i accidentally wrote my biography

so today i was responding to a student's email, trying to dispense sage advice about professionalization, when i realized i'd just written basically my entire life story of the last five years.  so i just thought i'd post it here in case anyone cared.  it's not especially interestingly written (or interesting in content), but ctrl + v is so easy, why not?
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As far as the professional stuff goes, I actually got my MA here at WSU (in Pullman).  I started my Bachelor's at Kent State University in Ohio, which is about an hour from where I grew up, and I was a computer science and programming major for a few years.  It's sort of a cliche story, but basically what ended up happening was that I realized I didn't like my major and all of my elective classes that I had to take to graduate ended up being English classes, as I realized more and more that those were the classes I really liked.  That was a bit surprising to me, since I had actually been a terrible English student in high school.  

Anyway, I changed my major and graduated with a BA in English and a really crappy book that I had had to write for my undergrad thesis.   

As everybody says, there's not a whole lot that you can do with a BA in English (there are some things, but I didn't want to do any of them), so I quit school for a few years and just worked normal minimum-wage type jobs  before applying to grad school and ending up at WSU.  I picked WSU because they give assistantships to all of their incoming English graduate students.  Basically it's a deal where they pay your tuition and you teach introductory writing classes for them while you get your degree.  I really liked the idea of getting to work while going to grad school instead of just sitting around reading books all day (ironic, considering what I'm doing right now), so I came here.

I finished the MA in 2007 and missed getting in the Ph.D program by one person, so I stayed on and taught as a faculty instructor for a year and then started the Ph.D program two years ago.  So, yeah, I've been an English major all the way through, which in some ways is a really good thing, but also can be a bad thing, I think, especially as doing interdisciplinary work gets more popular.

I actually did my MA thesis on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales...up until about 2007 I was obsessed with pretty much anything written in English before 1500 or so.  Then, I think I just got sick of it.  I'd been working on the same topic for about five years at that point and I think it just got old.  Fortunately, around that time I took a great class here at WSU from two fantastic professors.  The class was about the history of travel writing, and it really got me thinking about a lot of things, but primarily it got me thinking about how literary theory and all the wordplay and academic argument that goes with higher education in English literature can actually be paired with real-world concerns.  I mean, the stereotypical idea of the English professor is someone who spends all their time reading a bunch of made-up stories by dead white guys and writing articles that explain what those dead white guys meant to say.  Now, I'd be lying if I said that I don't enjoy doing that from time to time, but what drove me away from Chaucer in the end was the fact that I couldn't really see how studying it mattered to anyone other than me.  I guess ending up at ecocriticism was just a logical progression from there.  

I really love ecocriticism because it's so innately connected to real-world concerns, and politics, and policies, and how real people and real cities and real countries live their lives.  You can look at something like Carson's Silent Spring and see really easily how that book mattered to our society in really obvious ways, and from there it's easy to see how studying that impact as a graduate student can be important.

Of course, all of that isn't to say that studying something like Chaucer or Shakespeare is worthless; I still think a lot of that stuff is fascinating.  That travel writing class I took ended in a class backpacking trip to the Selway river that was (instead of just a fun way to end the semester) a really logical extension of the books we'd been reading and all the stuff we'd been studying.  When I realized that I could still study lit theory and actually back up that study not with the words of dead white guys but by writing about my own experiences in the woods and in cities and during cross-country trips and that kind of thing, it wasn't a hard decision to switch my focus :)