Humanities Retrievers will be hosting a workshop tomorrow for students entering the workforce, "You're Hired! Humanities Job Search Strategies." Lunch will be provided at the event, which will be held in PAHB 216. 

Clair Volkening (B.A. 2023; Communication and Technology track; she/her) is a former English major now working as a Technical Writer contractor for the federal government. Access past alumni spotlights here.

At UMBC, I studied English and was a member of the Humanities Scholars Program and the Honors College. In my junior year, I got involved with the Center for Democracy and Civic Life and the Academic Success Center (ASC). Through this work, I realized I was fascinated by the how and why we learn—from the way a tutoring session affected a tutees confidence to how our society perpetuates beliefs via implicit or explicit education. In my senior year, I honed in on this interest through an English Honors Research project with my advisor, Professor MacDougall.

Before graduation, I didn’t know what I wanted my career to look like, I just knew that I really enjoyed engaging others in the writing and learning process. Now, I work as a Technical Writer on a contract with a military training academy. My everyday tasks include working with instructors on their course materials, and I am being exposed to an entirely new area of technical education and methodology. Ultimately, the same question arises regardless of the learning sphere: how and why do we learn? I am grateful to UMBC and my many professors for teaching me to ask that how and why—whether the topic be as small as my own, or my team’s, writing or teaching, or as large as the rhetoric surrounding big-picture societal issues.

UMBC recently published an Arts & Culture interview with Keegan Cook Finberg, covering her thoughts on poetry and society, poetry courses at UMBC, and her newest book Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public (Columbia University Press, 2025). 

Reflecting on her own teaching, Finberg says:

"I want students to be okay with not understanding everything that they’re reading while exploring the aspects that they do understand—to explore why this author might want it to be difficult in the beginning, why there might be something important in that feeling of discomfort that they’re experiencing with the text. Can they notice moments of beauty in the text, even if they don’t yet understand what they mean? A lot of our conversations start with that sort of work. 

And once students realize that that is the goal—that they don’t need to be able to decode, they don’t have to be the person who knows it all in the room, there isn’t one right answer—it really unlocks a very different sort of space. I often watch that sort of journey with students. They realize that there’s something inherently important about this difficulty, important even to their understanding of themselves, their heritage, the way that language works in their households, even in their larger worlds."

Read more here!