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About to graduate from ��㴫ý with an English degree, Isabella Ocampo gets revved up describing her favorite writers.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and William Shakespeare top a long list.

“And Dostoevsky, of course,” she said. “He’s so talented and his spirituality is very interesting. He’s not a summer read, for sure, but still great.”

Literature fascinates this student from Chesapeake. “That's my true passion — reading and writing about reading,” she said.

A year or so ago, you’d find Ocampo immersed in the innerworkings of machinery, not the pages of a classic novel.

As a technical services intern at Stihl Inc. in Virginia Beach, she spent summer 2024 sharpening her technical writing chops. She helped a team of coworkers craft responses to dealer inquiries about the company’s primary product, chainsaws.

She wasn’t simply correcting grammar mistakes. Ocampo got to know those noisy chain sabers inside and out.

“It was the first time I'd ever used one,” Ocampo said. “That was interesting. My first day, they were like, do you want to try some of the products? I said, sure!”

Before her internship ended, she could take one apart and put it back together. “Which is a unique party trick,” she said, smiling. “Definitely a unique thing to do as an English major.”

Ocampo is serious about both literature and technical writing.

She left another university in the region and came to Old Dominion in part because she knew about the English Department’s reputation for excellence. At Old Dominion, she enjoyed talking with her teachers and fellow students about books. She also completed a certificate in technical/professional writing.

“I think technical writing works very well alongside the literature concentration,” Ocampo said. “It's really informed the way that I think about literature and the way that I write about literature.”

One of Ocampo’s professors saw that she had a knack for technical writing.

“What stood out the most is how Isabella would take hold of a technical writing concept and then take it as far as it could go within the course structure,” said David Robledo, a lecturer in Old Dominion’s English Department. “She was an excellent team leader because of her ability to communicate goals, break down work into components, and clearly articulate expectations and goals for work outcomes.

“If you are talking about ‘applied’ learning, Isabella's performance as a student in my technical writing class is prime example,” Robledo said.

Indirectly, the teacher helped make Ocampo’s chainsaw summer possible. “He always encouraged us to create LinkedIn profiles and start marketing ourselves early, so I did that,” Ocampo said. Having seen her posts, a representative from Stihl contacted her about a career fair. From there, it all fell into place.

The student was happy to find that her communication skills were useful at Stihl.

“At first, I felt out of place as a literature person in a room full of engineers at a chainsaw company,” she said. “But I was delighted and surprised. It was a really rewarding internship. After two weeks or so I felt right at home and I could see where they needed someone like me.”

She says she made a positive impact at the company. “By the time I internship was over, I had put every published piece of documentation — every internal, published piece of documentation — through readability tests to bridge the gap between the highly technical language of the department and the more readable, more conversational tone that the dealers were looking for,” she said. “Since I've left, they have continued using documentation that I created.”

Ocampo said ��㴫ý’s mixed student population is part of what made her Monarch experience so satisfying.

Older students entering college after years in the workforce — or those with families and holding down full-time jobs — were her classmates, she said.

“That diversity of thought and experience is invaluable,” Ocampo said. “You really do get to see a lot of different perspectives on the same work.”

Ocampo hopes to one day return to school and eventually earn a doctorate in literature. She’s not sure if she’ll pursue graduate degrees at Old Dominion or elsewhere, but the university is certainly in the running.

“I really do love the department and the people I've met here,” she said.