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VOICEOVER: This is Alumni Aloud, a podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode, we talk with the GC graduate about their career path, the ins and outs of their current position, and the career advice they have for students. This series is sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Office of Career Planning & Professional Development.

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Angela: Hello. Aaron! Would you just introduce yourself briefly. Tell us your role, and where you are.

Aaron: I am an Assistant Professor at Hostos Community College. I’m in my fourth year there, and I came from the graduate center, where I got my doctorate in English and I also worked at both career services and the writing center.

Angela: Excellent! Well, it’s a treat to have you on today. Interviewing you as a fellow in the career services, which is something you did before. So I’ll get right to the questions. The first question. So you pursued a doctorate in English. What questions drove your research? And how do those questions continue to shape your work today?

Aaron: Sure. So I guess the main question of my research was, how did both Victorians and and twentieth century British writers and readers conceive of suicide. How did they think? What did they they think caused suicide. What did they emphasize about suicide? And how did that change between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Because, at the end of the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim wrote on suicide, which was a sort of foundational sociological text sort of a case study for for sociology as a discipline and then, in 1915 Sabina Spiel Ryan, who was a psychoanalyst who worked under both Freud and Jung wrote a book or an article, excuse me, called destruction as a cause of coming into being which was sort of the foundation of later for its death drive and beyond the pleasure principle. So so I write about how? you know those influence suicide discourses in modernist fiction? And then in the Victorian era, how things like newspapers and religious thought influenced. How people conceived of suicide as well. Wow! Really fascinating. They were published in the newspapers, you know, along with the divorces.

Angela: Something really weird is that I actually am exploring Emile Durkheim’s conception of suicide in my own work, which has to do with learning communities. Wow! Because it’s a basis for some of the theories about retention.

Aaron: It’s really weird. And I’m just like this is weird, like, why cultural suicide more when students aren’t able to graduate or like to succeed in college, or something, you know, like some sort of so too much investment in the culture in the social body, not enough investment in the social body. That sort of thing. Wow! That’s super interesting.

Angela: And I’m like, this is a problem actually like this shouldn’t be like the theory that we’re unsing. So I’m critiquing this as a foundational thing.

Alright. Well, what steps did you take along the path to end up in your position at Hostos? How did this happen?

Aaron: I won the lottery. I don’t know. You know, I think one of the big parts was I did my writing across the curriculum fellowship at Lehman and they had actually based their model on what OS host was doing. So I know that was something that interested them, that I had that background. Actually my chair told me. You know I saw that on your resume, and that sort of step struck me. And you know I guess I like a lot of us. I was teaching a lot to pick up. I was picking up extra classes, and I think for community college. That’s something they’re interested in as well, because, you know, it’s a teaching forward position. And you kind of have to be able to do anything at any time, you know.

I think that the way CUNY sort of throws you in the classroom or the grad center sort of throws you in the classroom. Helps you figure out pretty quickly what kind of teacher you are, and how to teach something at the last minute, you know a lot. I covered some classes for people who got sick and just walking into the class, having read the material yesterday. I think that was really good practice for the kind of work I do now.

Angela: Were there any other career paths that you considered?

Aaron:  I’m not really good at anything else. So I don’t know. I suppose teaching in some other contexts. I know a lot of people, for example, from the career center I did Bard early high school or early college Bard, early college. So that was definitely on my radar. Something like that. But yeah, unlike, I think a lot of other people, especially in other departments. There’s not a lot of application in other fields, you know. You can’t really go into government or anything like that. I don’t know. I didn’t have to think about that part. But yeah, probably something in teaching that wasn’t academia would have been where I ended up

Angela: was community college a focus for you, cause you knew about the teaching emphasis?

Aaron: Yeah, I had gone to an event that Jenny put on, Jennifer Furlong, who runs the career services center about teaching at Community College. Sean Gerrity, who’s a colleague of mine now spoke there and it really interested me just because it is focused on teaching and it’s and it’s, you know their primary interest is how you interact with students and work with students.So I did. Yeah, that was sort of my ideal position was a CUNY community college getting to keep teaching CUNY students, which I’ve been doing for 5 or 6 years. By that point

Angela: I heavily relate to that. What role did the Grad Grad center have in your intellectual development?

Aaron: I mean, it. It had a big role in terms of my research. Richard K. Who was my dissertation supervisor, worked with me through my masters, through my orals and my dissertation. He was the chair of, you know, all of those committees. And he introduced me to D.H. Lawrence and helped me sort of conceptualize what I was working on. And then I think, also, working at the career center was a big part of how I ended up where I am. I mean they put on great events, and even though the market is a lottery every I mean it really is. There are a few sort of tricks you can pick up and getting, you know, people like Jenny to look over my materials and getting to hear people who have been through the process or hear people who’ve been on hiring committees. I got to be on a hiring committee for the director of the Career Center. And that was really eye opening in terms of how these things actually work. You know, you. You work on all these materials for so long, and then you realize the person is reading. It is reading 100 other letters, and so you sort of have to rethink. You know, how do I stand out quickly? And you know this person isn’t going to reread this, and look really carefully at what I’m saying. So learning to sort of put the most important things first, and so on. That was super helpful.

Angela: Yeah, you mentioned some events you went to, and your experience in your fellowship and also like the emphasis on teaching while you were a Ph.D student. Yeah, the next question is, how did your experiences at the GC transform you into the faculty member that you are today?

Aaron: In a lot of ways you’re you. You’re shaped by the grad center, but you’re also shaped by the campuses you end up on and I. My teaching fellowship was at Lehman and I was lucky enough to have a really good chair at that time. Paul was coco and also deputy chair, Deirdre boy, and they were just really generous with their time. Paul, I used to take all the fellows, I think once a month, and just hold the meeting for us for any questions we might have any support we might need. And also she was just super generous with giving us electives and all types of classes that we’re just the intro or or survey courses.

Also City college I taught at City College and the chair there was also great Elizabeth Mesola. She gave me a lot of classes. She actually gave me a class that was open, and I could teach it on anything, and II taught it on suicide and literature. So I got to sort of teach my dissertation while I was working on it.And of course, the students, you know, just working with CUNY students. I always say I love that we talk about diversity, I think generally when we talk about student diversity, we talk about ethnic diversity and maybe gender diversity. But and wh, which, of course, is really important, but also Cuny students have, you know, country of origin, diversity, age, diversity, you know, teaching a class where some I taught a class at City where I had an 88 year old student.

And that was amazing. You know, it’s amazing to have people from different generations talking about the material in a way that I don’t know that you get in in other campuses for, or most students are like 18 to 25. I remember teaching The Sorrows of Young Werther and before class started everyone was complaining about this character. You know, he’s so gross he’s so manipulative, you know, in his romantic gestures. And then I had an older student come in after all all these complaints, and he walked in and just said, This is the most romantic book I’ve ever read in my entire life, and and it’s great that he comes from a generation where, where that was more common, you know that sort of romantic behavior was expected. And so it led to an amazing discussion, because the younger students were given a different perspective on how these sorts of things are historically situated, right? The ways that people communicate their love to one another. So yeah, I would say, I was lucky to have really good mentors. Really good department chairs. Really lucky to work with Jenny. And then also, just to have all these great students.

Angela:  The next question is, what were some challenges you encountered as you transitioned into the full-time role at Hostos?

Aaron: Yeah, that’s funny. I think it’s harder to be a grad student. Actually, I mean I did start in January 2020. So you know, I was a new faculty member during the whole Covid thing. When you’re a grad student, you’re on multiple campuses, you’re juggling multiple roles to try to stitch together. You know enough money to live in New York. So I would say, that’s actually more challenging than the full time faculty position.

Angela: What would be some advice or recommendations that you’d give to current graduate students who are interested in working at a community college?

Aaron: I guess I would say 2 things. One is to teach as much as you can. You know, building a teaching resume, but also getting that teaching experience is gonna make you a better candidate. And also send all your materials to the career center, you know Don and Emily and Jenny and all the grad student fellows.You know I mean the help is just incredible. I mean III don’t know that I would be where I am without that sort of input on all my materials, and so on.

Angela: Well, those are all my questions. Thank you. Very good talking to you and hearing from you and your perspective, I’m sure it’ll help a lot of other students that are wondering how to move forward and whether it’s possible. But you are.

Aaron: Thank you.