Essay on Future Nets $10,000 for Student Now

An English student who described her vision of an era when computers eliminate office drudgery won a $10,000 writing award, beating science majors from top universities in a contest about the future.

Hedy Oliver, 36, a part-time technical writer and student at Cal State Northridge, won Honeywell Inc.’s Futurist Awards Competition, besting a field of 450 contestants nationwide.

“There was one competitor from Yale and another from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” she said in a telephone interview. “Most of them are technologists. I am a writer.”

Oliver wrote the essay, titled “Goodbye Gutenberg,” as though it were a series of letters written in 2010 to a friend living in the bygone world of 1990.

“I made up this little story in my mind (and) set up a scene as if someone was living at that time,” she said.

She contended that computers will overtake in significance the changes that followed Gutenberg’s 15th-Century invention of movable type and the mechanical printing that developed afterward.

Secretaries become obsolete and voice-operated machinery has vanquished office drudgery, her essay said.

“Just as the printing press changed the whole world, computers are also going to change people’s lives by bringing information instantly to millions,” Oliver said.

The entries were judged by a panel of scientists and engineers on the basis of creativity, clarity of expression and feasibility.

“She was competing against doctoral candidates,” said her English professor, Anthony Arthur, who traveled with her to Minneapolis to receive the award.

“The implications are interesting,” he said. “I think it shows that you don’t have to pay $10,000 for an education. People can get a perfectly good liberal arts education without paying that kind of money.”

Arthur, who devised a course called composition for the pre-professional two years ago, has his students write competitive essays instead of research papers.

Oliver, a technical writer for View Engineering in Simi Valley, said she originally planned to graduate from college in the 1960s but dropped out, got married and went to work before returning as a student in the 1980s.

The prize money, she said, will go to pay for the rest of her education. Working with Arthur, she designed a special major for herself called technical communication.

“I need the money,” she said of the prize. “Now that I’ve got it, my financial aid has been cut.”