Graduate Profile: Lauren Sypniewski
While she may not have psychic abilities, Lauren Jo Sypniewski didn’t need a fortune teller’s clairvoyance to know she was going to study English at Alma College. The 2010 alumna’s enthusiasm for literature and writing made a college crystal ball unnecessary.
“I never had that ‘major unknown’ phase that many freshmen and even sophomores go through,” she says. “I’ve always been passionate about books and writing, and I like the adventure of searching for the human aspect in my own writing.”
Despite Sypniewski’s passion, she wondered what she could accomplish with an English major and switched her academic focus to pre-medicine during “a mid-undergrad crisis.”
Sensing an ill omen, however, she eventually reverted back to her literary focus. She says she simply wasn’t happy studying science.
“I missed English, and I felt like I wasn’t living my dream anymore,” she says. “I realized that I needed to be an English major because that was—and still is—who I am!”
Fated by the stars to be an English scholar, Sypniewski is now an Emerson College MFA student in the creative writing nonfiction program in Boston. She has future hopes of teaching writing at a small school like Alma.
