Dianisbeth Acquie '16

One of the most rewarding decisions I made during my time as a Harvard undergraduate was choosing to concentrate in English. I had entered Harvard knowing that I was generally interested in the humanities but unsure about how to narrow my interests. Taking a Shakespeare class with Professor Garber and one on American Modernism with Professor Alworth in my sophomore fall made me realize that I wanted to spend the majority of my time at Harvard in the Department of English. These classes provided a glimpse at the wide-ranging experiences that I could—and would—have as an English concentrator. For three years, I had the opportunity to contemplate the racial dynamics of Americanah, study critiques of colonialism in Wole Soyinka’s work, and analyze the gendered landscape against which Edith Wharton wrote The House of Mirth. I wrote short stories in Professor Kincaid’s fiction writing seminar and performed spoken word for Professor Kim’s World Theater class. I was able to explore Latinidad in literature and think about how my identities coalesced with and diverged from those of the authors that I studied. My senior thesis was a novella that considered questions of race, gender, colonialism, and migration. It allowed me to weave the many threads of my time as an English concentrator together.

As a sophomore, I understood how much I would enjoy spending years devouring prose and poetry in the Department of English. By the time I graduated, I understood more about how enriching my experience had been as an English concentrator. Yet I did not realize until law school how important the skills that I learned during my time as an undergraduate would become as my career progressed. I have carried many of the tools and techniques that I learned in the Barker Center over to Harvard Law School, where I am a third-year student. As a student in the Department of English, I learned how to engage analytically with the written word. Writing critical and creative papers alike taught me how to appreciate diction and syntax. I learned how to read works from over a thousand years ago and connect them to themes that still influence contemporary literature. Many of these skills are transferrable. There are close parallels between interpreting statutes and interpreting dense prose. Parsing old cases is not dissimilar from studying early American literature. Though legal writing is a far cry from the elegant language that marked my studies of English, I exercise many of the same skills that I learned as an English concentrator in my legal studies. Choosing precise and evocative language has never been more crucial. Creativity is still central to all the writing I do. I am grateful to the many excellent professors that I had in the Department of English for cultivating my love of language – a love that will persist long after I leave Harvard’s campus and enter the legal field.