Blog Post 6

My current identity at Virginia Tech seems to reside between student and independent scholar. By independent scholar I mean writer/poet. I do not identify myself as a researcher as I don’t purposefully seek out academic research regularly. I turn to academic research only when necessary. I do see its advantages and have enjoyed discovering how many academic articles and essays I have found on poetry through this course. However, I enjoy reading actual primary texts by poets and other creative writers and writing my own work more than I enjoy researching secondary materials on poetry.

I don’t identify myself as being a teacher yet as I am not currently teaching. I am moving gradually into that identity through working with a mentor (who is a teacher) and through my pedagogy class.

To a degree I believe separating these ideas out is impossible, as I conduct informal research almost daily through Google and Wikipedia searches. In my own life I am constantly reading up on certain phenomena I find interesting. And so, I’m always researching. I’m just not researching in any formal academic way.

I think I also teach without being aware of it. Granted, my “teaching” does not occur in a classroom and it’s much less anxiety inducing, but it exists along the teaching spectrum at some point. For instance, I am very eager to express and explain ideas to peers and enjoy mentoring and tutoring fellow students.

Like Nial, it will be necessary for me to plunge into all of these identities in order to land a decent job in the future. Though I rarely turn to academic research without needing to, when I am forced to explore intellectual essays (particularly when they have to do with some aspect of creative writing), I usually enjoy what I come away with. Thus, in the future, I may develop a desire born of necessity for academic research.