echalumni - Tumblr blog

echalumni · 12 years ago

Text

Interview of Seulghee Lee (Class of 2003)

Editor's Note: The following is the first in a series of email interviews conducted by current East students of East alumni. Our first interviewee is Seulghee Lee, a current PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Please feel free to post questions or comments below, and the Alumni Association will respond!

[Q. Can you give us some background about your time at East and your experiences since then?]

A. I graduated from East in 2003. My most profound memories are of the cross-country team (2002 state champions!), student activism (Amnesty International), ECHO, and band. The teachers and mentors who mean the most to me are from these activities: Don Clarke-Pearson, Betsy Dawson, Mimi Cross, and Steve Lytle.

I graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, MA, with a major in English and a concentration in African American studies. I then went on to the University of California, Berkeley. Currently I am completing my dissertation, which discusses how contemporary African American and Asian American authors have broadened our concepts of love.

[Q. What is a typical day like for you?]

A. I teach Berkeley freshmen for three hours a week and hold two hours of office hours (time set aside for students to drop in). Other than these obligations, my time is my own, so it's easy to lose track of all the things going on: big and small writing projects, conference proposals, academic job applications, grading papers, meeting with faculty, meeting with students, and so on.

[Q. What was something that you didnt expect about post-high school life?]

A. One thing I didn't expect from post-high school life was how much I would miss the camaraderie of hanging out with folks you grew up with, those contexts in which care -- yours for them and theirs for you -- can truly be taken for granted. The together-ness of a residential college experience was intensely social but in a very different way. The kind of organic relationships you develop in a public high school is categorically different from what comes afterward. There is a reason that so many movies are about high school social life, and there is a reason that such movies tend to be way better than movies about college.

[Q. What advice would you like to give to East Students?]

A. First and foremost, along with my brother, who shares a similar message in his alumni society stuff, I would encourage folks to stay attuned to the present. The things I am both anxious about forgetting (just as much as I am assured I never can) are not which colleges accepted whom or whatever AP exams I took. Rather, they’re things like long runs with the cross country team, dreaming aloud about winning the state championship; pickup hooping at Phillips during the offseason; and my first rap shows at Cat's Cradle, KRS-1 and Little Brother and El-P (I teach a class on hip-hop and am not sure I would be doing so without having had these early experiences). All your ambitions for the future are only possible from a profoundly rich present. I am reminded of this every new semester at Berkeley as I begin with a new crop of folks fresh from high school. They've made it to Berkeley, and they have ambitions, places they want to go. And no doubt I want to help get them there -- but they are also amazing as they are, right now, and it’s important to celebrate that!

#seulghee lee #2003 #interview

0 notes