When I first started at St. Norbert, I knew that English would be a strong-suit for me. I excelled in my English classes in high school, and those classes were the ones that I found most interesting for me. There was always something I could find that I wanted to write about, and the literature that I was exposed to in high school really struck the creative nerves in me. The challenges that I faced as a first year English major was the idea of revision and the ability to constantly edit and improve my writing. I was so used to a rough draft to final draft process in high school, as well as the five-paragraph essay structure.
As I finish my degree, I’ve learned the importance of patience when it comes to writing and just thinking in general. You have to sort through what you know and ask yourself questions, and understand that not everything you seek to know will have an easy answer. There is not always a black-and-white answer to anything either. In writing, you can suggest an answer to a question and explore it, but sometimes the truth is hidden and exists somewhere between two frames of thinking. The way that I’ve learned to understand the importance of patience is connected to my discovery that writing and thinking both rely on confidence. While we may not have the full understanding just yet, we can get some part of the way by believing in the arguments that we make and finding evidence that we are confident in to support our claims. I don’t expect to know everything, but the things that I do know are at least built on a strong foundation.
The classes that I found to be the most significant in my development as a writer were English 305: Literary Theory and Writing and my English capstone class. These were classes that focused specifically on the revision process of writing, as well as highlighting different theories/types of essays within the English discipline. Literary Theory and Writing was structured in order to submerge its students into the writing process, with multiple styles of papers due in combination with each other. As I started one type of paper, I was already revising one or two other types of papers. No grades were given during the semester, just written comments and advice on the papers that I would submit for feedback. This class forced me to make decisions about the quality of my own writing, and to revise my papers until I was satisfied with my work and decided my paper was finished.
In the case of the English Capstone class, I was required to write the longest paper of my college career. I wrote a 15 page research paper on Nathanial Hawthorne’s beliefs surrounding organized religion and his own personal connection to Puritanism in his ancestry. This was one of the most grueling assignments I had taken on in my college career, and one that I knew that I wanted to be proud of when the time came for me to submit it at the end of the semester. I learned that confidence in my writing and a striving to improve was what was going to leave me feeling the most fulfilled. I can proudly say that I think my capstone paper is one of my best pieces of work during my college career, and I am proud of the work that I endured in order to achieve that.
In addition to improving my skills as a writer when it comes to argumentative writing and research, I also learned how to do some creative writing. During my junior year, I took a Poetry Workshop class and was able to treat writing as a way to grow my creativity and describe things that I am passionate about. I was able to see writing as a way to express myself and write things for me rather than an audience. Writing is important not just from the ways that we seek to understand the world around us, but it also can be helpful in trying to understand ourselves.
I was able to make connections between my work as an English major through my employment/extracurricular life on campus. As a freshman, I joined the St. Norbert College TRIPS Program, and was inspired to take on the Education and Events Coordinator role for the program in the consecutive years afterward. My work consisted of creating education workshops and presenting them to the TRIPS community on campus, teaching them about being an active citizen in their community and ways to think critically about social justice. I had to use my abilities to write critically in order to create the content that I shared with the participants, and the majority of that content revolved around the critical thinking skills that I had also learned in the English discipline.
As I graduate, I want to become involved in content creation/marketing and copywriting. My work with TRIPS focused on creating content for social media as well as for presenting on behalf of the program, and so I’d like to carry those skills into my future career. My written communication skills (as well as oral communication skills) have improved so greatly over the past four years from both my academic opportunities and the opportunities I’ve had as a residential student on the St. Norbert campus.
Overall, I am very proud of the ways I have grown over the past four years as an SNC student. The English discipline has taught me how to be a better writer, a better critical thinker, and a better believer in myself. I’m excited to see what the next chapter of my life has in store for me!
