like to write software technical guides.

Her advice for writers is to write every day. “Even if it’s just for fifteen minutes, over the course of a year that adds up to a lot of words,” Naughton said.