Scott Weaver '01, Web Writer
My time as an English major at DePauw was spent wrestling with the question of writing. Was it simply a craft one learned as a sushi chef might learn to roll rice into very tiny, expensive dinners, or was it an art one staved for, bitterly spending grocery money on foreign cigarettes? I never found an answer, though still had to pay tuition.
After graduate school, I spent a year working as a staff writer for an alt weekly newspaper, where, truth be told, a degree in English is pretty useful, nouns-and-verbs-wise. Beyond the obvious, however, my degree helped me become a better journalist. At DePauw, I learned how to think critically, how to unpack rhetoric, and how to analyze complex problems and issues. Thanks to DePauw, I learned how to think beyond the immediate.
As I've grown older, I appreciate my time at DePauw more and more. I worked with amazing professors like Joseph Heithaus and Eugene Gloria. So when I got an opportunity to give back some of what each of these teachers gave me in the classroom, I jumped at it.
For the last four years I taught English at the College of Western Idaho. I knew that DePauw had done a good job of preparing me for graduate school. What I hadn't been aware of, however, was that DePauw's English faculty had prepared me to be a teacher as well. After four years of being exposed to creative, hard-working, and determined professors, I had many models to follow for my own teaching.
Students often asked me "What can I do with an English degree?" To me, that's looking at the question backward. My answer has always been, "What can't you do?"