Hi everyone

I have just joned this forum and I am a former medical transcriptionist and am now more of a general transcriptionist looking to get back to where I started as part of my work at home business.

I also have a forum of my own on my own web page which I will tell you about in the next couple of days.

I just wanted to let you all know that I am here and will be following and posting frequently.

Transcriptspro aka Sue Dyson

Hi Sue,
Welcome to TI - So tell us, what made you to abandon a specialty and go for a broader transcribing practice?
Kim

Hi Kim

And thanks for the welcome.

Firstly can you tell me how to edit the poll as I’ve just realised that I have mis-spelt transcriptionists - not good :-(.

In answer to your question I moved away from medical transcription simply due to lack of work opportunities.  I then decided to become a lawyer and became a legal secretary whilst I studied.  It was easier to learn the legal stuff from the books when I was actually doing some of the stuff as a legal secretary.  I was then a lawyer for 8 years and hubby and I decided we’d had enough of living in the UK and moved to Spain.  We set up a business as a virtual secretarial service and for the best part of 12 months I have transcribed everything from How to run an oil company to Can a woman really have it all?

I’ve always prefered medical transcription audio because I absolutely love anything medical including watching gory operations on the TV.  I am thinking now its time to go back to it and realise that I may have to do a course first but not sure about that.

I have joined a couple of forums to get to know the medical transcription community as it is in 2009 which will be very different from the 1980/1990s. 

I also like the look of your site too.  Tell me how did you get into MT and how long have you been an MT?  Also why did you create this forum?

I don’t think the poll can be edited directly, but I’ll go in through the database and fix it for you there.  It shouldn’t be hard since it’s our first poll

Wow, sounds like you’ve been in a lot of the different fields.  How interesting!  From the UK to Spain - that must be quite a culture shock.  For me it was quite a change leaving California and moving to Illinois.  I couldn’t imagine moving to a whole different country.

I’m a GT.  I’ve done some medical transcribing, but only as far as like medical seminars and the like.  I’ve not been trained as an MT.  I worked several years in the legal field as a legal secretary and dealt with a lot of legal stuff there.  Mostly I dealt with bankruptcy and divorce cases for the first few years and then went to another law firm and started dealing with criminal cases.  Being a GT is great because the topics I transcribe are so varied.  My favorite ones to transcribe I think are criminal interviews.  Tthey’re harder because they’re always verbatim but they’re so much more interesting than research interviews.

Thanks for the compliment on the site.  I started out to just create a simple blog so I could blog about my transcribing.  When seeking blogging software I found a cool one that came with a forum, so you could actually link your blog posts to forums for discussion - a really neat idea I thought so I created the forums.  Then I realized that people were going to want to advertise their transcribing services, so rather than having everyone posting in the forums here and there in a bunch of different posts to sludge through, I figured I’d better install a directory where people could find transcribers as well as where transcribers could find companies that would hire freelancers and ICs, (Independent Contractors).  So the whole thing kind of came together as a community and I figured what the heck just get a domain and turn it into a community and here we are.

I think it’s going to do rather well.  I’ve seen it go from an Alexa Ranking of 6 million a week ago to just under 2 million now.  I’m pretty sure in time it will become a great place for transcribers to come together, share ideas, ask questions, read about the industry in the blogs (I definitely need some more writers) and a centralized location to find and rate other transcription services and companies.