Student Profiles: Kathleen Cooperstein
Some English majors come to the field by circuitous but nonetheless interesting
routes, pursuing a variety of potential careers along the way. Take Pre-Law
major Kathleen Cooperstein, for instance.
When she was a child, for example, Kathleen was determined to be a detective. “In order to hone my detecting skills,” she reports, “I kept a notebook full of profiles of everybody I knew or met, down to the cashier at Taco Bell. I wrote down every detail of them, making myself notice things like wedding rings, scars, mismatched socks, or nicotine stains on their fingernails.”
Apparently, Kathleen’s creativity and keen sense of humor come naturally. Like her older sister and younger brother, she was home schooled in an environment that was neither wholly urban nor wholly rural but, to use her term, “rurban.” Her formative years were spent in the moderate-sized city of Kingsport, Tennessee; then her family took a year-long road trip across America before they settled in 2000 in Big Stone Gap, Virginia.
Detective work long abandoned, Kathleen found another potential career in her small hometown: actress. Literary trivia buffs will recognize Big Stone Gap as one of the settings fictionalized in Appalachian writer John Fox, Jr.’s Trail of the Lonesome Pine, a work with which Kathleen is very familiar. For the past two summers, she has played the cousin of the main character in her hometown’s stage version of the novel, which also happens to be Virginia’s official state outdoor drama.
When she entered VT, she pursued yet another career path as a Psychology major before switching to English. After enrolling in Literature for Children her second semester – after she realized she had taken her only required English course the previous semester – she made the decision to declare English and pursue Psychology as a minor. It didn’t hurt that during her freshman year she wrote an essay that earned her a sophomore scholarship, an event that boosted her confidence and assured her that English was indeed the right fit for her. “Until that point I had considered myself to be fairly average in a college of so many,” she admits, “but afterwards I felt that maybe I actually did stand out.”
Although she is an ardent fan of the Harry Potter series, when asked to choose her favorite work of fiction, Kathleen selected another classic work of children’s literature, Peter Pan. “I could read [it] once a day for the rest of my life if I had the time,” she says. “Maybe it's because I think the writing is witty, maybe the characters are bold, maybe the action is dramatic, or maybe I like imagining that I can be young and heartless again. I'm sure by the time I graduate I will have written enough papers on it to discover the real reason.”
While stressful, all of that writing is something in which Kathleen now takes great pleasure. Although she admits that she enjoys reading more (because it’s “pure enjoyment”), she does say that as an English major, her “GREATEST pleasure comes from reading over something of mine after it’s already been written.”
In the future, Kathleen plans to attend law school and maybe do a little publishing on the side.