Student Profiles: Alek Duerksen
When Charlottesville resident Alek Duerksen graduates in Spring 2010, he will
be able both to design a safer support system for a coal mine and write
a poem about it. Double majoring in Mining & Minerals Engineering
and Creative Writing might strike some folks as odd, but for Alek the decision
brings the best of both worlds together and plays on his major strengths.
After a brief stint in Architecture, Alek moved to Engineering and picked up an English minor, but after breezing through the requirements for the latter, he realized that a major was within his grasp. He declared, he says, “To gain exposure to literature and improve my creative and professional writing skills. In the 'real world', I would love to have my poetry and nonfiction published in journals or maybe (this is stretching it) a small collection or memoir.”
Alek’s proudest moment after adding English to his academic program came last semester when a story he had written in ENGL 3704: Creative Writing Fiction won third place in a campus-wide writing competition. Not surprisingly, he indicates that his favorite period of literature is Romanticism. “I love gothic novels and the Romantic poets, especially,” he says. “I first became interested after I read Frankenstein. It was nothing I had expected and I started to investigate the period a little more. It all seems so epic and beautiful to me; I love reading it.”
Yet, this does not mean that Alek’s interest in literature is limited to the Romantic period. Coleridge’s “Vision in a Dream” ranks with Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Orwell’s 1984 as among Alek’s favorite works.
Alek’s hobbies are equally diverse. Naturally, being an engineering major, he likes to build using anything from Legos to woods to rocks. But he also enjoys watching movies (“serious ones,” he emphasizes), cooking, and playing sports.
In five years, Alek hopes to find himself working for a mining corporation in a foreign country and writing in his free time. But he won’t rule out pursuit of a master’s degree – or even, later on, a Ph.D. Given his considerable writing talent, one would hope that if he does attend grad school, it will be in English!