Where are you now? What are you doing, and what does your work involve?
I'm about to begin a doctoral program in English at the University of Michigan, where I plan to focus my studies on trauma and cultural memory. I'll spend the first year of my Ph.D. program in coursework before beginning teaching and eventually research.
Since graduating from Haverford, I've worked as an English/Humanities teacher at two different independent schools: Culver Academies (IN) and Hackley School (NY).
How have you drawn on your experience in the Writing Center since graduating?
Because I worked as a high school English teacher, my time in the Writing Center directly informed my day-to-day experience. My familiarity with student-centered writing pedagogy proved to be incredibly helpful, particularly in one-on-one instruction, and trained me to take a patient and empathetic approach to writing. Much of my teaching also concerned questions of interpretation and argumentation, both skills that are core to the work of the Writing Center at Haverford.
In a more basic sense, my experience with students at the Writing Center helped steer me toward a career in teaching.
How did you come to your current position? What have you done since graduating?
Although I loved the experience of high school teaching (along with coaching and residential life), I found that I missed being a student and felt as though I had unfulfilled interests and goals in academia. I took a full year, while teaching full-time, to research different graduate programs and put my applications together.
What’s something you’ve learned about writing that you’d like to share with Haverford writers?
As a professor at Haverford once told me, "You can't know what you'll write until you write it." I've come to appreciate writing as a means to develop and explore my own ideas: the very act of writing often adds complexity to my ideas in a way that thinking or even brainstorming cannot. I love the idea of writing as both a means and an ends to communicating one's ideas.