St. John's College

This page contains some notes on my undergraduate experience and why it stands out:

St. John's College is a Great Books school. There are campuses in Annapolis, MD, and Santa Fe, NM. For four years, everyone reads the same things. Students dive into Homer and Euclid as soon as we arrive on campus, and we wrap up senior year with Einstein and Virginia Woolf. It was the best choice for me as an undergraduate.

Normally, I would tell you about the courses I studied in the hope that their titles line up with what you'd like to see in a candidate or colleague. Instead, I'm going to tell you about thing things I got from my education that I use every day, even almost 15 years later.

I can listen actively. My classes were discussions that would last up to three hours, and more often than not, those conversations were about challenging original source texts. You needed to listen carefully to your fellow students, consider their input, evaluate that input, and have things to say yourself to be successful. I apply this in collaborative settings on a daily basis.
I can interact on a professional level with a diverse group of people. My science classes were filled with future doctors and artists alike. Those same doctors and artists were in my music, language, and philosophy classes. Everyone found themselves in situations that did not play to their strengths, and we worked together to make sense of those situations. These days, you might see me applying this to problem solving with a team.

I found my passion for higher education as a career here, even if I didn't realize it at the time. When I wasn't in class or studying, I was in the Dean's Office, earning work-study funds by working on a range of projects in support of students and faculty members. When I had a few free moments, I was working on a student publication asking college administrators why they made the choices they did and writing articles about their responses. I took advantage of great opportunities to become a higher ed geek, and I wouldn't be the professional I am today without those out-of-class experiences.
I'm not afraid of a challenge. Much of the all-required curriculum pushed me to personal limits intellectually, made me question fundamental assumptions, and caused me to carefully examine things I had always assumed about the world I inhabit. I taught myself to become "a math person," though I had never considered myself to be one, wrestled with questions of faith and spirituality, and wrapped my brain tenuously around concepts as varied as Ancient Greek grammar, the Kantian categorical imperative, and special relativity. I may not remember everything I learned (please don't ask me about special relativity), but I learned how to learn in a way that I doubt I would have experienced otherwise, and that is what started me on my current professional course.

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