Mount Holyoke College

Date: May 18 2008
Major: English (This Major's Salary over time)
MHC was a wonderful, enriching experience for me, a roller coaster of feeling enclosed, stressed, crazy, in love with and absolutely detesting the place. What a school should be perhaps? It pushed and pulled me, changing my views and exposing me to other ideas while always encouraging thought and reading. Graduating from an undergraduate program, one may feel critical, desperate to get away from those further years in school and unsure whether the time, the stress and the investment was worth it. However, down the road, you find you get hired for a job and little did you realize it but you'd been interviewed because the boss likes MHC, has respect for it, wants people on his staff that he can say attended universities of such stature. It's a superfluous reason to get one's foot in the door, but I will take it over not being interviewed anyday. I also felt leaving MHC that it had given me a confidence that I did not know I had needed previously. You are catered to, you are encouraged to think, to question, to take your own research farther if you wish to, and that is a wonderful & exceptional way to be treated in this day and age. Sure, it is a bit of a fantasy to think that every MHCer will and can do great things—but perhaps they can and will? Regardless, they will be given a few years where they are told that is possible. But I am a writer, I'd say a sort of anomaly for MHC, and sometimes felt that way there. Yet I also felt encouraged by the Eng dept staff while a student, to keep plugging away at what now look like silly immature texts, and yet over time I came to author a few books, and hope more are en route. Not only did I have the opportunity to study under great writers (Joseph Brodsky was there, and Michael Petit was a key figure for me at the time, as well as taking advantage of the MFA program over at UMASS, going to their readings, meeting students and faculty, listing to the authors they invited to the valley), but the thorough background in English lit, from its origins to the present, via survey and then seminar courses, has continued to be invaluable to me as I write, teach lit, and continue to gain more insight into texts studied at and after MHC. I of course also made great friends, many of whom I keep in touch with now and again, depite the fact we live in different countries. And would I be living in a different country had I not gone to MHC? Never. I took that junior year abroad and then kept going with it, and have now lived in 3 countries and visited a dozen or so more. Being an Iowa girl, the idea of getting out of the US borders seemed a long shot as a child, in fact unthinkable, and yet MHC provided the encouragement and opportunity to see the world, and now I teach at some of the top schools in France. If hesitating because of the "all-women" question, there will never be a better space to explore what it means to live separately, as in next door, to the "other gender". To ask questions about whether such a division is still relevant in our age, and to reflect on the place of men and women in each of our lives. Men flock to the campus, and there are 5 schools in the valley for social time, so you won't feel like you have been locked up away from the world in any case, so give it a go if you are a student considering this. For me, who have gone on to co-ed schools and who teach in an almost all male school at the moment, it was interesting to have had the MHC experience and to realize how we women interact with each other when not around men all the time. Overall, MHC relmains a positive experience, and a place where I met some of the brightest women I have spent time with.