Dominique Howard, the 2014 Microsoft Word World Champion

by Jackie Strawbridge

Dominique Howard was convinced she’d bombed the Microsoft Word 2007 national competition. As the winners were announced, she let third place go by, then second, then promptly spaced out in front of a cupcake display.

“[My] mind is literally just on the cupcakes,” she told me when we met late last month. “They call first place and I hear my name, but it took a while.”

Her mom had to turn around and say, Dominique, hello, that’s you.

“I hop up, ecstatic, and not knowing how this happened,” she recalled.

Dominique — Nique for short — is 22 and lives in Harlem. She’s a foodie, an avid debater, a couponing addict, and the first American woman to win the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championships in the competition’s 13-year history.

She was recruited to participate in the 2014 competition by Certiport, the test-development company that holds it, after she aced a Word 2007 certification test she had taken the previous summer simply to improve her job prospects.

Dominique said she showed up to nationals basically assuming the whole experience would be a nice free trip to Atlanta. But weeks later, she was at the world championships in Anaheim, besting finalists from across the globe in speed-tests ranging from formatting text to creating tables to inserting comments to attaching documents. Basic stuff, but with strict rules, and at lightning speed.

According to Dominique, she learned most of these skills on the job as a receptionist and through training at STRIVE, a workforce development nonprofit. Besides constant practice, an overall frustration with monotony and inefficiency helped her master Word 2007. (She told me she once taught a friend to do mass mailings after learning that his office labels mail piece-by-piece, which, to her, just sounded depressingly tedious and boring.)

Larry Jackson, STRIVE’s senior director for career services, said that the organization teaches “widely used” platforms to help land clients in offices throughout New York, many of which still use Word 2007 — so the whole thing is not exactly the niche-nerd field I envisioned when I first heard about the competition. According to Certiport, nearly 17,000 people competed across the globe in the Microsoft 2007 contest.

And even though Dominique exhibits some qualities I expected from a person who has memorized every function of a seven-year-old Microsoft program (when we made plans to meet last month, she Googled my bus route for me and showed up early with work to do), she is also an enthusiastic talker, has a contagious laugh, and, I later found out, wore a fabulous tiny top hat to the championships.

But the Dominique that I met, she insists, is a different woman from the one who entered the Microsoft Word competition.

“This was the experience that kind of changed things for me,” she said.

If it weren’t for the world championship title, she guessed she’d still be working in her previous job as a receptionist, “bored out of my mind, figuring, OK, well, I’m just gonna work here until I find something better.” Instead, she’s now applying for an Ivy League degree, taking a humanities course to beef up her debate skills, and planning on a 2015 Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship.

“I’ve become motivated to complete everything that I start,” she said. Before the competition, “I wasn’t really all that driven, all that motivated. I wasn’t a high achiever … I didn’t even realize what my full potential was. I couldn’t accept it.”

Throughout her life, she explained, she had family, teachers and bosses who supported her, pushed her, and expected great things. (Everyone I spoke to about Dominique — people who knew her before and after her world championship win — described her immediately as “smart,” before spilling out a list of other compliments.) She said she went through the motions, collected some accolades, but ultimately, didn’t expect much of herself — until she won this championship.

I called her up a week after our interview, basically to argue.

I asked her, why do you say you weren’t driven before this competition? Didn’t you tell me you founded and ran a magazine in your high school? Helped start a science club? Went to class once with a 102 degree fever and a mask over your face because a project was due? And weren’t you one of only a few students that your high school specifically encouraged to take the SATs?

“But I ended up not taking them,” she reminded me when I brought this up on the phone.

According to Dominique, the now-shuttered Manhattan high school that she attended pushed a handful of students with the top practice SAT scores to sign up for the real deal. She was one of only four students planning to take the test, she remembers.

The City’s Dept. of Education couldn’t confirm for me the exact testing policies of the school in question — the School for the Physical City, which closed in 2010 — but a 2007 report tells the same story about the school as Dominique did: one with some dedicated, quality teachers, but where expectations for students varied, and strategies for success were applied inconsistently.

Dominique said the SAT experience was overwhelmingly stressful: “I had people telling me, that’s the test that’s gonna decide where you go to school. That’s the test that’s gonna decide if you go to a four year college. I don’t wanna hear this. That’s really too much pressure.”

Leading up to the test she began to feel flushed, panicky — then she passed out.

“Nice little panic attack,” she told me.

Dominique graduated while the School for the Physical City was being phased out; after the SATs, the small group of students saw out their year in what Dominique called a “decimated…little one floor type thing.” She went on to study at LaGuardia Community College, where she said she found the coursework more than manageable, but had to leave after falling so sick she missed nearly a semester’s worth of class.

So these are two anti-climaxes that mark the chapters of Dominique’s academic life, and two stories she gave significant weight to when we first talked.

But before the world championship, she was also working at a YMCA camp that she enjoyed and is considering returning to. She took a job at the Wendy Hilliard Gymnastics Foundation, where she was a huge asset to the team, according to Wendy herself. She joined STRIVE, landed a job through the organization, and scored 100 percent on the Word 2007 certification test that would lead her to her world championship title.

I can understand being told you’re the best person on planet Earth at this thing and feeling different or more capable. But arranging Dominique’s anecdotes in order, I don’t detect a seismic shift in her personality after she took home the Certiport trophy.

Instead, I see a person who identified this awesome, unexpected achievement as a key to unlocking some inner positivity, and proceeded to turn that key — the kind of practical, efficient choice that makes her a virtuoso of Microsoft Word. I see a person propelled into diverse endeavors throughout her life by a relentless curiosity, all along waging a quiet fight against self-doubt, and growing up, and starting to win that fight.

Anyways, Dominique didn’t have much patience for my philosophizing when I ran this narrative past her.

“This was different,” she said of the competition. “I don’t know why this was different, but this was. You have the chance to show that you’re better than what you think you are. It just appeared out of nowhere. To me it was like the universe saying, here’s a gift, go strive for it, do something better. So I said, ‘alright.’”

If one thing has clearly changed about Dominique, it’s her attitude regarding the Microsoft Office Specialist championship. This year, she’s gunning for gold, and plans to update her skills to compete in Excel 2010.

“[Last year,] I kept saying, “I don’t think I’m gonna win this, I don’t think I’m gonna win this,’ and then when I did, nobody else was surprised except for me,’” Dominique said.

But for 2015, she has a new outlook: “Now, you’re doing this for you. Because you know that you have the skills.”

Jackie Strawbridge is a reporter in New York City. She still uses the same Word 2008 program she bootlegged in college.

Image courtesy of Certiport.