Q: Where are you from?J: I am originally from a small town called Rock Glen - but I moved to Bloomsburg at least ten years ago, and I’ve been living here ever since.
Q: What is your major/minor?
J: Mass Communications on the journalism track, and English as a second major on the Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing track. I thought about a minor, but I don’t know if I have the time for a minor! I wish I did, because there’s so many things that interest me that I would love to study more.
Q: What year are you?
J: A sophomore.
Q: What are your literary strengths?
J: I prefer - it takes me a little bit to analyze reading, so I prefer to write, especially creative things or those that don’t require a lot of outside research. I wish I had more time to do creative writing because I do enjoy that in my free time. Although, once I figure out the focus for a paper, I get it done in good time. It’s just the research process that takes forever. [laughs] I guess that’s my weakness as well.
Q: What do you like about being an English major?
J: I do enjoy helping other people [in WALES] enjoy and understand writing. I like brainstorming the most, I think - helping students come up with ideas. I love seeing a student, when they come in, go from being confused and maybe stressed to helping them develop great ideas.
Q: What are your favorite books/tv shows/genres?
J: As far as tv shows go, I recently started watching BoJack Horseman on Netflix - which was a mistake because now I’m binge watching all of it. Most of the shows I watch are those kind of dark comedies that are funny, and then at the very end of the episode it says something serious. I don’t know why I’ve been watching those kinds of shows lately. Maybe because I relate - [laughs] because I try to cope with humor.
Q: Why did you become an English Major?
J: I started as an Education major. I was in education - English education - and I did that when I was coming out of high school because I enjoyed the writing process and creating my own work so much, but you’re always told in high school that you can’t really get a job ‘doing English.’ So, I just assumed that my way to do that would be to become a teacher. As I took education classes I realized it wasn’t really going to be for me, because the reason I enjoy English so much is that I have the ability to create new things, and in the future - now I have more flexibility in what I can actually do as a job. If I get tired at one profession, I can switch.
Q: What was your favorite class that you’ve taken so far?
J: I actually really enjoyed English 397 (the WALES class) last semester with Mr. Koch, for the reason that it forced me to learn better habits, especially with grammar. I don’t want to say I was lazy, but I was lazy before that because, prior to that class I could kinda get by without doing the best I could do because I was able to do it. I just didn’t put in the effort 100% of the time. That class made me take apart how I write. It made me write totally differently and for the better. Even though it was very difficult, and very stressful, I would say now that it’s done I definitely am very happy that I went through it.
Q: What organizations are you part of?
J: I am part of WALES, as we’ve discussed, and I am a news editor for the Voice. I joined that last semester. I am also the president of the Society of Professional Journalists, so I have a mix of English and Mass Comm in my extracurricular activities. They keep me busy.
Q: What do you like to write about?
J: As far as academic writing, my favorite type of papers - I would say I do enjoy analysis essays because they make me look at [writing more closely]. It’s a challenge. Today I took my rough draft of a poem explication - I took it to [my professor] and she said I have the skeleton of a good paper, so I went back, reread, and doubled the length of it. Things like that - because I forget sometimes that you take classes to learn. I feel like a lot of people feel like if they don’t go into a class and they know everything that’s going on, they feel stupid. But you do take classes to learn and be challenged.
Informally, when I do creative writing… I like to think I have a sense of humor. I’ll write really serious poems, but really just sort of mocking the genre, if that makes sense - like, in my senior year of high school... we had to write a very serious poem about loss and make a deeper statement about this and that, and I wrote about a dead goldfish. You think it’s going to be serious and it’s really not entirely. I think that ties back to the genres I like.
Q: What’s the title of a book you’d like to write?
J: I’d probably write something about how to cope with [laughs] being a mess. It’d be called, like, Take My Shovel: I’ve Dug Myself too Deep or something like that. No, um, I guess that’d be more of the title of a book about me. But it could be a memoir. I can combine them.
Q: Dream job?
J: I would like to work some day for a publishing company for editing, working with authors on books, because while I do love to create my own, I think - more so - I’d be happier not having the pressure of creating all the time but still being able to work with the writing, kind of picking it apart and seeing what’s good and what needs to be redone.
Q: Any advice for new English students or anyone who was in a situation where they didn’t like what they were doing and were thinking about taking English classes?
J: I would say - you know what? A lot of people told me I need to think things through very carefully, but I think with my major change situation - if someone is in a similar situation to me - I just woke up one day and had this epiphany that I’m not happy. That day I went to the office and filled out the form and changed my major. As simple as that. And I started to panic after that because I thought I’d made the decision too quickly, but now I’ve become part of all these organizations, and I’ve got this great job at the writing center, so I’m happy. I think if I had thought it through more and put it off and took another semester of classes I didn’t actually enjoy, I would have been even more unhappy. You’ve got to go for it.
Thanks for the interview, Julia!
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