Kim West ’14
Year: Senior
Major: Secondary Education/ English
Hometown: Girardville, Pennsylvania — shout out to the coal region!
Relationship status: Taken
Her Campus: What made you choose to come to Bloomsburg?
Kim West: The once a year fair. I’m joking, it was close enough to home but still far enough away that I could make a separate life for myself. The campus is small and allowed for me to build great faculty connections and meet the majority of my peers, as well as develop close relationships with many of them.
HC: What activities are you involved in on campus?
KW: I am Sigma Tau Delta President, English Club President, and a member of NCTE. I am also an URSCA scholarship winner, which allowed me to do a pilot project this past summer on The Pennsylvania Dialects Project.
HC: What are you looking forward to the most this semester in your role as President of Sigma Tau Delta?
KW: Tree Fest. Treefest is one of the coolest events the town does and as a group, Sigma Tau Delta has been honored to be a part of it.
HC: Obviously, as an English major, you have a lot of required reading. What has been your favorite reading assignment so far?
KW: That is really tough, because I’ve enjoyed a lot of reading that’s been required (and on the flip side I’ve agonized over certain reading that has been required, I MEAN YOU MOBY DICK). I’d be able to narrow it down to two assignments — reading “Specimen Days” by Michael Cunningham and “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman, then comparing the two authors– one classic and one modern. I also enjoyed watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and contrasting her with Twilight‘s Bella Swan. I really get into looking at texts from different mediums and taking modern, updated versions of classics. Both of these are techniques I’ve taken with me into a high school setting, and students seem to be responding well.
HC: Where do you see yourself after graduation?
KW: Currently I’m heavily considering several options, so it’s truly a coin toss.I’d love to end up in Boston. It is the literary epicenter of the US and is a beautiful city. I’ve also considered going south or west with my teaching career, or even to a separate continent.
HC: If you could alter one aspect of Bloomsburg University, what would it be?
KW: I’d tell them to switch around their gen-ed curriculum. I think that is a fault of all American Post-Secondary curricula; we spend too much time pushing non-major- relevant (and frankly, courses that should have been covered in high school) general education requirements that hinder a lot of people from finishing a degree program on time, and take away from the opportunity to learn more in their focused field. Honestly, I will lay odds 10 to 1 that I will never talk about Chemistry in my classroom, unless by a freak word vomiting incident.
HC: What is the biggest non-academic lesson you’ve learned at Bloom?
KW: It’s never too late to start over.
HC: What advice would you give incoming freshman?
KW: Don’t use “Rate My Professor” and go to class. The second you decide a professor can teach you nothing is the second you learn nothing from a professor.
Favorite…
…spot on campus?
4th Floor of Harvey Andruss, near all of the classics. It’s the best hide out.
…class at Bloom?
It’s a tie between History of the English Language, American Romanticism and Feminist Reading.
 …place to eat off campus?
Marley’s
…song of the moment?
I’m not sure if this means a song I can’t stop listening to at the moment, in which case it would be “Restless Heart” by Matt Hires or “Can’t Go Home” by Good Old War, or if you mean a popular song, in which case it would be “Still Into You” by Paramore