Student Profile: Emily Hollenberg
Whether she’s reading a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller or penning a novel of her own, Indiana junior Emily Hollenberg’s native language is literature.
“I’ve loved English my whole life, and once I outgrew the firefighter stage, I knew I wanted to teach it,” she says. “I would like to be a high school teacher and also continue to write, whether as a novelist, poet or blogger. You can express yourself in a different way through reading and writing. They transport you to a different world for a while.”
Hollenberg, an English major and writing minor, is working toward a secondary education certification so she can transfer this passion and teach her students that learning can be fun. Besides, teaching runs in her family, and so does Alma College, she says.
“My mom went to Alma, but both of my parents taught me the value of a liberal arts education,” she says. “I also truly felt like I belonged here, which I had never really felt anywhere else. And Alma is sort of become a family tradition, since my older brother went here as well.”
In the novel that is Hollenberg’s Alma experience, she says some of her favorite characters are her professors, particularly Robert Vivian and Dana Aspinall, both associate professors of English.
“I love the relationships you can have with your professors at Alma,” she says. “Dr. Vivian has helped me discover myself as a writer, and Dr. Aspinall has done the same thing for me only on the literary side. He has really helped me develop my skills as a reader, researcher and scholarly writer on literature.”
