If you’d asked me six months ago what I thought I would be doing now, post-graduation, my prediction would have been quite a ways off from reality.

The original plan was to move back to my hometown of Lexington, MA and help out with the family business while turning an eye toward new media start-up possibilities in Boston.

That plan never materialized. Over the summer, a medical emergency in the family prompted my switch to a full-time management role in the company and all the responsibilities that come with it. Officially, my title is VP Marketing/Sales of HAI Laboratories, Inc. — a high-tech manufacturer of diagnostic equipment for vision care.

What that really means is eighty-plus-hour workweeks, fielding and re-routing phone calls and e-mails coming in through seven accounts, managing a remote group of US salespeople and international distributors, organizing trade show exhibitions, producing brochures, manuals and video education modules, assembling and shipping orders, hiring and training new employees, traveling an average of once every three weeks to attend shows and assist with on-site customer service, and too many other sundry tasks to name.

What it also means is I’m getting an incredibly comprehensive crash course in management and entrepreneurship, learning at the elbow of my mother, the company’s founder and a brilliant businesswoman.

I haven’t entirely left the world of journalism and community media, though.

In the past few months, I’ve gone back to my alma mater twice: at the start of September to assist J-profs Steve Fox and B.J. Roche in teaching the inaugural UMass Journalism Multimedia Bootcamp, and last week to give a guest lecture on video production to student interns for the Mass. Academy of Sciences.

I’ve also been working on PEG Point, a beat blog for public access and community media centers in the digital age. Keep an eye out for a new video series coming out this month called “Making the News” that explores the intersection of citizen journalism and access stations. The first episode (currently in post-production) will feature a behind-the-scenes look at UVC-TV’s student volunteer-run news show, UMass This Week.

There are a couple other projects currently in the pipeline, which I’ll hold off revealing until they reach a more concrete stage.

And what about this blog?

For a while, I wasn’t sure what to write about now that I’m no longer a student journalist or even, strictly speaking, working in journalism. But in a recent conversation, my friend S.P. Sullivan mentioned that it’s probably a good idea to infuse some outside thinking into the whole future-of-journalism conversation, especially now that “journalist” and “entrepreneur” are two words being strung together with increasing frequency.

So with that in mind, I’ll be adding to the mix of posts here lessons I’m learning from the business world, as well as chronicling the ins and outs of running a company. For those of you following along at home, I hope you’ll find the occasional dispatch useful. Do let me know if there are any topics in particular you’d like to read about.