Undergrad Publishes in Prestigious Journal

One of the great benefits of attending a private school like Rockhurst University is the one-on-one contact you’ll receive with your professors. Case in point, one of the students who had been in some of my classes received a Deans’ Summer Research Fellowship. Andrea Essner chose to research feminine imagery of God as employed in late Medieval English texts. I served as her mentor, directing her research of both primary and secondary literature. We met several times over the course of this past summer to discuss her findings and to propose a thesis statement for the paper she would write. My goal was to have her submit this as an article for publication in a scholarly journal. Andrea felt daunted by the task, but I knew she could do it.

It’s not often that undergraduates get to publish in journals that people with Ph.D.s compete with one another to get into. Andrea plans to go onto grad school and so I thought this was a perfect opportunity to prep her for that in a more focused way and hone her research and writing skills. (We do give students planning to go onto grad school a lot of mentoring here at Rockhurst.) Well, Andrea’s article was so good that upon her first submission it was accepted! Many times you might need to submit an article to one place, get rejected, and then submit it elsewhere until it’s finally accepted. Anyhow, Andrea’s article, “God as Mother in Post-Black Death English Mystical Texts,” will very shortly appear in Magistra (Winter 2008): 14.2. I’m quite proud of her!

If you attend a state college, you’re very unlikely to get such one-on-one mentoring with a faculty member; you can be lost in a sea of thousands of students.

To find out more about our personal Jesuit educational approach click here: http://www.rockhurst.edu/about/distinction/index.asp
For info on Rockhurst University’s Faculty scholarship and mentoring click here: http://www.rockhurst.edu/about/distinction/faculty.asp