From a Contest to a Doctorate
Kays, Trent

TRENT: My literacy story sort of begins with a writing project during my senior year in high school. I was asked to write an essay for a contest and I did; it was about the prejudices in society. I won the contest; it was kind of a surprise to me. But that was the first time I felt I was really a writer. At the same time though I was heavily involved in theater and originally I wanted to go to college for theater and the go out in the world and I guess be a famous actor or something like that. The first theater I ever did was Shakespeare and sort of just fell in love with "The Bard" as it were. But I realized that it's very difficult to live when you're a struggling actor or to even become successful. So I sort of changed my direction and decided to focus on history and in history you do a lot of writing and I was always very good at writing. But I had this one class with this one professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, his name is Michael Kline, and it was a persuasive writing class. It totally changed what I wanted to do. After that I decided to pursue writing and history at the same time. After I graduated with my bachelor's degree, one in professional and technical writing and the other in history, I decided that rhetoric and discourse studies, those types of things would be better for me and I thought I would have more fun. So I decided to pursue my master's in professional and technical writing. I think that writing just permeates everything, so rhetoric also permeates everything and you cannot separate the two. I became interested in sort of writing on Facebook, I guess you could say, or how one constructs identity through discourse on Facebook. After working on my thesis and working toward my master's degree, I really decided I wanted to go to doctoral school. I got together all the writing that I had done throughout my master's degree and throughout my coursework, and I selected what I thought were the best pieces and I used those as my writing samples and I submitted applications to several schools and the one thing that I learned about the application process is that it's very expensive. So I applied to eight schools and application fees are a lot, but it was worth it. I got accepted to two schools, Iowa State University and University of Minnesota. I decided to go to the University of Minnesota and I'll be starting there in fall 2010. As I look back I sort of think it all started, this whole journey started with that one thing I wrote, that one essay I wrote my senior year in high school for a contest. I always think back about that and think what would have happened if I hadn't written that essay, what if something changed, would I be in a different place? I don't know the answer to that but I can say that writing has led me to my current existence in this world as it is. My pursuit for a doctoral degree and to eventually become a college writing teacher. I just think that's great. I think that writing really can connect everything and just looking at it in my own life I have seen how it has held - every decision I've made has been held together in one way or another by my initial contest entry in high school. And that's my literacy story.