I am about to graduate from Carleton and like any outgoing student, I have all kinds of advice you’ve probably heard before.
You should get involved in other campus activities. You shouldn’t stress out too much. It’s not the end of the world even though it feels like it. And you should really try to use the gym at least once. I hear it’s nice.
But the single most important piece of advice I can give is that you should spend time getting to know your professors.
We, as students, are in a unique and special position—we get direct, unfettered access to some of the best academics in the country.
And while we stress about citation styles and word counts, it’s easy to forget that we are being taught by some of the brightest people around. Before our profs were profs, they were activists, researchers, lawyers, and politicians. Many of them still are.
Dont’ believe me?
I started realizing this only about a year ago. Allan Thompson is a well-known journalism professor here, whose work in Rwanda is known worldwide.
While I was in Rwanda last summer through his internship program, I took a trip to a small village in the north. When a local asked me where I was from, I replied “Canada.” His immediate response? “Do you know Allan Thompson?”
Just a few weeks ago I also learned that my women’s studies professor this semester, Janet Tulloch, was part of a movement in the 1970s to get a women’s centre at McMaster University. It was one of the first of its kind at a Canadian university.
When I first started at Carleton, I was one of those people who felt intimidated to drop in on my prof’s office hours. But when I did, I was always pleasantly surprised how receptive they were to my visits, and how much I learned from speaking to them one-on-one.
So next year, instead of just looking them up on ratemyprofessors.com, look your new professors up on an academic journal or in newspaper archives. You might be surprised at what you find.
