About a week ago, an organization called Furman Creative Collaborative published this video of Furman students saying what they’re thankful for. Make sure to watch this whole video and stay tuned until the end, when my friend Nathan showers us all with little drops of truth (if you watch it and you don’t say “UGH SAME!” once he is done, then we can’t be friends.)
PS: I am proudly the president of FCC so you bet your bottom dollar I will promote the organization through this blog post. We organize the annual TEDxFurmanU conference so we are pretty darn cool.
Hello there, Paladins! Time to get to know each other a bit!
Name: My name is Kenzie Wynne. My full name is McKenzie but nobody really calls me that. I usually go by “kenz” my grandfather calls me “mac” and honestly I’ll answer to anything! I had a friend once who tried to make “Big Mac” a thing so feel free to bring that back. I’ve always wanted a clever nickname that could double as a rapper name.
Hometown/Graduation Year: I’m from the hustling, bustling city of Simpsonville, South Carolina and I am a senior here at Furman set to graduate in May this year (oy vey!!)
Major: I’m a theatre arts major which is pretty freaking fun!
Name one student organization you are a part of: I am on orientation staff here at Furman and it is definitely one of my favorite things I do here on campus. It’s basically all of the fun of a whole summer camp crammed into three days. It’s awesome. Plus, I get to work with some of my all-time favorite humans and get freshmen super excited for Furman! It’s just the best.
What is your favorite CLP you’ve attended and why: It’s hard to narrow down one favorite CLP, especially since all of the shows the theatre department puts on are CLPs and they are ALL my favorites! I did recently attend a CLP entitled “Good White People” which opened up a discussion about race and racism and how people deal with it. It was fascinating, though-provoking and convicting! All things a good CLP should be. Also, did I mention that every single show the theatre department puts on counts for a CLP?!? ‘Cause I really don’t know what sounds better than a night at the theatre and a CLP credit. 😉
Name three things in your apartment that you couldn’t live without: I’m supposed to name three things in my apartment that I couldn’t live without, but instead of things, I’ll name what’s important—my beautiful roomies! I absolutely could not live without Clare’s jokes and ability to make me cripple into laughter her mutual love for all things Broadway (did I mention she’s got pipes to rival Barbara Streisand?? Yeah I said it.) , her capability to give great bear hugs, Erin’s willingness to gush and gab and turn on music way too loud and dance around the living room, and Kristina’s coffee-making, banjo-playing, happy hippy vibes and her aptitude for keeping things sweet and tranquil. They are my pillars without whom I could not stand.
What’s your favorite class you’re taking this semester: My favorite class this semester is my Acting 3 class with Maegan Azar. There are only six of us in the class and we are all seniors. We’ve all basically grown up together in our four years here and it’s a really special time for us to hone in on our craft together, encourage one another, and sometimes just be a little goofy in the name of theatre and learning.
Where can we find you on a Saturday afternoon: On a Saturday afternoon you can find me running away to the mountains as often as possible especially on pretty fall days. Or, I’m downtown eating. As far as hobbies go I’m pretty lucky because I’m majoring in my favorite hobby and I plan on making a career out of it too! But if I’m not in the theatre then I’m outside taking a hike or petting a stranger’s dog. Or I’m reading and writing. Or dancing around the apartment.
What part of campus/Greenville feels most like home to you: On campus the place that feels the most like home is the Playhouse. Probably because I spend upwards of about thirty hours in that building a week give or take a couple. I love that place a lot, not necessarily because the building is all that nice (it isn’t actually all that nice it’s kind of kooky in there to be honest and very old.), but mainly because the characters that inhabit it fill my life with more laughter and adventure and good conversation than anywhere else. I’ve always said it’s never the place that feels like home but the people that make it that way. The Furman Theatre professors and students are home to me. In Greenville, the other place that feels like home to me is Trio. It’s a restaurant right on the corner of Coffee and Main and it’s my dad’s place. I’ve grown up there. Literally. It opened when I was barely a year old. There are a number of waiters and waitresses who babysat me…which is kind of weird I guess. Anyways, I love that place and if you’re into Italian food and big portions you should hit it up stat!
What are you most looking forward to this year: I’m most looking forward to just soaking all of this place up this year. It’s my last year at Furman, and I love this place and I intend to just enjoy every last second as much as I can while I can. During my time at Furman, I’ve come to find that the moments that are the sweetest and memorable are the ones that I never actually looked forward to, but rather the spontaneous drives to Paris Mountain or Cookout runs or the late night talks and walks around campus. The best moments are the ones we don’t see coming.
Describe Furman in 5 words: Lasting memories in fleeting moments.
What’s your favorite meal served on campus: My favorite meal on Furman’s campus? That’s easy. Pizza, pizza, pizza. It’s reliable, it’s delicious and the line is always short. I’m a huge fan of no lines.
Name the last song you listened to: The last song I listened to is My Life, My Love by Family and Friends. It’s the perfect song for driving to Black Mountain on a crisp day with your windows rolled down. It’ll make ya wanna put on a flannel and smoke an old pipe and drink something that’s pumpkin-flavored.
Recommend a movie, a book, or a TV show we should all be reading/watching and why: Everyone should be watching Gilmore Girls. They’re bringing back all-new episodes on November 25th. I’ve watched through the whole show countless times and it is just everything. Lorelei Gilmore is one hundred percent my spirit animal. Speaking of spirit animals, absolutely everyone should read Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery. Seriously it is the best. I would never steer you guys wrong. That book is like the comfort food of books.
If you were an emoji, which one would you be: If I were an emoji, I’d probably be the mushroom emoji. Because it’s little and whimsical and I’m short and I’ve been told I’m whimsical. 🙂
Remember to also follow my adventures on Instagram using #furmanforthewynne ! love & rockets <3
My name is Hazel Davis and I am currently a senior Chemistry major at Furman. A lot of people think of Chemistry majors as a super obscure group of uber nerds who don’t have a lot of other friends and spend all their time studying. (Just think of all those Hollywood movies where the science majors are the scrawny little guys with erratic hair and glasses, who are constantly cooped up in a lab somewhere) To be fair, we do spend a lot of time studying, but in my time at Furman, being a chemistry major means having some of the best friends and support groups across campus. I might be biased, but I truly think we have one of the close-knits groups on campus, and that makes all the late nights of studying for bio-organic tests and writing analytical labs worth it.
My time in the department is a little different from some, because on top of being a chemistry major, I’ve also been president of the American Chemical Society Student Chapter for the past three years, and have worked in the chemistry department as a student office assistant since junior year. I’ve had the privilege of being able to organize a number of events for the whole department, which can be terrifying at times – trying to coordinate between officers and making sure that we have enough supplies and food, but it’s so great to see everyone in the department come together and enjoy a few laughs, good conversation, and maybe a couple of nerdy moments. We just had our fifth annual Pumpkin Somethin’, a cookoff between faculty and students, and last spring did our first joint Pi Day between the chemistry, math, and physics departments. And that’s not to say that ACS is the only sponsor of chemistry events, every summer the chemistry department hosts an Ironman competition, with all sorts of Olympic-style events that majors and faculty can participate in. It’s nice to know that at the end of the day, everyone can put a little time aside and come together to not worry about all the work that’s piled up.
As a senior, it’s getting to the point where I’m starting to look forward and wonder about all the things that are coming up in my future, but also take a really reflective look at all the things that have past. There are bad weeks and bad test scores, but there are also three and a half years of incredible events, time with friends, six hour bus rides to conferences with the Lego Movie, and conversations with professors that have nothing to do with electron pushing in organic chemistry, and everything to do with life.
For all of the prospective students reading this, be a chemistry major! And if you say no, you hate chemistry, just find a department that will give you all the support you need to succeed, but also challenge you to work hard, and grow as a person. Find that subject that brings you to tears because of how hard you have to try to master it, because when you finally do it’ll be worth it.
Hey dins (and hopefully future dins)! Last week I interviewed Dr Wright from the Chemistry department (which also happens to be my major, whoop whoop) so here is what we talked about- enjoy!
Dr Wright, professor of Chemistry and department chair.
What is your role in the chemistry department?
I have 2 roles in the Chemistry department. One role is to teach chemistry to students by teaching courses, and the other role is to be the coordinator for the department as the department chair. In the first role, I get to teach the CHM-110 general chemistry course for potential chemistry majors, and then I teach our inorganic course, and work with research and seminar students. As chair, I help coordinate the summer research programs, try to find funding for everybody, try to coordinate the instrumentation and keep it running, organize service contracts, and try to keep everybody working happily together.
How would you describe the ideal chemistry major? What are good chemistry majors like?
They come in lots of flavors. I don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all major, but I think what characterizes our majors in general is they are curious about how the world works, and they are intrigued by what happens in the laboratory whether they’re doing wet chemistry, mixing chemicals together, or sitting at a computer modeling how the universe might work. They are curious and resilient. They bounce back when their experiments don’t work, and they are able to smile occasionally when things don’t work, haha!
What is your favorite class offered by your department?
Techniques of chemistry. It is a wild and crazy class where the students are coming and going all day learning what it’s really like to be a scientist. From learning how to assemble glassware, to mixing chemicals, how to isolate products and characterize products they’ve made, learning how to use the instruments, getting their “driver’s license” on the NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy), using the big instruments for the first time. It wears everybody out, but at the end students are ready to not be afraid to make a mistake in lab. It’s okay to not know the answer all the time, and that’s a major transition for every student, to get to the point where they understand that it’s okay to not know the answer.
What kinds of study abroad opportunities are available to students? Are there any specific chemistry programs?
Chemistry majors have gone on study abroad with just about every department there is on campus. They have traveled with all the language programs, with the biologist to the Galapagos, they’ve gone to Africa on safari, they’ve gone to China, Japan, England doing Shakespeare. If there’s a study away program offered by the university, I can guarantee you there’s been a chemistry major on that trip at some point in time. We try to ensure that the chemistry major is flexible enough so that students can take advantage of the openings. We’ve had students go to the art department’s semester in Cortona, Italy. As long as you let your advisor know that you’re interested in going to a study abroad program, we work with students to make sure that it’s possible for them to do that. And we have sent students off to work in labs in Australia at the Institute for Smart Polymers. Professor Hanks has organized a lot of those opportunities at the University of Wollongong in Australia. While it’s not a formal program, we have coordinated these opportunities.
What are some internships that Chemistry students have held recently?
We’ve had students participate in other research programs through NSF REU programs, we have also had pre-med student participate in internships where they shadowed physicians, doing research at St. Jude’s, or even at the national Cancer institute, and we’ve had students who have done art conservation internships. So, usually, the students are combining chemistry with either an interest in health related interests, or with a second major, as it was in the case of the art preservation internship.
Are there any cool things we should know about the chemistry research program at Furman?
Well, Furman chemistry department has one of the largest undergraduate research programs in the nature. Last summer we had 54 undergraduate students working full time for 10 weeks with paid stipends from one funding source or another. Those students were working side-by-side with faculty members, in their research labs. Some groups were smaller, some were bigger. One student was working with Dr Knight doing matrix isolation analysis of new unstable molecules. Larger groups, like Dr Hanks’ look at new surface coating to prevent biofouling, whether it’s on implanted medical devices, or the coating of a boat. Dr Hanks just had a paper get accepted for publication about two weeks ago on some of his latest results. Dr Springsteen is part of this huge center for chemical evolution and he just had another paper get accepted last week. Dr Wagenknecht had 2 papers published this past spring and summer on his solar energy research. There’s lot of exciting stuff happening and all of these papers have student co-authors, it’s not just a faculty member grabbing the data from the student and publishing it. These students do research, collect and interpret their data, and then we send them off to conferences where they present that data. We had 32 students presenting their research at the Southeastern Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society (SERMACS) in Columbia, SC just last weekend.
Well, these are all the questions I had for you, but do you any additional comments for prospective students?
One of the things about a chemistry major is that you can do so many things with a degree in chemistry. It’s not just designed for students who want to spend the rest of their life working in a lab, or are pre-Med. While it certainly prepares people for those opportunities, we’ve had students that’ve gone directly into industry, regulatory science, doing patent law, going to divinity school and using this ability to think critically and ask questions as they work with people. No matter what you end up doing later, it’s a degree that helps you think clearly and critically.
Name one student organization you are a part of: I am a proud member of Furman Creative Collaborative (FCC) and Admission Ambassadors. I’m the president of FCC, an organization whose mission is to promote creativity and community on campus, and one of our signature events is our own TEDxFurmanU conference every spring. I am also the vice president of Admission Ambassadors, an organization that reminds me why I love Furman on a daily basis, and has given me a ton of networking opportunities with students around campus as well as prospective students.
What is your favorite CLP you’ve attended and why: My favorite CLP was the first one I attended my freshman year, called “The art of pencil sharpening” by David Rees. I walked around campus the first week and saw so many flyers for this event and I thought “there is absolutely no way this guy is going to talk about sharpening pencils, this is a metaphor for something”. JOKE’S ON ME. This event was 100% instructional on how to properly sharpen your pencils, but he did it in such a hilarious way, and I laughed so much, that it quickly made the top of my list. Also, this CLP was brought in by FCC, so it was the first thing that drew me to one of my favorite things I’ve been involved with on campus. Also, all of the theater plays never fail to impress me, and I love getting CLP credit for supporting my friends while being entertained!
Name 3 things in your residence hall/apartment that you couldn’t live without
My American flag
My ACS periodic table of elements blanket
My perfume (I am obsessed with smells)
What’s your favorite class you’re taking this semester? History of Western Medicine is by far my favorite class I’m taking. I only took it because my sophomore fall I had to take a history class for my GER credit, and I ended up taking History of Modern Europe with Dr Day. I hated learning history before I took this class, but Dr Day’s passion and enthusiasm just made me love the class. On top of that, I ended up being really good at it, and she told me I gave her the best answer she’s seen in my final answering an essay question about WWI. Anyways, I had a gap in my schedule and purposely ditched every other option I had in order to take Dr Day’s History of Western Medicine class. It’s been a lot of fun- I mean we are learning about leprosy and the plague, and Dr Day’s anecdotes just make it so much more interesting and enjoyable!
Where can we find you on a Saturday afternoon? On an average Saturday afternoon, you’d find me cooking in my apartment. I find cooking to be extremely relaxing, and I can be creative with it so it’s like my me time.
What part of campus/Greenville feels most like home to you? The Hartness Welcome center is my favorite place of this campus. I definitely feel the groups of ambassadors are my family, and the admission building is my home. Plus, there’s always coffee, hot chocolate, and cookies there, so it’s a PRETTY GREAT HOME!
What are you most looking forward to this year? Applying to Chemistry graduate school and figuring out my future!
Describe Furman in 5 words. Community, serenity, passion, family, dependable.
What’s your favorite meal served on campus? CHICKEN TENDERS (on chicken tender Tuesday)!!!
Name the last song you listened to: Take me home, country roads (I’m tryna be southern, okay?)
Recommend a movie, a book, or a TV show we should all be reading/watching: Okay, confession time: I started watching the Office the last week of August because I had never watched the whole thing, and last month I finished watching it. I FINISHED WATCHING ALL 9 SEASONS OF THE OFFICE WITHIN 1.5 MONTHS. And I’m about to start watching Arrested Development for the second time. Everyone needs to watch both of these shows because
They are really easy to watch
They have very clever humor based on continuity
Episodes are literally 20 minutes; you can watch at least one in a day while taking a break. Or you can watch multiple episodes and finish a season in a day (I will NOT admit that I’ve done this).
Meet the professors and students that make Furman amazing! This blog series is about the dedicated faculty and student body on Furman Campus. This week I had the privilege of learning about the Furman Philosophy department where I interviewed Professor Sarah Worth! Hope you enjoy and please comment any questions you have about the Philosophy department or Furman!
What role do you have in the philosophy department?
“I am the department head and so that basically means I kind of herd cats and get a bunch of philosophers to be on the same page about some issues, and I schedule classes, and, you know, support students and figure out programming.”
What is your Favorite class offered in the philosophy department?
“Well my class obviously, I teach a philosophy of food class which is really fun and has been very popular but it’s been really rewarding for me as a teacher because we have a lab and we cook together. I didn’t want to teach a class about food and not cook and eat together, and talk about food and its role in community and not have that community so it’s been a lot of fun for me, and I think it’s been a lot of fun for the students”
What are your favorite hobbies outside of Furman?
“I make jewelry! I buy beads all over the country when I travel for Furman and I do a bunch of silver wire stuff. So it’s very gratifying to have something outside of Furman.”
What are you working on now inside of Furman?
“Teaching classes which takes a lot and I just finished my first book which will be coming out in January. It’s called In Defense of Reading which is sort of a philosophical defense of what reading does for us cognitively, morally and socially. I talk about what being a reader does. Primarily dealing with reading fiction for the sake of reading fiction and discussing the benefits of that.”
Any specific undergraduate research opportunities within the philosophy department?
“I didn’t have a Furman advantage student this last summer but I have had one every other summer for the past three or four years that actually helped me do research for my book. And I am trying to think, Dr. Epright often has something going on because she is with the medical humanities and she often has students in the hospital systems. We also have a program for senior philosophy majors. It’s an honor program so you have to have a certain GPA and they get to write a senior honors thesis. So we only have one student this semester that qualities for that and she it writing a really interesting thesis about disgust and the law and what role disgust plays in some legal precedence.”
What kind of study away experiences are available through the department?
“Nothing specific to philosophy but we contribute to a number of different study away programs. I will be going to Italy in May for a class on food and philosophy called “Slow Food Italian Style” and it’s a May-X. We go to Italy, cook food, talk about it’s cultural role, and go on hikes! it’s funny because most students lose weight on this trip, I know I did! but we eat and hike and talk about it and it’s awesome! But other than that a factually lead trip goes to Japan every other year for a cultural exchange and philosophy, which is also really awesome!”
What about Internships?
“We have a lot of double majors in philosophy and so a lot of our student’s internships are related to their other majors. An example is a student that had an internship last summer with the State Bureau of Investigations. She is a double major in philosophy and psychology but I think what constitutes reason is one of the big questions that we deal with that she was dealing with in terms of the investigations she works with.”
What are some popular double majors?
“I don’t know if we have one department that is most used with philosophy as a double major, it’s a pretty even distribution. We have a lot of people that want to go to law school that are philosophy majors and of a popular one is political science and philosophy. We make philosophy fairly easy to be a second major because a lot of people aren’t going to come to college and major in philosophy but it is great as a supplement and it really helps people with writing skills, language skills, reading difficult material skills, that are all applicable in all kinds of different fields”
What’s one of your favorite things about being a professor?
“I love working with smart students I mean I wouldn’t come to work otherwise and I really like teaching. I was doing a bunch of administrative stuff over the summer, like a lot of committee work and organizing and finding research and I really enjoyed it but when I got back into the class room, into the fall, I was like oh yeah this is why I do this. I love this.”
What do you think makes Furman different?
“I think we have exceptional classroom teachers. A really nice balance on the faculty of demands for teaching and research which benefit each other and I think that Furman does really well with the research and internships part that is integral to really high quality undergraduate learning experience.”
If you want to know more about the Furman philosophy department or the Furman Advantage schedule a tour of our beautiful campus or contact admissions! Roll Dins!!!
