Real Time Writing

I have this voice in my head, that’s made up of multiple voices, that continuously asks me what I am going to do with my degree. I mean, what am I going to do with a degree in the humanities? STEM, political science, business, and many other degrees all have career pathways that are clear to see, but when it comes to degrees in the humanities, the pathways you can take seem to be hidden in the fog. What’s behind the fog?

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my English degree, and in all honesty I’m still not sure. They don’t talk to high school students about careers in the humanities in detail, and there is a lot of pressure on people to go into any of the different STEM fields. I originally came into university as a biology student, and it took three semesters for me to finally realize it wasn’t for me. When I made the leap of faith to switch my major to English, my head started filling with the voices of everyone I knew asking me what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I switched to English because I’m good at it, and it makes me happier than any of my other classes ever have. I want to get my PhD, and I want to teach in some capacity. What really draws me to teach people about dissecting literature is that they are losing the ability to do so themselves. With the rise of programs like ChatGPT, students are not coming up with the meaning of texts on their own. From personal experience, I can tell that part of the reason students turn to AI is because they just don’t want to read what is typically assigned to students. They find the language difficult and the content boring, and they don’t know that the skills they learn within their humanities classes are transferable to so many things in life. I want to use my degree to lead people in a different direction. A direction that allows them to be creative and think for themselves.

The rise of generative AI has been rapid, and a bit frightening. I’m worried that people will stop caring to come up with ideas or opinions on their own. If I can guide people away from that, even if it is just people within my community, then I will be so grateful that I decided to pursue the humanities. Teachers make a change, and I want to use the humanities to help people remember just how powerful our minds really are.

As our semester comes to an end, it is time for us to reflect. We’re reflecting not only on the semester at hand, but also on the history of our university. Inspired by the Federal Writer’s Project, my classmates and I are now beginning our Mercer Writer’s Project in which we must choose a story from Mercer’s past and tell it. With a school as old as Mercer there is so much history to tell, but I don’t want to go back that far. A story that stands out to me is the National Coming Out Day event that was held on campus that turned out to be the catalyst for Mercer University separating from the Baptist church. Before becoming a student at Mercer I knew that the institution had previously been associated with the Baptist church, but I had no idea why it no longer was. I learned about the coming out day event through one of my gen ed classes during my freshman year, and I have been proud of this piece of Mercer history ever since.

There are two main concepts I’d like to use when framing the way that I’m going to tell this story, empathy and memory. I would hope that it is no secret that empathy plays a huge role in a subject like this. To give some background, Mercer University had been associated with the Georgia Baptist Convention for 172 years, but there had been a few instances that made the church threaten to remove its support, and the GSA’s National Coming Out Day event was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Empathy is one of the most important things to have when telling the story of a marginalized community, and throughout my retelling of this story, I want to ensure that I continue to show empathy to the LGBTQ+ community and the people that were involved in this event. To have held an event that resulted in the break of a 172-year relationship is an incredibly brave thing to do, especially when it may have felt as though they had minimal support.

When it comes to the memory aspect of this story, it has already begun to be forgotten. As I mentioned before, I was not aware of this story until I learned about it in one of my gen ed classes, and not every student gets taught this. Ever since my sister began attending Mercer in 2018, I knew about the university’s past with the church, but I never knew why the two separated. Many other students have had the same experience. This pivotal moment not only for the university, but for the student population apart of the LGBTQ+ community has already started to fade away only 20 years later. Especially at a time like right now, I do not believe that this story should be forgotten. Marginalized communities and their efforts for a more accepting society should not be forgotten, and I am hoping I can contribute to the efforts of making sure stories like these are not forgotten, that we are not forgotten.