Lauren Anderson

          I am currently in my third year at Simpson College as an English major with a secondary education minor and have added a few journalism classes. I also have experience helping students in the Simpson College Writing Center and writing news for the Emerge program on campus. The experiences I have chosen to participate in are a direct result of the May Term class I chose to take following my freshman year. I participated in a career observation class and spent twenty hours in an ELL classroom in Des Moines and the other twenty at Meredith Corporation also located in Des Moines. Both experiences expanded my view of what opportunities were available to me as an English major.

          After graduation I hope to continue on to a graduate school program to gain my ELL endorsement in order to teach those from middle school age to adult who are just beginning to learn the language. I have since participated in other observations and find this field to be extremely rewarding. These students seem to be even more appreciative of the opportunity to learn than the regular classroom student, which is something I hope to harness and use to create new opportunities for them. Many of the children in these classes have just arrived in the country and they and their parents have arrived with many dreams for the future. I deeply want to assist these students in gaining the skills to find success in a competitive but exciting country full of opportunity.

          As someone who greatly enjoys the art of writing, I have also become very interested in the field of journalism since my time spent at Meredith. I enjoy descriptive non-fiction and I am most intrigued by the possibility of editing or web editing specifically for a magazine. I hope to gain an internship over the summer of 2014 to gain more experience in this field that will equally match that which I have gained in the area of teaching thus far. I hope that my variety of interests will make me marketable upon graduation.