Senior Spotlight | Comps Illuminated
Senior Spotlight
Sasha Monks
We are back again with another senior spotlight, this time about the lovely Sasha. Curious about her advice, comps, and plans for the future? Read on.
What are your current post-graduation aspirations?
I have pre-requisites for nursing school/nurse midwifery. Hoping to enjoy my last months in the humanities as best I can.
What was your favorite class?
The Victorian Novel with Susan Jaret McKinstry my sophomore spring.
What advice would you give to future English majors?
It’s pretty easy to have a good time as an English major. Definitely do an English abroad (Mumbai and Seoul or London), it’s a great way to get requirements done while also having the best time ever. I also wish I had gone to more English talks! I think my number one tip is that English is a major that benefits from taking classes in other departments. My favorite moments have been when I used something I learned in another class for English. Or vice-versa, used my English skills in another class. Especially Methods. I think about Methods every term, even when I’m not in an English class.
What is your favorite book?
The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope or The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden. I love books about folk tales.
What’s your most “English major” trait?
Obsessive tendencies.
What’s your comps topic/thesis?
Colloquium! The theme is Backtalk. No idea what I’m writing about yet. Get back to me soon.
Peter Marshall
Did you love the senior spotlight article on the first page about Sasha’s comps, advice, and future plans so much you wanted another spotlight on another senior immediately after? Well keep reading, because you are in the right place.
What are your current post-graduation aspirations?
I hope to take a bit of time off first, and then I might work for a performing arts organization for a couple of years as I consider the possibility of grad school.
What was your favorite class?
Methods with Nancy sold me, at the time an undecided sophomore, on being an English major. I’m super grateful for the introduction to theory and the training as a critical reader. I also loved Greg’s seminar on Virginia Woolf. She’s hands down one of my favorite authors, and I can’t think of a better way to have explored her works.
What advice would you give to future English majors?
This might sound trite, but do the readings and go to your professors’ office hours. Class is so much more interesting when you know what people are talking about, and your profs are a treasure trove of advice!
What is your favorite book?
Mrs. Dalloway. It contains some of the most stunning writing you’ll ever encounter, and I got to write a cool paper on how the novel uses musical and psychological fugue as means of collective consciousness for Clarissa and Septimus, two characters who never meet.
What’s your most “English major” trait?
I may use the words “destabilize” and “transgress” more than I should. Also, I print out just about all of my readings and annotate them by hand.
What’s your comps topic/thesis?
I’m part of the colloquium group. Our topic is Backtalk. We’re looking at how literary adaptations create intertextual dialogues with pre-texts. It’s been fun working so closely with other English majors, and we’ve got a good mix of familiar and unfamiliar works.
Comps Illuminated: A Look Into the Comps Progress
Ever wondered about comps? Join us every issue this term to be elucidated about the infamous and enigmatic process that is the fate of every English major. This week we asked “What did you do before this term to work on comps?”
Colloquium is a comps option in which students read a list of texts surrounding a specific theme picked by profs. During winter term, they discuss the texts and write a paper.During fall term, the colloquium group looked over the colloquium reading list and wrote a proposal to add Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and two poems and remove Frankenstein and its pairings from the list. After their proposal was accepted, they started to plan their syllabus. Sasha says, “Getting in contact with profs and creating a syllabus is extremely exciting. You get to feel involved in the English department and meet with all sorts of people from other disciplines.” Hollin adds that before break, she was “getting excited about reading iconic classics.” The group read the longer texts over break and now are in discussion mode, both with each other and profs who are “experts” on the different texts.
The research option requires a paper proposal in the fall and the majority of winter term is spent writing a longer paper. Research on criticism and context is done throughout the process.Ambar, who is doing a research comps, said, “Over fall term, I focused on collecting any possible secondary sources (I already read my novels over the summer) and tried to fit them all within an argument. This winter break, I focused on immersing myself in the two novels at the center of my comps, Beloved and When The Reckoning Comes. My advisor (Kofi) suggested I read the texts without trying to force them to fit a label, so I carefully annotated each text and took care to pick up any running threads. Although the process was much slower than what I’m used to (I struggled to finish 100 pages each day), I’m very happy I did it, as it helped me notice stuff I wouldn’t have picked up on otherwise.”
A creative writing comps can take many forms. From a play to short story collection, to poems, to part of a novel, any kind of creative writing is welcome.
Ryan, one of the students doing a creative writing comps, said, “I did the proposal [in the fall, and] gave an outline for what I wanted my short story collection to look like and what authors inspired me. I [decided on] a title for the collection and the thematic content. I wanted to have six stories and so I wrote a blurb for each, what point of view I wanted it to be in, and roughly how many pages. My collection is about vice and virtue. Each story is going to take something that is commonly seen as a vice or a virtue and reframe it and it is all based on the experiences I’ve had in college. For example, I’m on a year-round sports team so I think a lot about exercise, which is seen as a virtue. But I’ve seen so many instances of mental health being impacted by over-competitiveness, or an addiction to exercise.”