By MARTY LEVINE
Editor’s note: “Lasting Lessons” presents stories from faculty and staff about an educational moment that made the most impact on their lives — as a student or an instructor, inside a classroom or out, here at Pitt or elsewhere, formal or impromptu, between friends or even at a bad moment — something that challenged or changed them. Look for more Lasting Lessons in future editions of the University Times.
Diana Nguyen is associate professor in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of English as well as its Writing Program director, and directs the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series.
In 2003, Diana Nguyen entered UCLA as a neuroscience major planning on law school. With the help of mentors across the years, she turned instead to writing poetry, creating a first collection that was a finalist for a National Book Award.
“We were all terrified of him,” she said of her first mentor, now-retired UCLA poetry Professor Calvin Bedient — not because he was so critical or negative, “but because he was so sparing in his praise. Everybody worked trying to get to that place. … He was never cruel. But he had standards. And you didn’t want to bore him.”
Bedient’s poetry workshops were so inspiring, she found, that even when she had taken the maximum number allowed for credit, she continued auditing his courses.
Finally, at a school event, Bedient surprised her with a suggestion: “I think you should do an MFA” — a master of fine arts degree.
“For him to say that was just pivotal,” she said. “He really planted that seed. I never would have decided to do this.”
For one, she said, she is a child of Vietnamese refugees who had other expectations for their offspring: “You can understand, for them, they fled a war-torn country,” and expected her to enter one of the so-called professions, and not the uncertain world of writing for a living.
Nguyen, of course, knew that the job market for poets would be thinner than most. She decided to take a year off before following her mentor’s advice, and found a job with Apple in the San Francisco area.
But poetry still called, and she moved to New York to study under poet Lucie Brock-Broido at Columbia University, thinking: “I can always go back to tech …”
She still wasn’t writing enough, she felt, but Bedient “would always check in,” and Nguyen now had the chance to ask him to submit poetry to her — as poetry editor of Columbia’s literary magazine. Bedient would seek her comment in return, which amazed her: “I had never had a former poetry professor treat me like a peer. It was mentoring but I think we were friends,” she said.
By 2014, she was still working hard just to live in New York, and was planning to do her PhD at the University of Denver when the death of her younger brother “jolted me,” she said. “What am I doing? I wasn’t really writing. I started writing totally different work than I had been doing for the last few years.” She found her voice between the opposing styles of her two mentors, she said. Perhaps most importantly, “I didn’t care anymore about what people in other realms liked.”
A year or so later, she had a whole new manuscript — “Ghost of” — that was picked up in a month to be published and became a finalist for a National Book Award. She saw Bedient later at a conference, and he said, “I knew when you were an undergrad you had it. I knew this would be your life.”
She said of her own teaching style now: “I was not like Cal, in terms of how sparing he was in his praise, but I do preserve praise for when it is warranted. He feels like a poetry parent. I love meeting people who have studied under him. I really cherish him so much.”
Kathryn Ferguson is student services administrator and ombudsperson in the School of Dental Medicine’s Office of Student Affairs
Kathryn Ferguson was in an English master’s degree program at Duquesne University in the mid-2010s and tutoring other students in the university’s writing center, when one of the English professors, James Purdy, surprised her by suggesting she seek a career outside the department.
“I liked the writing — I enjoyed writing academic essays and considered becoming an English professor. I really enjoyed working with students. But if I hadn’t met with Dr. Purdy I don’t know where I’d be at this point.
“I wasn’t sure where I really wanted to go with the program,” she said of her English degree. “We were talking about my schedule for the next term. One of the big question marks I had: I wanted to take classes that were very practical for what I wanted to do with my career. He mentioned that higher ed administration was the thing I wasn’t thinking about.
“No one else had told me that this was a career option.” And she didn’t even know that Duquesne offered such a degree. “He didn’t have to meet with me,” she said of Purdy. “He didn’t have to give me career advice. But he took the time” and even connected her to this new program’s director.
“I really appreciate that somebody who wasn’t assigned as my advisor would meet with me and talk me through things. That meant a lot to me and it was a huge game changer for where I am now.”
Today at Pitt, she works primarily with dental pre-doctoral students. “We see the students as they onboard with admissions, all the way to graduation. I’m very big on mentoring in my job. It would amaze you to know” how many students are still uncertain of their career direction at this point, she said. Some of them do it because their relatives tell them to do it. Or they have relatives already in that career. “Some students are scared stiff about what they are going to do after college.”
She helps them to realize, as she did, “you can admit that you don’t know where you are going or you don’t know everything. That’s OK. Nowadays, we have a lot of resources on campus, compared to past decades of higher education. Nowadays, the focus is on student success.”
Robert J. Thompson is manager, multimedia and digital strategy, in strategic communications for the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences
“Everyone is creative,” R.J. Thompson said. “A lot of people believe they are not creative, regardless of their major.” One of his goals in life, he said, “is to get people to understand that they are inherently creative — that people don’t know how to tap into that innate creativity.
“I myself struggled with this very same problem,” he said. But in working past such roadblocks, earlier on, he even wrote a book to demonstrate how to realize your own creativity, which earned him a design excellence award in a graphic arts competition while he was an MFA student at the Savannah College of Arts and Design in Georgia. “And that kicked off my teaching career,” thanks to a professor there who suggested this direction, leading to positions at many local institutions, including as an adjunct at Pitt.
“Through my own self-discovery I was able to turn that into a lesson for my students,” Thompson said. He looks for “common points of resonance that tap into what motivates people so they can understand their own talents and capabilities toward creative problem solving.”
In the business school, where he teaches an advertising course, for instance, he recalled one student who lacked confidence in her own creativity. He helped her work on a mock advertisement, showing her how the choices of words, colors, textures and shapes “releases a variety of emotional touch points” for the advertising viewer. The exercise, of course, was really aimed at building up the students’ own natural instincts: “She is trying to understand, ‘This is my creative process,’ and get to a solution that is well-researched, well-considered, thoughtful and in some cases empathic and immersive.
“It gives people a framework” for future creative projects, he added, “and the synapses start firing.
“That totally redefined not only the perception of herself, but it also redefined how she was being perceived professionally,” Thompson said, for that student in the internship and work world. “She was able to articulate her creative process along all her decision making.”
John M. Kirkwood is distinguished service professor in the School of Medicine’s Department of Medicine, Division of Malignant Hematology and Medical Oncology
John M. Kirkwood has a more-than-50-year record of bringing up the next generation of investigators in his field, “and I think the rewards are really innumerable.”
Fellows apply to Pitt at the end of their medical training, to become certified in a specialty. The first fellow Kirkwood trained, when both were at Yale, followed him to Pitt in 1985 and is now very prominent in the field; in fact, Kirkwood has seen many of his fellows lead cancer programs, at multiple national Institutions.
“There has to be a click on both sides,” between fellow and supervising physician, he said — and between the fellow and the chosen specialty: “This is what I want to spend my life with,” fellows must decide.
The usual fellowship lasts three years, and mentor and mentee can meet for an hour a week — or for several hours, and more often.
Most recently he pointed to Lilit Karapetyan, for instance — a fellow five years ago, now at University of South Florida, in the Department of Cutaneous Oncology and their cancer center.
Fellows learn how to work on a protocol for an investigation, conduct the investigation and write the results in a paper afterward, with a grant application to continue the original work often to follow.
“It’s the crystallization of what fellowship is for hundreds of fellows,” Kirkwood said. “That’s really the crowning glory for the fellow and it is one where I share the pride in the productivity” — and as he sees them enter world of academe.
“That’s how I measure my success — for my mentees.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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