Assistant Professor of English & Director of Community Engagement, Dr. Lara Smith-Sitton, started her teaching career at Kennesaw State in the summer of 2015 by teaching graduate and undergraduate internship, writing and rhetoric courses.
“We’re all just very committed to teaching and committed to the students we have in our classes,” Smith-Sitton said. “We’re given a lot of support for teaching so I think that’s what drew me to Kennesaw.”
Smith-Sitton taught at Georgia State University and Emory University before coming to KSU, which she said has been a great experience thus far.
In addition to teaching and mentoring, Smith-Sitton helps students gain hands-on experience with projects transferable to the working world. Green Card Immigrant Voices: Immigration Stories from an Atlanta High School, a collection of immigration narratives published in April 2018, is one of many community-engaged projects implemented in her writing and internship courses. The project utilized student editors and writers in the English program to curate, edit and publish the stories of young immigrants in Atlanta.
Going forward, Smith-Sitton and her research partners on the project, Dr. Darlene Xiomara Rodriguez and Dr. Paul N. McDaniel, will be involved with numerous events promoting the book and discussing how these projects are valuable teaching tools.
Smith-Sitton also performs big data projects where she collects information from employers on what they seek from a writing perspective. In doing so, her mentorship and guidance with internships helps students more accurately land positions with up-to-date qualifications.
“When I was going to college, what I knew was that I loved to read and that I loved to write and I loved to editing people’s writing,” Smith-Sitton said. “My initial thought was that I was going to be a journalism major — it made a lot of sense.”
But when Dr. Smith-Sitton started her college experience at Oglethorpe University, she discovered that there was no journalism major. This minor setback placed her in the English department where she realized that pursuing a degree in English was exactly what she needed.
“I realized that all the things I wanted to do as a journalist, I could also do through an English degree program,” Smith-Sitton said.
After transferring from Oglethorpe to Georgia State, the workforce was waiting for her. Though work gave Smith-Sitton the ability to write and do what she wanted, she discovered that it is hard to find good writers.
“It was difficult to find students — college graduates — that were able to deliver the writing skills that we needed,” Smith-Sitton said. “The organizations I worked for largely hired from business schools than humanities programs.”
This led to introspection on how she and her colleagues became skilled writers. Internships, service learning projects and community engagement was the answer to helping college students become skilled and developed writers. With this realization, she went back to school and used her workforce experience to “help students, those people who particularly love writing, research and reading, how that shapes into careers.”
One would think that Smith-Sitton doesn’t have time for much more in her impressive schedule, but she says she finds time to sneak in baseball games.
“I’m a huge baseball fan — my son is a baseball player — so if I’m not here, I’m probably reading a book somewhere or at a minor league Atlanta baseball game,” Smith-Sitton said.
