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Class of 2008

Wesley Schantz

Wes Schantz '08 pictured in the Hagia Sophia Museum in Istanbul.

Sometime early in my freshman year I started reading Dante's Vita Nuova and I thought that would determine what I was going to do. I wrote some poems and read more—Rimbaud, St-John Perse, Goethe. I couldn't even pronounce any of those names. I could play soccer, but I had decided not to, afraid that that would limit my free time too much and determine the people I would meet.

I thought for a while I should be a writer, and so major in English or maybe philosophy. But the more that I read, the more I thought about it, the more my favorite writers seemed to be pointing beyond themselves, beyond writing, to a way of living in the world. Like any good postmodernist, I wrote about this, too. But I also tried to experience it. I played soccer for the school, joined the Cater Society and went to Dublin on a grant to study Joyce's hometown, got to know former Indiana senator Birch Bayh as part of a Starr Center Colloquy, volunteered at the Kent Family Center.

I recognized in foreign languages a way to bring together these loves for words and for real-life experience that seemed to build on one another, give meaning to one another, and in a really interesting, dynamic way. I went to Granada in the spring of my sophomore year and was convinced I had made a good choice with the Hispanic Studies major. I've since then worked at summer camps in Puebla, Mexico and in the suburbs of Madrid, and visited a number of Mediterranean countries, but Granada remains my favorite place, after Chestertown.

Right now I'm working on traveling to South America to teach English. I'm applying for a Fulbright, and substitute teaching and continuing to write in the meantime. Even if I don't get the scholarship, I'll still go.

Further down the line, I'm thinking about graduate school abroad, teaching at the university level or in alternative schools, learning to fly airplanes, and getting a dog.