Dr. Sarah Gunning is a second year, assistant professor at Towson University and this week’s Campus Celebrity!
HC: What classes do you teach?
SG: I teach English 317, which is Writing for Business and Industry, for business majors, [English] 301, and I’m also teaching the grad program’s PRWR Professional Writing 628, which is Designing Content for the Web and then a research methods class.
HC: What do you like the most about teaching?SG: I get to know my students pretty well, that’s really fun. Especially when I meet them as freshmen and then later on when they’re seniors and juniors, and they’re really figuring out what they want to do, that’s pretty fun to watch. It’s like I have 61 kids. They’re not just students, they’re my kids.
HC: What is your educational background?
SG: I went for my undergraduate at Ohio University, that’s a small town of maybe 20,000 people. I went from Graphic Design to Biological Sciences and ended up graduating with a degree in Microbiology. I worked in a non-profit sector as a research assistant. To advance in that position, I needed a Masters’ Degree so I went back and got a Masters’ in Technical Communication from Eastern Washington University in Washington State. After that, I thought I was going to go back into the non-profit industry and help with evaluations and run research studies so I went back for my doctorate at Texas Tech. Then I started teaching and discovered that I really liked it.
HC: What spurred the change from graphic design to microbiology?
SG: I had a really hard time with the textbook materials in my undergraduate classes. This was before YouTube; before the Internet was saturated with material so if you couldn’t learn it through the textbook, you had a really hard time picking up the material if you weren’t that traditional student. I thought I would go back and enhance my graphic design abilities and maybe illustrate textbooks or make it a little more visual to help learners, like me, adapt to that information. The further you go in and you’ll take different classes, and then your pathways will go different ways. I still do a lot of information design and visual communication in all my classes. It’s funny how it worked out that this is what I’m teaching ten years later even though the path that I took was kind of wacky.
HC: What else are you involved with outside of teaching?
SG: I’ve only been in Baltimore for a year so I’m still learning about the communities. What I’ve been doing this semester is working with Professor Zosha Stuckey. She knows everybody in the whole city. She grew up here, she got her Masters’ here. She’s very involved. So I’ve been apprenticing her in meeting people within the community and figuring out community partners. I’m trying to get to know every person that works here. I’m in a bowling league through Towson University. It’s faculty and staff so I’ve met a lot of people that way. I’m in some hiking groups and book clubs and things like that.
HC: Do you have any future career goals?
SG: I want to be a dean someday, that’s my goal. But if I am a dean, I want to be a dean that still teaches. I don’t want to just be administration — I at least want to teach one or two classes a semester just so I’m still working with students in the classrooms and can see what their needs are, so I can help the entire college adjust to those needs. I don’t want to be one of those out of touch administrators.