Sarah Sweitzer
Chemistry
My four years at Gordon have been spent studying the sciences and dabbling in English Language and Literature long enough to attain a minor. Chemistry has been my particular passion. Beginning to understand the mechanisms constantly at work around me on a deeper-than-surface level has been one of the great blessings of my time here.
Before you get the wrong impression, I do have a personality, one that is not completely quirky; I do not wear a pocket protector, nor do I (completely) embody other cliché images of the science-minded. In fact, if I were to take you back to the beginning of my four years, you would be talking to a girl who had little to no interest in science, a girl who just wanted to make it to medical school and chose the science she found least excruciating as the route.
However, with each successive year I have grown to love and appreciate the department and the subject. We chemistry majors are few and far between at Gordon; however, it is not quantity that matters but quality. The small numbers create the opportunity to connect with one another and receive individual attention which at other schools is all too often impossible. I have consistently found the professors in the Chemistry Department to be interested in who we are as people, and not only in how much of the book we can reproduce. I hope one day the program will expand, both in terms of numbers and resources. But, mostly, what I hope is that the department never loses the close connection it has with its students.
Trevor Peterson
Economics
I was fortunate enough to have been in the last microeconomics class Dr. John Mason taught before his retirement. His focus on the poor and the need to think carefully about how we address issues of poverty attracted me to the economics major. Thinking about the two years I have spent as an economics major, I realize this is what will have the longest impact on my life. Any college can teach the analytical aspects of economics—supply and demand charts are the same everywhere—but the Economics Department here treats the discipline as more than a series of mathematical models. This spirit is best shown in the close attention Dr. Mason gave to issues surrounding poverty. Economics majors are sometimes accused of being heartless souls, but the importance of alleviating poverty and caring for the poor was impressed upon us from day one.
While poverty has not played as large of a role in most of my other classes as it did in Dr. Mason’s, one thing has remained the same: the desire not just to make a careful analysis, but also to use that analysis to engage important issues. Dr. Smith, the department chair, calls this Prudence. There are many important issues that we are faced with today, and economics has provided me a framework to examine them and how best to address them.
Christen Byrd
Education & Math
There are few teachers in this life as effective as experience. The journey of an education major is really an escort into the world of responsibility and into the understanding of what it means to pour into the upcoming generation. From the early classes on education theory to the final experience of student teaching, we are presented with the first long-term decisions about who we want to be as adults. We all have ideals about which person we will never be like or about something a teacher said to us that we will never repeat. We all form an ideal of who we want to be in that ever-elusive future. To those desires, the Education Department of Gordon College has said (without so many words), “Here is your chance. Find out if your idealism for the future can meet your reality in the present.”
I am delighted to say that, as I await graduation, I have already spent time forming, very specifically, who I will be in this world. I set my goals and my ideals (in theory); and with hard work, fantastic guidance, and a lot of refining, my ideals have become (and are becoming) my reality. Whether through the successful (or comical) moments of student teaching or the tearful nights of self-reflection, I have been refined and prepared for this new season that is now just around the corner. Thank you, Gordon College, it has been it has been an unforgettable journey.
