Last month, I graduated from the University of Maine at Farmington. If you are familiar with this top-ranked liberal arts college in rural Maine, then you’re aware of its nationally accredited four-year teaching program, which pulls in hundreds of Education majors each fall. And you’ll probably also assume that any student you know who attends UMF is there for a teaching certificate.
If students are not majoring in Early Childhood, Early Childhood Special Ed., Elementary, Secondary, School Health, or Special Education, they may be enrolled in UMF’s popular business or environmental science programs.
But, if a student is like me, she is a non-education major, enjoying and thriving in any one of UMF’s specialty or self-designed majors. As a dual major in Creative Writing and English, with a pretty unpopular minor through the Women & Gender Studies program, I have soaked up every moment of what UMF has to offer, and have proudly left the university with the tools and capabilities required to go forth, and write my little heart out. Fortunately, the friends I made along the way were the best I’ve ever had.
Were they amazing, supportive, fun, and ambitious? Of course. Could they stay up until early morning and watch “Friends” reruns with me until our eyes shriveled into our skulls? You bet. Could they spend hours with me in a nook of the campus library, poring over British Lit and sipping cappuccino, talking over the best ways to say, “this poem needs more… poetry in it” during workshop? Um. Well, they’re my friends, and, what more can I ask of them than just that?
I’m not saying that because I had very few (literally, one close one and a handful of acquainted) Creative Writing or English major friends, that I didn’t get the “full college experience” in making a diverse group of friends. I’m certainly not saying that because my closest friends—even a few of my admired mentors—were Ed majors, that I didn’t appreciate them, or that I didn’t feel connected to them or enjoy their company.
However, having been the lone non-Education major in two of my most impactful friend groups in college, and the lone Fine Arts major, at that, always made things a little difficult, and sometimes awkward. Even a little frustrating.
Meals in the dining hall normally went something like this: I down a veggie burger while listening and not often contributing to my girlfriends’ conversation about SED 160, the infuriating time constraints on lesson plans in a professor’s class, or the nail-biting, pee-your-pants-inducing PRAXIS tests. I throw in the occasional, “Jeez, that sounds ridiculous; I’m sorry, guys,” but silently wish one of them would turn to me, nonfiction essay draft in hand, and say, “Okay, I get that I need a more concrete voice throughout the piece, but, is the way I draw out the description of my mother too kitschy?” I zone out continuously until Katherine shouts that we should head down the road to Gifford’s Ice Cream for dessert.
During girls’ nights, somehow talk eventually turned to my friends’ teaching woes. A book I’d see on Whitney’s desk might prompt me to ask her what she thought about the narrow plot line, and her answer would often be followed by a detailed, nuts-sounding summation of what teaching assignment actually goes along with reading the book. While I always listened with a sympathetic ear, and still do respect, support, and uplift what they went through to become certified educators at a time when such people are more underpaid and undervalued than ever, I couldn’t help but feel a little lonely. In fact, I didn’t discover one of my best friends and fellow Creative Writing major, Jill, until my senior year.
It was hard not having friends who were writers like me, who shared the same passion and enthusiasm for reading and writing the way Humanities majors do. At times, it was angering when the occasional parent of a friend or a visiting professor would ask nonchalantly if I was also in Practicum this semester, or innocently assume I was attending the school for teaching. It made we wish that, as a school boasting one of the top competitive, successful, and comprehensive Creative Writing programs in New England, UMF would advertise it a little more alongside information about the teaching program.
The Education major at UMF is intensely structured, offering students a range of enriching opportunities post-graduation. The program is diverse, intelligent, and deserves respect, while calling upon enthusiastic prospective majors to board the Education train with all the heart and soul that truly makes the program rich, vital, and integral to our school systems.
Without my teacher friends, I, too, wouldn’t be as richly informed and dually honored to stand beside the education system—but the Creative Writing and English programs are just as fantastic and completely imperative in today’s world, because today’s world, especially, needs teachers and writers to firmly support one another.
I only hope that other non-Education students can find a place called home within the cozy, coffee-guzzling, brick-and-mortar walls of Farmington’s campus, a gaggle of friends with a shared major in tow.
