This post inaugurates a new series on the blog, archived here, about what SJU students do after they graduate. By sharing the good news we hear about the wide variety of professional and personal successes our students have, we highlight for ourcurrent and future students the value and possibilities of the St. John’s English degree.
The title of this series, “Guest from the Future,” comes from a famous literary encounter between Oxford professor and philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1945. Berlin was working for the British Foreign Service during the war when he met Ahkmatova, who was then utterly cut off from the Western democratic world that Berlin represented. The philosopher become a key figure in Akhmatova’s modernist epic, “Poem without a Hero,” and the encounter between these two — between youth and age, West and East, democracy and tyranny, philosophy and poetry — became for her a symbol of new possibility.
We think of our graduates as representatives of new possibilities, and here’s our first featured student, Sandra Nelson, undergraduate English major and class of 2013.
After working for many years in our Institute for Writing Studies, Sandra has relocated to the desert Southwest in Arizona, where she has recently begun work as a Learning Support Specialist (Reading/Writing) at Central Arizona College.
The responsibilities of the job include tutoring students, training and supervising the reading and writing tutors, collaborating with other departments to ensure that our program is best serving the needs of their students, collecting and conducting research and analyzing data pertaining to the Learning Center, and developing the Center’s online tutoring methods and program. She’ll also likely soon begin teaching three credit hours per semester.
CAC is a junior college located in Coolidge, Arizona.
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