A weekly inside look at the unique faces and personalities that make up The College of Wooster community.
Sally Kershner
Features Editor
Tell us about your involvement at Wooster.
In terms of school stuff, I’m very much all over the map. I really liked art and philosophy in high school, and those have carried over to college. I originally came here for chemistry, but then I got really into math. In the molecular orbital theory section of my first chem class, I raised my hand and was like, “Well how do we know that molecular orbitals are the shape that they are?” And the professor said, “Well really that’s just a bunch of math.” And I said, “Well do you guys ever talk about that?” And he said, “We talk about that in P Chem, but we don’t get into that very much.” And I thought, if I really want to understand the structure of the world, math seems to be where it’s at — I sort of skipped physics because it’s terrifying — and I declared my math major! Becoming a dentist is the ultimate goal, though.
Outside of academics, I play the piano and the melodica. I love playing at bluegrass when I can. I’m the vice president of the Living Wage Campaign, promoting staff respect among students here, and I’m a part of the student health coach program.
[Health coaching] is a really striking program because you see, you know, older people really start to care about themselves because other people care about them. A lot of times when people get sick and old they kind of — the self-care just drops. And if you have a younger person coming into your life saying, “You should care about this, you should want to continue living your life,” that really inspires them to take action.
Also, this isn’t an official club activity, but the health coach program has made me very cognizant of COPD [Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease], so I’m very anti-smoking and make it a point to keep people I know here from smoking as a habit. I’m very adamant about saving people’s lungs.
Do you think Wooster is a place that allows for students to have varied passions?
Yes, but it depends on the passions you pursue. I obviously enjoy math, art and philosophy, and because the math major leaves me room to take classes in other areas and the faculty encourage that, that’s something I can do … It’s helpful to be able to take a philosophy class and not feel guilty about not taking more math classes.
There are a lot of clubs on campus, which I think is a really good thing too, although I am actually surprised by the lack of art-related clubs and activities on campus. The only regularly-meeting art club I know of is knitting club, and I don’t knit, so I’d love to see more collaborative art events happening. Also, I don’t want to sound like I’m bashing Ebert at all, but they are a little exclusive to non-majors. It doesn’t make it very easy for non-art majors to come in and use that space or work on their goals in art — that is something that makes it difficult.
What draws you to comics as your preferred medium?
So, the graphic novel as a medium was first introduced to me by Scott McCloud’s trilogy on understanding comics. Once I discovered how much possibility lied in the medium, I got really excited about it — it’s like you’re making a movie, but for really, really cheap. It’s portable, I can work on it whenever I want and I have more control over it — it blows the doors wide open in terms of what you can do.
I saw that as an opportunity to share my personal experience of how I perceive the world, because in high school — being homeschooled and going to online high school my whole life before Wooster — I was very isolated, I had all these weird imaginary friends in this period of really only being with myself and encountering these people who were part of my imagination and my experience of real life. I couldn’t really communicate that to anyone very well except through pictures and trying to tell their story. So, I want to write a graphic novel about that.
Freshman year, I actually wrote a small, autobiographical comic about five pages long on really big pages for my figure drawing class. That was me experimenting and seeing “Do I really want to go forward with this?” That was a really positive experience, so I was like, “I want to do this.”
Fun Fact?
I have a fear of pool lightbulbs. Also, my dad was the world champion of competitive roller-skating in the eighties.