Alumni Spotlight: Dylan Wilkerson
During the second semester of my senior year, I walked away from Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan and never returned. At that time I saw no purpose in formal education. Although I had spent the majority of the time with my face buried in the pages of a book, I believed that I didn’t need some busybody teacher to tell me what to do. I wanted to work, earn money, and spend my free time educating myself. Nine years later, I found myself working for minimum wage in Los Angeles, no longer confident of my intellectual superiority. I knew that I needed help, not only to find a new and more fulfilling career, but also to take my intellectual development to another level.
My educational journey began at Los Angeles City College, where I acquired the academic skill-set which formed the bedrock of all my subsequent successes. I built up my critical reading and writing skills, I attained a near-fluent command of Spanish, and I sweated my way through mathematics. It was during Dr. Sotiriou’s British Literature survey classes that I realized that my enduring love of books was calling me to become an English major.
High grades at LACC brought me to the University of California Los Angeles, and I relished every moment on that beautiful campus. But I still made it back to Los Angeles City College every day, working my way through undergrad in an ESL tutoring lab. Interacting with students from disparate national and economic backgrounds helped to remind me of the tremendous opportunities afforded by higher education. It also forced me to tighten my grip on English grammar; have you ever tried to explain the amazing variety of compound verb tenses to a non-native speaker of English? Now, as a PhD student at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, I get to spend my days pouring over ancient texts, grappling with ancient languages, all the while astonished by all of the strange and beautiful literature that has (almost miraculously) survived the passage of time and come down to us today.
After graduate school, I hope to become a professor of English literature at a research university. I believe that professors are more than just researchers and scholars; they are also educators and custodians of important cultural objects. As a high school dropout who worked his way back into higher education, I hope that I can connect with students who are struggling to find inspiration in their studies by imparting to them my enthusiasm and excitement for ancient texts. I also hope to inspire many students from diverse backgrounds to pursue medieval studies. It is important that medievalists take pains to demonstrate the enduring relevance of our material to broad sectors of the population. Although medieval literature was the product of an ancient culture whose customs and ideas were quite different from ours today, nonetheless, it is still very capable of evoking strong emotional reactions resonant with the experiences of contemporary readers. All scholarly pursuits are enriched by the participation of individuals from various and diverse ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. I believe it is of paramount importance to bear this in mind as we build an academic culture of inclusivity and tolerance within medieval scholarship. Perhaps my non-traditional educational trajectory will function as an asset in this endeavor.
