Category: Academics
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Because of Community: Professor Jennifer Bickham Mendez
This post is written by Caitlyn Whitesell ’20, who serves as the communication intern for OCE. She interviewed Professor Jennifer Bickham-Mendez in Fall 2019. Professor Bickham-Mendez researches Latinx studies, race, class gender, social movements, and more in William & Mary’s sociology department. Through her research, she engages directly with the Williamsburg community to serve the…
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Community = Q(f x d)>R(f x d)
On our first day in class this semester, I asked my students — all first years in the Aim 4 program — how they define community. Then I shared with them some definitions from the last 75 years. This broad offering: “A common definition of community emerged as a group of people with diverse characteristics…
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Magnitude and Direction
“If you remember anything from this class, I want you to remember that a vector has both magnitude and direction” – T. Wayne, my high school physics teacher. A few years ago, I celebrated the tenth anniversary of graduating high school by sending a letter to ten of my former teachers sharing what had stuck…
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Who I Am Is Here
I just logged into my blog dashboard to upload an end of semester post and for the first time noticed that I have a Draft folder with something in it. Below is the entry I discovered which I wrote in December 2012, the first winter after I graduated. It seems appropriate to finally post this…
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That Time a W&M Professor Lied To Me
It was one of my favorite stories to tell on an admission tour as we paused in the lobby of Blair Hall. I recounted the day I walked into my history course, “The Global Color Line” with Professor Vinson, and he stared us all down. “Today, you are going to teach class,” he said, while…
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Building My Own Dumbledore’s Army
Sometimes I picture myself in that moment, except instead of a battle of good and evil, I’m in some sort of academic show-down. All I know is that I’m about to do battle based on the power of my education, and suddenly all of these professors are standing behind me.
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You Know That Feeling…
You know that feeling of opening a book you’ve been dying to read. Or even better, the feeling of opening a book you’ve read at least ten times before, but you’re just as eager for the 11th. That moment of knowing that what you’re about to immerse yourself in will be at the same time…
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Once a Sharpie, Always a Sharpie
The Sharpe Program has changed not only my service experience but my William and Mary experience
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Craving a Blue Book
It’s easy to feel the countdown to Thanksgiving Break in the air on campus. For many students, getting to Thanksgiving Break is cause for celebration because it means getting through midterms and paper assignments that always seem to stack up this time of year. Unfortunately for some, Thanksgiving Break will be the time when they…
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Ode to the Sociology Department
The Sociology classroom experience at William and Mary is the one I think of most often when I am longing to return to my undergraduate academic life because in Sociology classrooms I found myself excited, engaged, and challenged.
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Learn Everything You Can
I’m sitting in The Media Center in the basement of Swem (I mean, “Ground Floor”) working on a really cool new project, The Speak Up Series, that I’ll be telling you about soon, but for now I just wanted to add a brief post. There are some really great things about moving from student to…
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Success Awaits You
It may not be in form you expected, but know that success is waiting for you here.
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Overheard @ W&M
Another reason to love our faculty.
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Our little secret (that I’m publicly posting)
Don’t tell my history professor this, but my attempts tonight to eloquently propose a museum exhibit which thoughtfully explores alternative interpretations of Native American activism in the 1960s has not been so successful. I blame it on location. Working at the same computer in Tyler Hall for the past three hours, the computer next to…
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GERs and Gazing at Stars
I hope you take a moment this evening to look up at the stars and know that if you can already identify the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, or Orion, or know to turn to someone next you and have them point it out, then you are already on track for a successful college experience.