Harry #2

"If you could go back and tell your college sophomore self one piece of advice, what would it be?" I started out my second meeting with Dr. Langan with this question. She first laughed at the creativity of the question and began to talk about how sophomore year was her most pivotal year at Wheaton College.

Dr. Langan came into Wheaton College intending to study pre-law so that she could be a lawyer. Long story short, she decided to switch majors and pursue a different career path after struggling to enjoy the highly theory-based law classes offered at Wheaton. Dr. Langan ended up choosing to switch to a Communications major, by the start of her sophomore year, because she was confident in her communication skills. After switching, the Communications advisor that was assigned to Dr. Langan, coincidentally, was Dr. Griffin. He is special to Dr. Langan because before starting college, one of her mom's good friends told her to introduce herself to Dr. Griffin because he was her mom's good friend's old high school boyfriend. Dr. Langan's first advisory meeting with Dr. Griffin happened to be the first time she met him but they immediately clicked once she let Dr. Griffin know about her connection with his old high school girlfriend. After some time, Dr. Griffin cultivated a mentor relationship with Dr. Langan.

"My advice to my sophomore year self would be, 'Don't spend so much time on your studies, you will not regret not spending that extra hour studying.'" This is what Dr. Langan realized to be true as she continued her studies at Wheaton. She understood that the work Wheaton assigns to its students does come easy to most of its students and so it is most ideal to not get so caught up with the school work.

After describing her sophomore year, Dr. Langan mentioned there was also something she would tell her senior year self. Dr. Langan's senior year was full of media-related activities inside the communications department - she and her friend ran a weekly Tuesday night program on WETN while taking many different technical communication classes. This set Dr. Langan up with two exceptional internship opportunities: one with WGN radio and the other to work for Johnny Morris of CBS TV. Though these internships were too good to give up, Dr. Langan understood that working in a heavily-men dominated work environment would prove to be difficult. Thus, she decided to rescind both internships and talk with Dr. Griffin about other career decisions after senior year. Dr. Griffin ended up advising Dr. Langan to consider graduate school, which ultimately led Dr. Langan on the path to become a college professor. Though Dr. Langan has no regrets on pursing to teach higher education, the second piece of advice she was give to her former self is to take on one of these internships and see how it pans out.  

Before ending the meeting, Dr. Langan advised me to intentionally search out and find that one class that I find myself so passionate about. For her, it was the class Communication Theory. She explained that finding this one class is key because it will shape my career path. It will illuminate in me the passions that I would want to pursue in my professional career.