Interview with a student

One of my students interviewed me. Here's what came out...

First I would like to ask what your scholarly interests are and how they came along.

I am mainly a student of literature, but stories tend to branch into all kinds of different fields. For example, I’m planning, next year, to go for my doctorate. I want to study English, but I want to study it in terms of how it’s being affected by technology. Computers have changed the way that we write, and new forms of storytelling are popping up in amazingly creative media forms. For example, I recently saw a story that was written exclusively for the iPod touch, with its unique interface. The reader used their finger to navigate through the story. Other aspects of literature that I like are studying masculinity in stories (think Beowulf), and figuring out experimental fiction (think William Faulkner or James Joyce).

What are some things that you do outside your discipline? Jobs or activities?

Currently, I work full time at a research and development laboratory in Charlotte. We make cement based products better. I test the strengths of different kinds of mortars by crushing them, which can be pretty fun. I like to take walks with my wife and my dog, Latch. We go camping sometimes, and sometimes we like to go see bands play around town. I also help brew almost 300 cups of coffee a week for our church, which is a lot of coffee! I like coffee a lot too.

What do you think it takes to be a successful college student?

Mark Twain once said, “Never let school get in the way of your education.” I’ve always liked that quotation, and have tried to follow it myself. I always liked school, and I think that part of why I liked it so much was that I never let it really get to me in a bad way. That’s not to say that I never was stressed out about a paper, but I worked hard and got things done. I remember standing outside of class waiting to start a big midterm exam, and everyone else was so nervous. Meanwhile, I felt pretty calm because I knew I had to take the test, and couldn’t help myself by worrying about the outcome. I’d do my best, and that was all I could do, and I did pretty well.

For you, what were one or a few things that were difficult in college?

Managing sleep with all the demands on a student is pretty challenging. I napped a lot in college. Also, balancing the time between work and spending quality time with people that you care about is always a challenge. It still is for me. I would be writing a paper, or reading a book, and one of my friends would ask me to go get some chicken wings, and I usually couldn’t refuse taking a break for some wings. One last thing that I’m not sure how to help with is that it was difficult sometimes to figure out what my teachers wanted from me. Now, I have to figure out what my boss wants from me, so, while I’m sure students are still facing that obstacle, it’s a good lesson to learn how to appease the person who is in charge.

What are two things that you hope each student leaves WRIT101 with?

I want you guys to be able to communicate well. That’s one thing. I want you to be able to write clever sentences, to be able to explain a concept, to be able to express yourselves. Those are all pieces of that first thing. I want my students to feel confident with their abilities in writing, but, unfortunately, I can’t do that for my students. They have to want it. The second thing that I really want the class to leave with is a sense that they had fun, that they enjoyed learning, and that they felt the positive vibes I’ve worked so hard to send their way.

What do you think are some responsibilities of faculty at Winthrop?

To guide their students toward great, and ambitious, goals is one responsibility that I feel weighing pretty heavily on my shoulders. I also feel as though there are a lot of professors out there whose goal is to challenge and crush their students, but I feel a strong responsibility to encourage the students, and give them the sense that they are intelligent, and are capable, and have the ability to do really amazing things.

What was your declared major in college and if you had the chance to change it now what would it be?

I started out as a biology major, interestingly enough. I have always enjoyed science, and it’s funny that I’ve ended up doing a bit of work in a laboratory lately. However, I changed to English my sophomore year, because I felt passionate about literature in a way that I just didn’t feel about the sciences. Now, I work with folks who are passionate about the sciences and it’s really neat to see them in their passion. I finish my master’s in English here at Winthrop recently, and have finally gotten to teach writing. It’s really amazing, and I wouldn’t want to change my major. However, if I was forced to change, I might pick some kind of technology/design kind of degree. I’ve always been amazed at people that can do such beautiful things in code. It’s something that I know nothing about, and have always been fascinated with. Or, I’d choose political science; I’m pretty impressed with those guys too. They understand stuff that I have no clue about.

Lastly, you always say that when you first got to college you had a hard time writing, what made the biggest impact on you to become a better writer and even to decided on being a college professor for students possibly experiencing the same issues?

Being a college professor is something that I’ve wanted to become since I changed my major during my sophomore year at the College of Charleston. I taught high school English for a very short while, but that is another, very long, story. Writing, for me, came after reading. I liked the stories, so I was forced to respond to them in the language of those stories, written English. For visual artists, they study other artists’ work, and then they make their own. For the student of literature, writing becomes a means of the dialoguing with, or responding to, the texts. Still, I got an F on a major paper that first year as an English major in a Shakespeare class that I should have waited to take until I had honed my writings skills. I had no thesis! I had a good professor, Dr. Bonnie Devet, who really, and finally, showed me how to break down the English language into its parts, and put it back together again. She probably helped my skill with writing as well as almost anything. Still, Dr. Devet, as much as I love and respect her, probably can’t claim as great an influence as the, literally, thousands of hours I’ve spent reading. Not much can compare with training a writer as reading a lot of great writing. Plus, there are always those squiggly lines in Microsoft Word that tell me what I’m doing wrong, and all errors are discoveries (Dr. Devet’s phrase, not mine; although she hated the fact that I liked to learn from those squiggly lines). So, my two biggest pieces of advice here are find a mentor, and learn from your mistakes.