About

Emily Calder (B.A. 2012)

I graduated with a BA in Latin Language and Literature and a minor in English Literature in 2012. I had always intended to teach Latin at a high school level, but following an exceedingly difficult semester of student teaching, I decided that at least for now, that path is not for me. I struggled to find a job that would be emotionally rewarding and ensure financial stability, but, two short months after graduation, I began training to be a 911 dispatcher in my hometown, Wilmington, North Carolina. It is not necessarily intellectually challenging work, but it constantly forces growth in my interpersonal skills and it allows me to feel like I am doing some good in the world while enabling me to pay back my student debt. I still use what I learned in college to enrich my own life by reading my most beloved Roman poets in Latin when I have time and in so doing I keep my skills relatively sharp for when I can find what I seek: a means of enriching the lives of others with the Classics as I had always planned. I do not yet know what form this will take, but I still very much consider myself a Classicist, even though my career has thus far taken a different path.