English @ SU

Hello readers!

My name’s Alyssa Kearns, and I will be updating the blog this semester as part of my internship. I’m a senior English Major at Stevenson where I also tutor and am a member of Sigma Tau Delta.

Stevenson University is the third college I have attended, and it is by far my favorite.  The other two schools–Lycoming College in Pennsylvania and Concordia University in Irvine, California–were important experiences for me, forcing me to consider what kind of education I wanted and how I wanted my college experience to be.

For me, Stevenson has been a much better life choice. I immediately fell in love with the professors and classes. They were much smaller and student-oriented unlike my previous schools. There was a variety of more interesting classes offered as well. I honestly cannot imagine myself graduating from anywhere else.

After graduation, I plan on doing one of two things. I will either go to Graduate School for my Masters of Art in Teaching, or my MA in English. I could see myself as a teacher because I enjoy reading and writing essays, and would love to instill that same passion into future generations. I also want a career that involves working with others, so teaching seems like a perfect fit.  If I discover that teaching is not what I thought it would be, I will pursue advanced degrees to become a writer or editor.  Those jobs will quite likely require sitting an office, limiting the time I can interact with others.  If I am doing something I love, though, I might be able to bear the cubicle.

Maybe you, like me, are still thinking through career choices.  Therefore, as part of my bi-weekly blog entries, I will meet with and interview professionals within fields staffed by former English majors. Some of these include high school teachers, editors, and publishers.

Check back each week for updates on the English Department and to catch up on some of the opportunities I have been exploring!”
-Alyssa Kearns

The English Department is pleased to welcome back students for the spring semester. We hope everyone–from first-year freshmen to battle-tested seniors–had a good break and enjoyed reading some books that were not assigned for class. We hope you’re set for a fantastic semester!

Please stay tuned to this blog for information about upcoming events. Throughout the semester, the department plans on hosting several different events. Some of these include a welcoming party for all freshman English majors, a Spectrum release party, English Club and Go Green events. We will be more information regarding these and other events as the dates draw closer.

Have a great semester!

                When Rachel Martínez got the position of editorial assistant to the editor of communications at Maryland Public Broadcast Television, she had expected to be an “assistant” in the sense of fetching coffee and delivering papers.  She had no idea that she would be writing a vast majority of the station’s monthly T.V. guide.  What Rachel writes are blurbs: small announcements advertising a show and any of its sticking points such as famous writers, actors, or directors.  The blurbs are small, but numerous, and can often involve calling producers and other research in order to get the information she needs, especially if she has to add anything for the online guide or the members’ newsletter.  The blurbs are divided by sections and target demographics which Rachel must consider when she is adjusting and adding information.  Rachel can usually complete a section of blurbs after about two days of writing continuously from when she arrives at the station at 9:30 until she leaves at 5:00.

                She never expected to be writing so much, but she thinks of it as practice for her own career as a writer, perhaps as a travel journalist.  Rachel also enjoys the fact that her internship is in television.  She says she would like to stay in television, and envisions a possible career as “ an editor or a producer.”  No matter her future, she considers this internship to be her foot in the door.  Even at the level of intern, she is making connections and friends within the industry, and her editor is constantly bringing to her attention job opportunities at other publications.

                Rachel would like to thank her mom for pushing her to get current internship.  It had been a simple affair: Rachel and her mother had watched PBT for years.  Rachel’s mother was the one who brought to Rachel’s attention the fact that she could not know if they were hiring if she did not find out for herself. Since the station was right down the street, Rachel decided to apply.  She did not receive an answer of any kind for some time, but Rachel believed in not stopping until she got what she wanted.  When they finally called her back and gave her the position, she was already a month into summer break, but she felt fulfilled by her own sense of accomplishment through sheer determination.

                With the semester coming to a close, some of you may already be deep into your hunt for your internship and some of you may not have yet started.  Rachel’s advice is to find the one you want, not the one you can easily get.  “Don’t take the safe option,” she says, “treat it like college applications.  You have your safety school and you have your reach school.  You have your safety internship and you have your reach internship.”  If Rachel proved anything it was that a person can get the job they want if they are willing to reach for it.

-Mitch Monin, Media Intern, Department of English

My esteemed readers in the English Department, I realize that those of you reading this will already be enjoying your Thanksgiving break.  I think that makes a post for a send-off redundant, and so instead I would like to say a few words as though I were given the honor of making your Thanksgiving toast.  So please, raise your glass:

Our semester is almost over.  That alone might be reason to be thankful, but it is much more than that.  Here we are at the end of this challenge, taking our extended Sabbath before the dreaded final sprint.  Some of us have made it on their own, entirely independent, and for those people they can thank those who came before them, their role models, who gave them the discipline to accomplish their goals and complete the truly arduous task of experiencing and participating in a college semester.

For it is daunting:

Who among us can say they have never struggled?  It goes beyond the coursework and the deadlines.  Students struggle with their jobs, with relationships growing or fading, with nutrition, and with roommates who are essentially giant man-children that don’t know how to clean up after themselves and leave dirty socks in the common room so the whole apartment smells like unwashed feet.  But I digress.  We cannot all be singular masters of ourselves.  Some of us needed help this semester, perhaps a little push in the right direction during times of need.  It may have only been a small push, or for some maybe larger, but to those of us who needed it I can assure you it was felt.

Therefore, I propose that as you sit at your feasting table Thursday, you take the time to think about each face your eyes pass over.  Think about the faces that you have always known and those you have just met, the ones who are there and the ones who should be.  Think about the ones you think about when you need a little push.  Now, is your chance to say “thank you.”

(drink.)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Maura Fisher-Bernstein

Originally uploaded by English@Stevenson

Meet Maura Fisher-Bernstein.  Maura’s internship has her working tirelessly for Dr. Snyder as they prepare and organize the Comparative Drama Conference. The conference starts in March, but proposals for conference seminars are emailed to Maura daily. Her job is to organize and reformat the proposals into single-page abstracts so they can be easily distinguished and selected for the green light. On any given day she can have between 15 and 25 proposals to address, and as the cutoff date approaches she expects to deal with as many as one hundred a day.

Maura is handling the pressure beautifully. Despite the perpetual deadlines and the constant scouring of her inbox, she chooses to focus on how this opportunity has helped her improve as a student and a writer. “If I had taken this internship before I’d taken the Churchill seminar,”she stresses, “I would have written much better.”

Driven by her aim to become an accomplished scholar, Maura used to worry, “how will I follow all of these people before me?”  She feels this internship has given her the confidence to proceed: “[the internship] changed how I write my papers and how I will write my dissertation for graduate school.” She knows that the experience she has gained will aid her as she reaches for recognition in scholarly and intellectual circles.

Like many of us in our senior year, Maura’s search for an internship happened at a frantic pace and increased in panic as the deadline approached. She attributes finding her opportunity to Dr. Van Aken, to whom she went for help. He suggested Dr. Snyder’s yearly need for a conference coordination assistant and Maura went after it even without knowing at first what her duties would be or how it would help in her career path. Yet, if you ask her, she will happily affirm that she would take the job again if given the chance.

To those students approaching their internship hunt, Maura suggests for your own sake that you, “get it done early, as soon as possible, and you’ll feel much better about it.”

-Mitch Monin, Media Intern, Department of English

Dear English Department and English Community,

Please join us Wednesday, November 9th in the Greenspring Library for Spectrum’s Open Mike night!  The reading will be held in the Library’s Lobby from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.  Free food and refreshments will be served!  Come relax, laugh, listen, eat, read a poem of your own or a work you just love!

And–this just in–Spectrum’s editors have decided to extend the submission deadline to November 17th!  Send in your haiku, your sonnets, your odes to Owings Mills!  Whatever you have, we want to see it.  Email your submissions to achandler@stevenson.edu, and I will happily pass them along to the editors for consideration.

Anniversaries are usually opportunities to look backwards, but after the dead have been properly honored and fingers inevitably pointed, disasters leave little joy to those who wish to reminisce.  A decade after the most traumatizing attacks in recent memory, Stevenson’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences assembled a panel to consider the idea of looking forward to how history will remember 9/11 in 2021, after yet another decade.

9/11 - Ten Years from Now

Specifically, the plan of the panel was to establish hope.  The speakers discussed the direction and train of thought we as American citizens needed to travel in order to ensure that historians would not look back at our country’s response to this disaster in shame. 

History Prof. Glenn Johnston spoke first, and he spoke about the importance of words.  He talked about the fact that the attacks were remembered as a date, a set of numbers, perhaps as a reverberation of the shock instilled in all who stood witness and could not give it more of a name.  By showing how words were used over time using Google’s nGram search, Dr. Johnston proved scientifically what we had all already known instinctively: we were afraid.  Then he showed us something greater: by examining the declining usage of “Pearl Harbor” in the time after the 1941 attack, Dr. Johnston proved that fear, no matter how great, would subside in time.

Next was Religion Prof. Roger Bridges, who stressed that the way we handle the future depends on how we understand religious convictions.  Were the attacks a fault of Islam or of fanatics who happened to be Islamic?  How the future saw us would depend upon our answer to this question.

Speaking as a team were Prof. Hamin Shabazz and two of his students, seniors Victoria Graham and Scott Dansicker.  They discussed how America’s legal system had changed in reaction to the tragedy.  Dr. Shabazz stressed the maintenance of our fourth amendment rights, and his students demonstrated all of the ways in which these rights may be called into question in the near future.  They discussed airport scanners and GPS trackers, methods of search that might make the populous guilty unless proven innocent.

Ending the presentations was our own Prof. Aaron Chandler, who recalled with humble clarity his own experiences on the day of the attack.  He wanted to bring to our young attentions the fact that we were now inevitably immersed in the country’s history.  We were, and are, living in “monumental time,” apart from the time we privately experience in our own lives, and our actions are being watched by the eyes of the future.  Thus, we have a responsibility to ourselves and each other to act to the highest of our characters.

The panel concluded with a question and answer round, culminating with discussion of the morality of the now infamous “Ground-Zero Mosque.“  To at least one outspoken audience member, the proposed mosque was an insult to those we had lost.  The response from the professors harkened to every point made that night: refusing the mosque attacked Islam, not the terrorists; refusing the mosque denied the rights of Islamic-American citizens; and refusing the mosque insulted the memory of the Islamic men and women who died in the attacks. 

In a way, this question was really for the audience, we students listening intently.  We should have understood then, and we should understand now, that the Ground-Zero Mosque is our first test as we enter a world a decade after the attacks.  Some of us are obtaining our first tastes as voting citizens and democratic members of the republic.  The mosque may well be our first true test, and we must not forget that the objective eyes of the future have now been turned upon us.

-Mitch Monin, Media Intern, Department of English

Ashley “Fergie” Ferguson is the muscle of ProseWorks.  A slender, talkative woman with dyed red hair, Ashley has happily spent this semester as Lead Editor for Dr. Major’s online literary magazine.  She edits submissions in the time she has after class and homework, while also writing pieces of her own. 

She secured the internship thanks to Justin Poe, the previous editor, whom she “pestered” to guarantee the position would be open when he left for his own internship with the Department of Homeland Security. 

Editing is nothing new for Ashley, and she excels in her position.  In high school, she was the go-to friend for editing anything: literary magazine submissions, creative writing assignments, even fan-fictions.  Additionally, she is in the process of helping her best friend’s mother edit a book for publication.

Ashley transferred to Stevenson from Harford College, where she double-majored in English and photography.  The photography reinforced her love of fashion, while the English acted as an outlet in the forms of both journalism and poetry.

Her love of writing and fashion began as an act of freedom: an official casting-off of Catholic school restrictions as she entered high school.  She wore whatever she wanted, even (maybe especially) if it did not match, and was sure to include as many “psychotic” colors as possible, following the trends of the day.  She began writing poetry at around fifteen and loved it ever since, continuing to do it to this day.

Ultimately, Ashley hopes her double major leads to becoming an editor for Vogue where she can indulge in writing and fashion for the rest of her days.  Until then, she would be glad to spend another semester editing ProseWorks, but she also plans to simultaneously get an internship editing for Diamond Comics.  Perhaps it will be a challenge, but Ashley is driven by her love for learning, as well as the willingness just to prove that she can.

-Mitch Monin, Media Intern, Department of English

As a student, I know that some of us struggle with the idea that there is a world outside of school.  The idea of leaving the structured and settled environment of a campus may be the very thing that causes us to procrastinate and put that daunting future just a bit further out of arm’s reach.  However, what we forget in the panic is that life on the outside is “real” life.  It is the event that we have spent nearly two decades preparing for, and yes, it is scary because there is a chance for failure, but that is what will make success worthwhile.

Point and case: Dan Eberle.

Dan became interested with linguistics while taking English 231 as a sophomore.  He spent the summer between his sophomore and junior year earning 9 credits in North Dakota University’s intensive linguistics programs at undergraduate and graduate levels.  After graduating with a B.A. in English, Dan returned to UND to receive his Master’s in linguistics.

Since then, Dan joined Wycliff and has been surveying sign language in cultures around the world.  Dan and his wife, Sarah, have traveled to Indonesia, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom to follow their pursuits.  Most recently, as reported in a newsletter sent to our own Dr. Nannette Tamer, Dan and his wife spent a week in Frankfurt, Germany to help teams of deaf translators translate the Bible.  As of writing this, Dan and Sarah are in Portugal, surveying sign language until they are scheduled to return to New York.

Dan represents what a person is capable of when they have the courage to live their lives and follow their passions.  His interest in linguistics has aided the deaf the world over, and his faith has driven him to help translate the Bible for a global audience.  He has taken his knowledge and used it to better himself and the lives of those in need, and he is proof from the same source that we can do the same.

The English Department Halloween Party is this Thursday, October 27^th from 5-7 pm at The Exchange.

Please join us for some ghoulish games, literary fun, and food! We’ll provide the snacks and YOU provide the dessert!

Following the party we’ll be viewing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 in DC 12 from 7-10!

See you there!

–Spectrum, Sigma Tau Delta, and The English Club