Category: What’s Up, Baylor? with Chelsea Teague

This week, I sat down with my fellow BIC sophomore Jared DeVries for an impromptu chat about Baylor, life, and his goals for the future.  I had Delia—my trusty laptop—and my usual battery of Deep, Soulful Questions© in hand and was anxious to hear what he had to say.

“Indiana Jones,” he said unflinchingly.  “If I could have any job, Indiana Jones would be perfect.”

I had to take a quick break to laugh a little over my keyboard as he explained to me animatedly why Raiders of the Lost Ark was the perfect movie (“It’s got everything!”) while slurping his sweet tea from Starbucks (which was good, he said, but not as good as apple juice would have been).  The rest of our interview was just as fun and light-hearted, with Jared making it clear that he tries not to take himself too seriously—an attitude we could all learn from.

“Do you have any quirky habits that you want to tell us about?” I asked after we had agreed that the Indiana Jones franchise was epic, although maybe Harrison Ford was getting a little old to take on the Nazi menace single-handed.

“I laugh a lot!” he said, surprising no one.  “I think it’s one of the defining characteristics of who I am.  Sometimes I laugh because I think something’s funny, but then other times if I don’t hear you, I laugh anyway, so it’s not awkward.”  Maybe ironically, we both laughed over that, and Jared shrugged a little.  “I like to laugh,” he said simply.  “It’s fun.”

Goodness knows that we BIC-ers need all the fun we can get, and even amidst the fire and frenzy of school, Jared knows how to keep his spirits up. “Freshman year, I was in Dr. Hibbs’ class for World Cultures I,” he said when I asked him about his favorite Baylor memory.  “And we got to dress up for extra credit one day, and I was Enkidu!”  He had bought a long, hippie-style wig from Walmart (“The hair was everywhere,” he said) and had worn a cheetah-print loincloth, and not much else.  “At first I thought it might be too risqué, but then I just decided to do it!” he said.  “And then I got Chipotle afterwards.”

“Where do you see yourself in five years?” I asked him.  “What would you like to be doing?”

“Hopefully I’ll have graduated,” he said, laughing.  Other than the completion of his undergrad career, Jared hopes to be in some kind of a position to pursue history and teaching—an assistant-professorship, perhaps, like a real-life Indiana Jones.  “I love learning, and teaching, and finding out how things work,” he said.

“How about in fifty years?”

In fifty years, Jared will be seventy, and hopefully living a well-established life somewhere with a family of his own and Washington, his beloved bonsai tree.  “He’s been with me two years now, and he’s doing great,” he said about Washington.  “He wants to travel more, and I keep him on my windowsill so that he can see outside.”  Jared and Washington seem to like the simple life, and in fifty years they would be perfectly content to “just enjoy life and engage in what it has to offer.”  That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.

Of everyone I have met in the BIC (or even in all of Baylor), I think that Jared is one of the only people I have yet spoken to that seems genuinely comfortable with himself—I mean, it takes a lot of gumption to dress up like an ancient Mesopotamian demigod.  He sees the value in the small things and is constantly looking for opportunities to improve, even mulling over ways to make life easier for Waco’s citizens while he is out running.  If BIC had any part to play in the kind of person that Jared turned out to be, then it is doing something right, and we can sleep tonight knowing that our education is in good hands.

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

Although every BIC professor is fantastic, there are a handful of names that stick out in most students’ minds as intrinsic to the BIC machine—teachers that, were they to suddenly pack their bags and move to Slovakia or some other obscure place (like Montana or something), would take with them a special part of BIC legend.  Dr. Stacey Hibbs, famous around BIC circles for her enthusiastic appreciation of Aristotle and for giving out candy on test days, is one such professor.

“Everything begins and ends with the students,” she said when I asked her what part of her Baylor career she was most proud of.  Not just influencing students who go on to achieve amazing things, she clarified.  Dr. Hibbs is most proud of being in a position to help the students who come to her with their problems, who want to talk to her about their “rough patches.”

“That’s great,” I said.  I meant it too.  In a world that puts so much pressure on academics to be the very best in their fields and that pushes them to compete with their colleagues for any kind of recognition, sometimes professors can put their obligations to their students on the backburner.  It is obvious that Dr. Hibbs’ students have nothing to worry about.

“Do you have a favorite Baylor memory?” I asked her.

“All my memories involve my students,” she said, true to form.  She told me about one student of hers a few years ago that began selling contraband t-shirts when Baylor beat Texas A&M in football.  “I bought one from him and then watched him get chased down the street by BU security,” she said, laughing.  “And two of my other students a couple of years later, on the last day of class, dressed up as a banana and a gorilla and chased each other around my classroom!”  They said they wanted to make sure that she would remember them, Dr. Hibbs told me.

I broached a new topic and asked Dr. Hibbs about her hobbies or if she had any quirky habits that she would care to share.  With more excitement than I could understand, she said, “I love to do yardwork!”  Not gardening or anything like that, she said, but real pioneer stuff, like cutting down trees and landscaping—stuff so that you can see the difference between when you start and when you finish.  There was an outdoorsy glow in her eyes as she said this—the same kind of glow my parents got whenever they used to tell me that it was yard day and that I should find some work gloves and get ready to sweat.  It made me nervous just thinking about it.

“My parents love yard work too,” I told her.  “It’s hard for me to see the appeal, though.”

She laughed and said that it was probably a generational thing.  “Sure,” I said as I clung nervously to my smartphone and my privilege.

Finally, I asked Dr. Hibbs to explain Baylor to me in three words.  It is the shortest question on the list that I ask my interviewees, but it is consistently ranked the most difficult, and Dr. Hibbs told me she thought long and hard about it.

“Warm,” she said, not meaning the weather.  “And rising, and engaging.”  And with that, she left to go leap tall buildings in a single bound or to put out forest fires or to do whatever it is that BIC professors do in their free time.

Thanks, Dr. Hibbs, for taking time out of your busy schedule to give a few words to all of us trying to live the examined life, and thanks for putting your whole self into your teaching.  We all really appreciate it.

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

Everyone already knows that Baylor bears are smarter than the average bear, but they are often brilliant and multi-talented too!  This week, I spoke with a bear that wears so many different hats, she has to duck when she enters a room so they do not get knocked off.

Tirzah Reilly is a senior English major with a minor in studio art.  She is originally from Waco, and she liked it so much that she decided to stick around for her college years.  “I like Waco,” she told me.  “It’s got a bad rap, but it’s a nice town.”

It’s certainly true that the Wack has a particular artsy charm that would appeal to anyone with an artsy bone in his or her body, and Tirzah has at least fifty artsy bones. Honestly, she probably has some artsy muscles as well.  When discussing her hobbies, she mentioned that she draws and paints like a pro, and she also plays the mandolin and the ukulele.  As a studio art minor, she is also required to dabble in photography, woodcutting, and a plethora of other artistic media. Truthfully, she is brilliant at all of them.  Her other hobbies include watching BBC (I’m right there with you, T) and torturing her cat with hugs (“He hates them!” she said).

Tirzah is a fantastic poet as well.  In fact, when I asked her about what she feels has been her greatest accomplishment at Baylor so far, she mentioned that her work was first published at Baylor in the Phoenix Literary Magazine, a compilation of the best of Baylor’s undergraduate poetry and prose.  She has also won the The Poetry in the Arts, Inc., Dr. Robert G. Collmer Prize associated with the annual Beall Poetry Festival student literary competition (which, for everyone not familiar with it, is a pretty big deal).  I have been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to sit in a couple of poetry workshops with Tirzah, and if her accolades were not already enough to prove her talent to me (they were), then hearing her poetry read firsthand sealed the deal.

For all her great literary achievements, however, Tirzah told me that she felt her greatest Baylor accomplishment was her continued involvement with Kokernot Residence Hall.  Kokernot was where Tirzah spent her freshman days, and she served as a CL there during her sophomore year.  These days, she works as an OA at the front desk.  “I am so glad that I got to be a CL there, and I’m proud that I can continue to work there in a different way!” she told me.  The fact that Tirzah considers working in a place she loves to be a more significant accomplishment than all of her prizes and awards is pretty telling her sparkling personality, if you ask me.

Towards the end of our talk, I asked Tirzah what her best Baylor memory has been so far.  She told me all about her study abroad trip to the UK last summer, about becoming so close with all the bears that went with her, and about all the new and different places they visited.  “We took a weekend trip to Scotland,” she said.  “To Edinburgh, and there’s this mountain there called Arthur’s Seat.  The first day, we climbed all the way to the top, and I looked down at the city, and it sank in for the first time where we were.”  But the best part of that trip was the next day, she told me, when she and some of her friends climbed up the mountain again to sit and write and just enjoy each other’s company on the Scottish mountainside.  “I’m so glad Baylor brought us together!”

In the future, Tirzah wants to study library sciences at the graduate level.  “At Baylor?” I asked.

“We’ll see!” she said.

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