Lydia Brown

Advising is inseparable from both a deep trust and expansive curiosity about students and their ever-evolving futures. My approach to advising hinges both on students’ ambitions and their fascinations, seeking to pair a student’s spoken interests with their perhaps-unspoken proclivities. I draw on nearly a decade’s worth of teaching and scholarship in the liberal arts to translate, introduce, and-or deepen a student’s interests into something that UVA can offer them: a love of storytelling into a Data Science major; an eye for pop-music reception into courses in American Studies. I hope to expand students’ views of their own abilities and interests by modeling that the liberal arts constitutes multiple ways of conversing with the world, rather than a set of prerequisites from which one is excluded or included. Ultimately, it is this balance between ambition and surprise, student needs and curricula possibilities, that I am eager to curate as a pre-major advisor.