What's This?

My name is Annie, and I am a student and lifelong learner enrolled at UW - Milwaukee, working on my degree in Administrative Leadership with a focus on Adult and Higher Education. Within the field of Higher Education, I want to work to make STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields more accessible to woman and minority populations, and to improve graduate programs so that Master's and Doctoral level university students are receiving not only technical, field-specific training, but also the professional skills they will need to navigate career paths inside and outside academia. My interest in STEM fields is informed by my own background in mathematics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Outside of academia, I love to read, knit, cook, and stay as up-to-date as a busy grad student can with the latest nerdy TV shows.

I'm hoping to use this blog as a platform to comment on current work related to my interests in the Higher Education field, to reflect on my own experiences as an adult learner, and to communicate my ideas to a broad audience both within and outside my department and field.

Lastly, the title of the blog comes from one of my favorite poems by Wallace Stevens, which I read as an undergrad and which has always spoken to me as an amazing metaphor and description of the process of learning, taking in a new idea, and of the role of imagination in even the most grounded work. Here's the full poem:

Reality is An Activity of the Most August Imagination

Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,
We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.

It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna
Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust.

There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,
Under the front of the westward evening star,

The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,

Either in distance, change or nothingness,
The visible transformations of summer night,

An argentine abstraction approaching form
And suddenly denying itself away.

There was an insolid billowing of the solid.
Night’s moonlight lake was neither water nor air.

— Wallace Stevens, 1954