Colette Murphy earned a bachelor’s degree in communication from the University of California, San Diego, and a master’s degree in mass communication and media studies from San Diego State University. One of her favorite undergraduate projects was a stage play she wrote about the connections people form through their love of baseball. This was her final project for an ethnography class. Most people wrote a term paper, but during my data collection (interviews), She had become so taken with the stories she heard from people that she knew it needed to be presented in a different form than a standard essay to truly convey what I had discovered through her research.

Colette then went on to complete a master’s degree in literature and writing studies from California State University, San Marcos. While in grad school (part deux), she became an advisor at the campus writing center, which revealed her love of working one-on-one with students and their writing. She stuck with academia as a professor and a writing advisor for a number of years before pivoting entirely and taking up a role as a community manager in the video games industry. She worked in community, marketing, and development for six years.

After a major company restructuring led to mass layoffs, Colette found myself in a position to work entirely for herself and pursue her own creative writing. During this time, she found that she missed some parts of academia, but did not see herslef wanting to return to a single campus full time. That is when she found MedSchoolCoach, which gave her the opportunity to, once again, work one-on-one with people and their writing, while still working on her own projects as well. Currently, she has two novels in the works: a new adult fantasy and an adult romantic comedy as well as a full-length stage play.