This is what our English department looked like last year. Some of the people in this group have made very rich contributions to my life, and I couldn’t imagine my life without them!
Did you take a look at these wonderful people? They are some of my favorite people in the world: the McDaniel English department. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to join a few of them in talking during this year’s second and final Admitted Students Day about what makes our department so great.
I really love getting to talk to prospective students when I get the chance, so when my boss at the writing center sent out an email asking if any of the writing center’s English majors would be able to come to the English department open house, I immediately said yes, and would have done so even if my boss hadn’t offered to pay me for the hour (and more) that I spent with three English professors and another peer writing tutor talking about the English department.
Our presentation touched on a lot of things. We talked about how the English major is structured–how it’s been designed for students to have a variety of options in not just literature but also rhetoric, composition, and digital media–all things that were an important selling point to me when I was in the process of choosing a college. We also talked about the various minors offered by the English department (writing, journalism/new media, literature, and popular literature) and talked specifically about certain classes that we offer here–classes like Multimedia Authoring and Writing for Nonprofits.
I got to spend some time talking about working at the writing center and the publications I’m involved in, the McDaniel Free Press (our student newspaper) and Contrast (our annual literary magazine). I also talked about my research interests and how I’m planning on writing my senior seminar this fall writing about representations of self and depression in autobiographical web comics written by 20-something women who struggle with depression and mental illness, a project that I conceived last semester and began when I wrote a paper about Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half.
It’s wonderful to be so involved in the English department that I have a wealth of English major-related experiences that I could draw from to give my spiel yesterday. And was an honor to be able to give people the information they need to help them decide whether or not McDaniel College is the place for them.
Three years ago, I was a prospective student watching the English department panel. Yesterday, I got to be on the other side of that panel, and it was completely meant to be.
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