Since my freshman year in high school I have always had a love for writing and reading. It may have only been defined to some bizarre teen fiction at the time and what I was able to recollect in an every-so-often diary, but my admiration has only continued to grow from there.

When I came into my first English course in college, it was an honor’s contract course on introductory English composition, but boy was it an eye opener. Thinking I had superb writing skills and a knack for turning out great papers, I was way ahead of myself even the first day. It turned out I didn’t know a whole lot about writing proper essays, let alone being engaged in a conversation about them and other literary-related topics. However, within a couple weeks of a very demanding first freshman semester, I learned how to organize my thoughts on a topic and on the physical paper, gather research for it, and overall become a much better writer.

My professor was a very rigorous grader when it came to grammar, composition, and even content. But I would not trade the lessons I learned in her class for anything, she renewed my love for writing and gave me a much needed upgrade from the writing and analysis reading I had done before that. However, being that I was still a bit oblivious about what I really wanted to do in life and what I felt was right, I continued to be a biology major and for the next semester severely squander the high GPA I had become accustomed too.

From there I dabbled in studio arts, only recognizing that I had a love for teaching and an aspiration to be in the Peace Corps one day, but it was not until finishing my last English requirement in introductory literature that I had really found my craft. I thoroughly enjoy reading the classics and expanding my knowledge for all types of literature, at very different times. I have only excelled since switching to a literature major, with my once withering GPA and my own personal outlook. I still have a passion for art, but that only drives my writing to be more creative and my reading to be more interpretive.

Since this realization some time ago, I can truly convey my dream profession. Once graduating from Old Dominion University, I will only continue to add to the bachelor’s I receive in English Literature with a minor in Studio Arts. From there I aspire to teach literature, first teaching abroad in a much needed country such as Thailand or Lesotho, and from there continuing to a Master’s degree to then hopefully teaching at the collegiate level.

The study of literature not only helps in my pursuit to become a teacher because I want to teach the subject of literature, but it also helps in a wide array of areas. Literature should be studied solely because it enables anyone to have a richer life. All of the places we go, all the people we meet, or even aspire to go and to meet, we first get to experience a background for at the comfort of our home. Learning situations by reading about them, discussing them, and thinking critically about all different types of time periods and all different types of literary conventions. Every book I have read has changed me in some way. Giving me a new outlook to draw from, even when I was not specifically studying literature. When I was an art major, there was still literature to be read and instead of authors, artists to be studied that all bring a new perspective to further develop one’s self.

Not only does the subject of literature help in making for a richer life, but the study of history could not be left out as an accompaniment. The element of history is always there, whether it be in the background or at the front lines, it is always present and a part of making up an individual and everything they do. My own history is what has driven me to writing, and my own history and what is going in the time period will reflect in my writing. The same can be said for any author I have had the pleasure of reading. History is there aid in passion to writing what they have come to know and what they wish to know. In other words, history is basically the laboratory of human experience. Any account of history that is read or perceived through a literary text now inhabits your own mind and adds valuably to any opinion or thought you now develop.

As one example, the course ENGL 301 Introduction to British Literature, which I took the Summer before my Junior year, not only gave me a new insight to different types of literature from various authors, but it also gave me a background and personal reflection to the time period they’re living in and what they choose to portray of it. The assignments I encountered taught me more in the four weeks so far than I ever thought possible.

I had the opportunity to read so many incredible texts such as Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Book of Margery Kempe, Everyman, and a few other small collections of literature, that it’s insane I’m able to retain it. Not only have I gained new perspectives of writing and new history lessons throughout reading these selections, but I also obtained new insight for myself. Through each and every assignment I have learned in one way or another to interpret the text differently, whether it be summarizing with a modern adaptation in a tweet or reflecting a literary character in a meme, I would never have broadened my thinking to reflect it in the modern without the teachings from this course. Miss Megan Mize is a professor I can only hope to resemble when the time comes to teach my own students. I thoroughly love the teaching style I observe in her class and the influx of modern techniques she includes, that I can now not picture my own course design to be without it.

Being a literature teacher, and someday a professor in a specified literature subject of my taste with the title of Doctor in front of my name is all too much a distant dream at the moment. However, through all that I have learned so far, especially with the course I am currently doing, I know it brings me that much closer to obtaining it. Without literature in general, I know I would not be the individual I am today and the individual I aspire to be, and I only hope that as being a teacher of the subject one day that I can help at least one of my own future students have the same realization I did. The realization that literature is a need in everyday life, and if you have an underlying passion for it then there is nothing to do but fully pursue it and expand it.