About the Blogger

Hello, world! My name is Julie and I’m currently a grad student at Cal State University of Northridge, working towards and halfway done with a master’s degree in Rhetoric and Composition. I’m a 23-year-old aspiring writer/teacher/world-changer with a head for theory (Plato, Aristotle…you name it!) and a heart for immigration issues. I work full-time for Allstate Insurance as a licensed sales producer in order to afford a graduate program in what seems like an institution that is increasingly becoming a corporation (I’ll leave the discussion of the Corporate University for another time). I received my bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of California in Santa Barbara in 2011, chose this English program over law school–which was the originally planned path, and packed 4 years worth of college life into a U-haul truck and moved down to a small apartment in Los Angeles to pursue a career in academia. Throughout most of high school and my undergrad career, I had my mind set on going on to law school to study immigration law; and it wasn’t until a one-year stint here in LA working for an immigration law firm that helped me to realize that I had no interest whatsoever in sitting in classes full of kids whose attorney-parents were paying for their tuition and who were privileged enough to eventually become part of this California-Bar circle. It’s been over a year since I’ve been in this English program here at CSUN, and I can’t help but think to myself that there couldn’t have been a better choice to make. With fingers crossed, the next step in my career is to pursue a doctorate in Composition in relation to Education and to continue exploring the issues behind a curriculum that ignores and invalidates “othered” Englishes.