Undergraduate Student Questionnaire:
Where are you from?
I grew up just outside of Evanston, Wyoming on a cattle ranch on the border of Utah and Wyoming. It was a great, and interesting experience.
Why did you decide to study at Utah State University?
I had a scholarship here for soil sciences and range management and that’s why I came here originally. I took a few classes and I realized that I was not enjoying my time here and I didn’t love it. But I was also taking Len Rosenband’s history class, his 1100 Modern Europe class, and I loved it! I was so cool, and got me to start asking why and get interested in history, so then I switched over. I lost my scholarship, but I think it was worth it. It made my life a little interesting trying to figure out finances, but I think it was worth it because I would not have been happy doing anything with soils.
When and how did you first develop an interest in history, classics, or religious studies?
When I was talking to Amanda Adison, the history advisor, about getting a BA said, “You should take Latin!” and I thought, “Okay, why not?” and I got sucked right in! But I loved it. I’ve actually always really wanted to go to Greece. I loved Greek mythology as a kid. I remember that a book-mobile would come close to my family’s house, and we would get to go to it. I would always find the Greek Mythology books and read about them. I’ve always wanted to go to Greece and I got to do that this last summer and it was a dream come true. I was so excited. I loved every second of it.
Also, when I took Rosenband’s class I just loved it. I never realized that there were two sides to history, or that what you were taught in high school or middle school isn’t essentially true sometimes. There is a lot more that goes into things and it made me start to wonder about a lot of things and I was reading history books in my free time and thinking, “Oh my goodness, this is so interesting!” And I was reading books about Germany and the Holocaust and I just wanted to absorb all this information and learn so much. I thought, “This is what I want to do, this is what I want to study.” I hated what I was studying, it did not bring me any satisfaction. I think history opens up this questioning in people, and I’m like an inner detective. I feel like that’s what history really is, detective work. I’ve just loved asking those questions. It’s the first thing that I have been really curious about. History loves curiosity, because that is how you can make arguments, and research and find things out that people haven’t found before you.
What projects are you working on right now?
I work as an Undergraduate Teaching Fellow with Dr. Jones doing history methods, so History 3000 level class. That’s really fun. I finished my capstone last semester and I’m working on it still because I want to fix it and make it better, because some people want to read it from the Benion Foundation so I need to make it better and I want to make it better just because I’m me. So I’m working on that right now and I wrote about women’s movements in Cache Valley and how they impact people still here today. That was my argument. I used the papers of Allison Thornton Kemesh and Ione Spencer Bennion. They were both in our special collections and archives and I wrote about two influential women at Utah State and what they have done. They establish planned parenthood in the valley, they also established the women and gender center in the TSC, and the wife of the president of the United States, Betty Ford was able to come to the ribbon cutting ceremony. That was really cool, and President Ford was here as well because his son actually went to school here.
Right now I’m the College of Humanities and Social Sciences Senator. It’s an elected position and you run for it and you’re over the 3,000-4,000 students who are in the college of Humanities and Social Sciences. So, I’m in charge of CHASS week, anything about fee boards, increasing student fees, I vote on everything that way. I’m a part of all academic senate procedures, like the mental health bill that you’ve seen at our university, I have office hours and I’m the liaison between the students and the dean and I meet with different faculty members when needed. I also have an info booth and the student’s “My voice” which submits emails; I respond to a lot of those. I do all things with that, and “Light on the Hill” as well as “Breakfast with the Dean” and both things that I plan. I’m in charge of my CHASS council.
Last year, I was a CHASS ambassador and a peer-advisor for the college, so I would to scheduling and meet with freshmen about how things are going.
What is your favorite part of studying at Utah State University so far? Your least favorite part?
I think that we have some amazing faculty members who genuinely care. I have always felt welcome and that they are approachable. I think that they genuinely believe in their students. It kind of gets me emotional, but I just think that they really really care about seeing their students succeed and they tell them about jobs or help them financially. I was able to get the Preston Nibley Scholarship last year, and that really helped my financially. I think that our department actually cares about it’s students, and they prepare us well enough. A lot are not going to go to grad-school for history, but they prepare us to be analyzers. We get information and we analyze it and we can write better than so many people because it’s what we do and a lot of people need people who can write. I think we are sought after in that way and we can take any data and analyze it and figure out what it means. I think they prepare us, not only to be a historian, but also for life; life skills that can send you in a lot of different directions.
What is your number one goal as a student at USU?My number one goal as a student at USU was simply to learn. I didn’t know a lot about anything before coming here. I think I’ve grown as an individual because of the knowledge I have gained. One thing that I am really proud of is Latin, because I had to work at it so hard. I was my first foreign language and it wasn’t easy for me but I still did it and I was able to get that minor. I think that was one of my number one goals. I think it’s just that sense of continuous learning and being an investigator and finding things and stating why they matter, making arguments that are valid, and just life skills.
What skills do you think are the most valuable and that have learned over the course of your time here?
Writing. I remember going into Latin and not knowing sentence structure. My education wasn’t great before coming here, so I didn’t understand how nouns and verbs and everything worked. I had to learn that, but then I learned how to write how to read more quickly and how to be a better communicator because I understand the English language better. I think that has really helped me. That is a skill that is for sure, just my writing, I mean, if you had read something that I wrote my freshman year, it would have been awful. So, my writing has gotten so much better, as well as communicating. I think it’s really important to communicate with one another, and you can do that through writing and in many ways, but also argumentation. We [as historians] see something and think, “Oh, Who, What, Where, When, Why” and can make an argument for it. You could take that into business meetings, or whatever you are doing sway people, talk to people and make them understand what you are saying, make it clearer. I think these are basic skills that people do not have outside of our department because they don’t realize the significance of those skills.
Is there a certain historical figure who inspires you the most?
There are so many historical figures who mean a lot, but one of them is Annie Oakley. I loved Annie Oakley growing up and I just thought that it was cool that when she was fifteen years old and her mother was a widow and she had to feed her family, she went out and shot all these animals and sold them to restaurants and clears the mortgage on her family’s house. She was really able to keep her family afloat and then you see her go from the west and then she was preforming in England for the queen and she was just doing everything. Also, she was kind of an early feminist in a sense, just because she would write letters to the president saying, “We need women in the military, because I know I can teach them how to shoot”, and things like that. So I think she is really cool, and show cases that it doesn’t matter where you come from, you can achieve greatness. I think that is something you have to work on just because you come from the country or an area where things don’t matter, you can be whatever you want to be as long as you work hard at it.
I was also thinking about Catullus, because he said it like it was and he was okay with his emotions. I really look up to that, and being comfortable with comfortable with who you are and making fun of other people. I think that if you can’t laugh at your situations in life….. you need to laugh once in a while.
Is there an article, movie, blog or book that inspired you that you would recommend?
Yeah, Black Rain by MisujiIbuse, it’s a historical fiction. It’s the first time I realized that I might not have been told the who truth about history, and it’s about the bombing during World War II, when the United States bombed the Japanese. It talks about the radiation and kind of puts into perspective how dehumanizing that was and how it really impacted those people and how they dealt with it for years and years and years. It was one of those things that taught me that it didn’t know everything, and that there were a lot of things that I had either been miss-informed about or not told the complete truth about. It opened my eyes to the possibilities and to the idea that I shouldn’t take everything at face value.
You see all this stuff about fake news, but historians look for citations and things to back up the proof. We don’t accept things at face value. That was one of those books that reminded me, “You need to look at everything you can, and you can’t generalize something so significant.”
What are you passionate about, other than history?
Education. I’m really passionate about education, so that’s what I am doing after I graduate. I got accepted into Teach for America and I was placed in South Carolina. The program essentially puts people and educators in areas education is lacking. You try to make it better and try to encourage people reach their academic potential and be a better educator for them. I’m very passionate about education because I think that there is a lot of lack in education and I don’t think that where a child lives should dictate the level of education the receive. I think education needs people to work on it, so I’m going to work on it. I love politics. I’m one of the very few democrats from the area that I grew up in. I love coffee. I enjoy reading and fishing. I love to camp. Yellowstone is one of my favorite places. I’m fascinated with Bison. I read all about them all the time. Overall, I’m just really passionate about knowledge and learning and education. I think that more people should have access to it and it shouldn’t be determined by where people live.
If interested individuals want to follow you on social media or find you on the web, what is a good website or twitter handle for you?
Jacie Rex on Facebook.
@jacierex on twitter
jacie_rex on Instagram.