Learning what you want to do is often a matter of figuring out what you don't want to do. Senior Renée Dabney could tell you a story about that.
Dabney is in the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellow Program in English at Cornell. Born in South Philadelphia, she graduated from the Franklin Learning Center High School. Skilled in word processing and short hand, she immediately took a job as a secretary. But Dabney found the 9-to-5 world too limiting. So she enrolled in a "two-plus-two" program at the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP). Successful completion of her associate's degree would allow Dabney to get her bachelor's at one of the area colleges, such as Temple or Drexel. Her plan was to get a degree in English, then teach in the public schools. At CCP she joined Phi Theta Kappa sorority, excelled in her studies and placed in the National Honor Society.
Her course was set. Or so it seemed.
"I had already been accepted to three of the Philadelphia colleges when I got a letter from Cornell, almost at the last minute," said Dabney, who was contacted by the Cornell admissions office. "It turned out that Cornell was the alma mater of the coordinator of the education curriculum at CCP. She not only encouraged me to apply, but wrote me a great letter of recommendation."
Dabney transferred as a second semester sophomore to Cornell in 1997. She was still thinking of a career in public schools when a peer suggested the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship. Dabney applied as a junior and was accepted. The program, coordinated through the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell, helps undergraduates prepare for graduate school by providing academic and financial support.
With support from Marilyn Williams, assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Mellon program is co-directed by Dorothy Mermin, director of graduate programs in English and professor of English; and Jaqueline Goldsby, assistant professor of English.
Five Mellon Minority Fellows are chosen each year from the humanities at Cornell. They work closely with faculty mentors in their fields of interest. Each semester, fellows prepare a different project, sharpening research and writing skills, while advancing their bachelor's degrees. Projects can be developed into a master's thesis or dissertation topics, suitable for admission to graduate programs.
Dabney's first mentor was Goldsby.
This semester, Dabney is working with Elizabeth DeLoughrey, an assistant professor of English and a new Cornell faculty member. Dabney's focus is on contemporary African-American and African-Canadian women's poetry and essays and examining the relationship between migration (between Africa, the U.S./Canada and the Caribbean) and literary depictions of the African Diaspora.
"It's an absolute pleasure working with Renée," said DeLoughrey. "Projects like Renée's fruitfully bring together other disciplines, such as women's studies, Diaspora studies and African-American studies (and) are crucial because they reposition writers who continue to be underrepresented in academia and also stretch the boundaries of the national rubrics we use to categorize literature."
In-depth, one-to-one work with an academic mentor is a great benefit to Mellon fellows like Dabney.
"It's given me the opportunity to pursue in-depth readings and critical analysis with the assistance of great teachers like professors Goldsby and DeLoughrey," Dabney said. "This has helped me develop my own critical questions and refine my research skills."
Another of Dabney's projects allowed her first-hand insights into the challenges of graduate school in general and writers in particular. For one semester, she "shadowed" Crystal Williams, an MFA poet in the Creative Writing Program.
"We would discuss her work and I learned about the process of writing," said Dabney. "She was putting together a book of poetry and I saw the drafts, noted the changes she made, her efforts to secure a publishing contract, how she got her work 'out there' by doing readings."
As a result of these and other experiences, Dabney's career plans have changed.
"I find that I'm interested in writing, in tailoring my writing to critical essays and reviews," she said. "Friends who went on to teach in public schools tell me about their work and I realize the path I'm on now is working out better for me."
And her academic profile is again on the rise: Mellon fellow schools across the country are contacting Dabney and encouraging her to apply to their graduate programs. That's a twist this determined student from South Philly never saw coming.
"Things may not have played out in the way I expected, but they have fallen in the right way for me," she said.
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