Meet the BICers – The Mug

An Oxford Summer

QuickBIC Admin on September 9, 2015

Article by Chelsea Teague, current BIC student

The surface area of the world is 196.9 million square miles. Circumference: 24,902 miles. Population: 7.125 billion souls.

But I grew up in DeRidder, Louisiana—population all of 10,793—and the world doesn’t seem so big when the most happening place you can go on a Friday night is the local Wal-Mart. I didn’t think much of what the world had to offer beyond the confines of North America except that there were other places to live and that people lived there. I could point to France on a map, but it wasn’t France—just that squarish part of Europe where they sometimes ate snails. With this understanding of the world, I aced geography, but I didn’t really grasp the scope of the planet.

Moving to Waco did a little bit to open me up to the rest of the wide, wide world, but even its respectable population of 129,030 couldn’t compete with the monstrous size of Everything Else that I had never really reflected upon. I made a bunch of new friends during my first year at college. I met more people in my first week than I had met in the last six months, but I didn’t wonder for a minute that there could be anything more than my Baylor bubble. Could there be anything more, with a Chick-Fil-A two seconds away from my dorm? It was difficult to think so.

And then it happened, at the beginning of my second semester. I was surfing the Internet, procrastinating on my latest assignment, when I came across something called “study abroad.”

What? Abroad? Like, Oklahoma?

No! the website told me. Like Oxford, England!

I was immediately interested. It was a summer study program affiliated with Oxford University in the UK. I would go with three Baylor professors and twenty other Baylor students and travel and learn and eat and sleep and actually live in Oxford for all of five weeks. For a Tolkien/Lewis/Rowling/etc. nerd like me, it was a dream come true. Should I do it? Could I?

A quick phone call to my parents confirmed that yes, yes I could! I signed up immediately, submitting my application with dizzying speed, so quickly that I missed a typo, and that was that. It was almost too easy. The rest semester flew by in a whirl of homework and final exams, and then before I knew it, I was leaving my comfortable, 129,030 person home and boarding a plane to the UK.

That summer was one of the most incredible times of my life.

We touched down at Heathrow, and I was immediately overwhelmed by how multi-cultural everything was. In the space of five minutes, I had bumped into people from Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and all over the United Kingdom and had heard what seemed like every language known to man all at once. Things were much the same in Oxford, and tour groups of every nationality clogged the streets, turning the relatively small town into a hopping city center. Culture and history were everywhere, and I could hardly step into a building without reading a plaque about how old it was and how it had been the secret hideaway of such-and-such a person in the war of such-and-such a year.

The people I traveled with were some of the best I had ever met in my life, without exaggeration, and together we adventured in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Swansea, Stratford, Grasmere, and even Paris. I ate every weird food I had ever heard of (escargot and haggis were at the top of my list), explored the palace of Versailles, hiked in the mountains of Scotland, visited Shakespeare’s grave, and saw what seemed like every musical playing in London’s West End. We slept in Christ Church, founded by King Henry VIII some eight hundred years ago, and ate dinner in the Great Hall, the inspiration for the same place in the Harry Potter films. Everything was wonderful, and nothing lacked anything.

The world was suddenly so big. The whole of Europe was just a train ride away. The history and the places that I had spent all of high school learning about were right there at my fingertips, and all I had to do was go out and look at them. I was overwhelmed with the hugeness of everything. I tried to journal it all, but I wrote and wrote until my fingers were numb, and I still hadn’t captured everything that I’d seen and done.

All of a sudden, I felt so small. There were 7.125 billion people out there just like me, and I was in the middle of them all, and I was really, really small. There was so much to experience—how could I ever do it all in just over a month? There was just no way.

Texas felt different when I came back. It hadn’t changed, but it felt different—smaller, but in a good way, like how a small house is cozy. Homey. Now I can look at a map and find France and think about all the places that I’ve been and the things that I did, and think about all of the things that I haven’t seen yet. My study abroad trip forced me to live in a world that is bigger than the one I was born into. I’m going to see all of it eventually, even if it takes me the rest of my life. It probably will. The world is a big place, after all, and I’m pretty small.

Chelsea Teague is a sophomore BIC student majoring in professional writing.

The Best Mad Men are Sober

QuickBIC Admin on September 9, 2015

Article by Lee Shaw, current BIC student

As a professional writing major, I have signed on to be a literary mercenary in my future, to tackle every proposed composition yet un-scribbled, to eradicate every to be verb yet to be, and keep my MLA guidebook at my side like King James himself had orchestrated its assembly. When I am asked “What exactly is Professional Writing?,” I will usually spout the simple “An English major on steroids” (which truly speaks volumes as an English major is quite difficult in its own right). When I am asked “What do you do with a professional writing major?,” with respect to time, I might simply say that I could be an editor, an author, and publisher among many more careers. The truth, however, that my options for the future are practically limitless, would just take too long to explain. Although modern society becomes increasingly digitized every day, the demand for talented writers will survive, no matter the industry. Over the course of the summer I added one more potential career path to my growing list, namely copywriting.

This summer I worked for an advertising firm in Fort Worth, Texas called Pavlov. Named after the famed scientist, this agency aims to stimulate response from the general public that mirrors the desires of the client. Within the advertising field, any text present on an advertisement comprises the ad’s “copy.” As a copywriter, perhaps needless to say, I wrote anything from “Call 1-800-YOWATUP for more information” to radio and TV commercial scripts, and even the occasional brand slogan.

photo courtesy of Allstar/BBC/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Although Pavlov did not exactly reflect my Mad Men inspired fantasies (only one person smoked and – if there were ever any alcohol present during the work day – it was tactfully hidden from me), I do not think I have ever learned so much in such a short time. While I cannot talk (or write) about the projects that I participated in during my time at Pavlov, I can divulge the inner workings of an ad agency. (That’s right, the moment you’ve been waiting for.) After a client hires the agency, the account director determines exactly what the client desires and relays the information to the creative director, who I answered to directly. With every new project, the creative director would assign each of us in the creative department to brainstorm. This process pushed me to my literary limits, trying to encapsulate an entire company, an entire legacy within a two-word phrase. More often than not, I would come up with dozens upon dozens for a single project – often no more than ten would make it through. Yet this process never involved personal jabs, insults, or tense emotions. Advertising, as I have come to understand it, consists of facts – some things work, other things don’t. This process would repeat over and over until we decided on an idea and presented it to the client, just to start all over again the next day with a new project.

Some days I would spend six hours straight just trying to find the perfect pun to satisfy a client. Other days I would spend an entire day on one 30-second radio script, trying to formulate that perfect message, that perfect use of such a short amount of time. Advertising truly is an art.

As a Professional Writing major, writing lies in my bones. MLA runs as deep as my marrow. My handwriting mirrors that of a toddler, but so does my incorruptible passion for expressing myself through ink and experience. Advertising, a ten-character Twitter post that lasts forever, a story where the letters are the characters who have 2 seconds to grab your attention, constitutes just one form of the art that we call writing. I am truly grateful for this opportunity to expand my skills and hope that other students are so lucky to receive equally beneficial experiences.

Lee Shaw is a sophomore BIC student majoring in professional writing.

Life on the Bangarang

QuickBIC Admin on September 9, 2015September 9, 2015

Article by Sam Watson, current BIC student

Day one on the job. Early morning fog drifts across glassy water. The sun beams weakly through a cloud, enough to provide a breathtaking sunrise… the beauty of which is somewhat lost upon me, as I am only one cup of coffee into my required three. I sip slowly at cup number two as the boat rumbles its way towards the start of the day’s work, the grogginess fading in the face of the wind’s cool bite.

We arrive at where we’ll start transecting for the day and my partner [Will Bostwick] and I clamber up onto a small wooden platform built around the ship’s mast, hook ourselves in (safety first, kids), and begin sweeping the water with our binoculars. We’re looking for seabirds, small marine mammals, and, the big one: any sign of a whale.

Less than twenty minutes later, such a sign appears, hanging above the water like an ethereal spirit- a whale’s blow. I suppress my excitement as we call it back to the captain, a Ph.D candidate at Scripps Institute named Eric Keen, and he decides to execute a focal follow on this particular humpback after entering the data we gave him. [Will] explains to me this means we’ll break off from the transect and attempt to get an identification shot on the whale with our high powered cameras. Essentially, we’ll wait for the whale to dive and its fluke to rise out of the water. Each humpback’s fluke has distinctive markings we match to a photo database to identify it.

As we approach the behemoth, all I can see of its actual body is a low, dark grey line of flesh that rises up into the characteristic hump and dorsal fin. We’re still about three hundred meters out, so I wasn’t expecting to get a good view, but I’m still slightly disappointed. I’d heard so much about how charismatic and majestic these creatures were; was this all I’d see of them for the next month?

The whale blows several more times, moving calmly along the sheer granite shore of the channel, and we get within 100 meters. I’m more impressed with it now, but even so…

Then the back of the beast arches high above the water, looking for all the world like a prehistoric sea serpent, and a fluke, the width of which is nearly three times my height, rises straight up. The whole thing slips beneath the water with barely a sound, and all I can think is, “oh.”

This is life on the Bangarang, a 37-foot sailboat. You wake up, you drink coffee, and for approximately the next eight hours, you constantly see the most beautiful creatures on earth in one of the most beautiful places on earth. Life while you’re in the Bangarang’s care, needless to say, is amazing. Named after the Lost Boys’ cry of jubilation in the movie Hook, she carries you to sights you never thought you’d see.

She carried me to witness the famed bubble net feeding of the humpbacks, another event that’s nigh indescribable. There’s a group in the Great Bear Sea that’s returned, year after year, to meet up in the most spectacular feeding frenzy the natural world has to offer. The same whales, for over ten years, join underwater, one whale leading the others with haunting songs. They begin to circle a school of fish, slowly releasing bubbles and rising up towards the surface. If you’re lucky enough to have a hydrophone in the water, you can hear the slight changes in tone, pitch, and sound as the whales move, the hiss of bubbles, and then… Then you hear the calling whale deepen its voice, and you can tell they’re getting much higher much faster. You have around two seconds to prepare yourself, and then ten huge mammals are erupting out of the water, massive mouths wide open. The combination of their beautiful song and the sheer size and intelligence of the creatures, all spectacularly on display, was overwhelming.

This is, to some extent, what the BIC can prepare you for, if you give it the opportunity. On the surface, ecological field research and what you’ll be learning over the next four years have little to do with each other. But the surface only shows so much. When you see a whale on the surface, you can only see its back. Stick around long enough, however, and you may see something spectacular- a beautiful fluke, a pectoral fin, a breach, or maybe even bubble net feeding.

The BIC, on the surface, is difficult. The class load is heavy, the workload intense, and the teachers hold you to high standards; but what you’ll learn is worth it all. My time on the boat required attention and analysis. Ecology – particularly when whales are involved, because there’s so much we don’t know about them- asks of the scientist silence. You must sit, be still, and listen to what the ecosystem is telling you. You have to wait for the whales to sing. Let the BIC teach you to listen.

Sam Watson is a senior BIC student in the university scholars major.