Student Profile: Trevor Stauffer

Trevor Stauffer is in his last semester at Millersville University and has recently completed an internship at Merit Marketing. If you are a student looking for internships, visit this page to find more information. 

I put off my internship for a while. I always had excuses. I worried that I wouldn’t have enough time, that the pay wouldn’t be as good as my part-time job, and that my grades would suffer. Part of me even thought that I wouldn’t benefit from an internship. After all, school was going well, and the business world couldn’t be that different.

I was wrong. I’m a little over halfway through my copy-writing internship with Merit Marketing, and the experience is transforming my ability to write and edit in ways that formal classes never did (at least for me). In no way do I mean that traditional courses are less valuable; they are two totally different ways of learning.

F76A8222 (3)The internship atmosphere is different. In a college course, you are among peers. If you’re one of the more studious kids in the room, you may know a bit more about some topics, or pick up on lecture material faster. But no matter how much you stand out in the classroom, in an internship you know much less, and have much less experience, than anyone around you. In my opinion, this is a fantastic opportunity. You can ask for advice, learn from criticism, and foster connections with professionals. Be a humble sponge, soaking up the insights, methods, habits, and years of real-world wisdom around you.

An internship is also much more demanding than most college courses. There is both a much heavier workload and greater expectations on the quality of work. In an essay about Shakespeare, for example, you can probably get away with some awkwardly constructed, uninteresting sentences. And you’d probably be given at least a few weeks to write it. My copy-writing internship has been a great way to learn to write cleaner, leaner, more direct prose on a tight deadline. Professors are generally nice people, and don’t want to tear your heartfelt essay to shreds. But the real world is cruel. It doesn’t care how much introspective finesse you put into crafting that paragraph. Shorten it! Add more SEO keywords! Get to the point! While my mentors at Merit could not have been more polite or helpful, I did end up revising a lot. And that’s good: better to learn in an internship under friendly guidance than be called into a manager’s office at a real job.

F76A6164 (2)As different as my internship has been from previous classes, I know that without those classes, I would have been worse off. In particular, I think my journalism courses were especially good preparation. Because journalism stresses facts, readability, and topics that appeal to the public, I was able to use a lot of the skills I learned in journalism courses while writing blog posts for Merit.

My English degree has had less direct application, but it’s still been important. Pursuing an English degree has led me to care about language and literature. I’ve read many challenging works, become interested in different genres, and been absorbed in the power of history’s greatest authors. So while I’m far from a great writer, I’m a far better writer than I would have been without pursuing an English degree.

Another aspect of my internship I’ve really enjoyed has been writing blog posts from home. It’s been a lot more work than I expected, but that’s not a bad thing. Each week, I’ve been researching and writing one blog post for Merit’s website from the comfort of my own room. I’ve been able to cover a wide range of topics I previously knew nothing about, so it’s been a great way to expand my general knowledge of the business world. This from-home work has added extra credits to my internship and flexibility to my schedule: it could not have worked out better.

If you’re an English major on the fence, trying to decide if an internship is worth the extra work, I’d say go for it. You can earn credits, get paid, and, if your experience is anything like mine, you’ll meet great people and improve your writing dramatically.

—Trevor Stauffer

2018-2019 English Award Winners

Congratulations to the 2018-2019 English Award Winners!  Below are the scholarship recipients and the award qualifications. On May 1st there will be a banquet for the winners. Visit this website to see English major only scholarships and this website to see past award winners. 


Allison Rickert Memorial Award: Catherine Shehan

  • Awarded to a student from any class year with a minimum GPA of 3.0 or greater who contributes to the George Street Press or the Creative Writer’s Guild.

Dorothy J. Patterson English Award: Bryce Rinehart

  • Awarded to a rising junior majoring in the English teacher preparation program and working toward a Bachelors of Science in English Education with a minimum GPA of 3.0 in both the major and overall. The scholarship is renewable for two additional semester.

William S. Trout Memorial Award for English Education: Mariah Miller

  • Awarded to a senior English education major who has a cumulative GPA greater than or equal to 2.5, and 3.5 GPA in English courses. Candidates are required to document a commitment to creative writing through publication of original work.

Nadine Thomas Journalism Award: Vanessa Schneider

  • Awarded to a senior English education major who has a cumulative GPA greater than or equal to 2.5, and 3.5 GPA in English courses. Candidates are required to document a commitment to creative writing through publication of original work.

Eileen Carew Promising Writers Award: Shaakirah Ahmad-Tate

  • This scholarship is awarded to an English major with a declared Writing Studies Option who has achieved excellence or shows promise in writing. The student must have a minimum of a 3.0 GPA.

Dilworth-McCullough English Award: Mary Beth Nolt

  • Awarded to a student who has achieved excellence in English literature.

Class of 1910 Award: Amanda Mooney

  • Awarded annually for excellence in English to a student at the end of his or her senior year.

Frank R. Heavner Memorial Award: Maria Glotfelter

  • Awarded to the English major with the highest average in at least nine hours of linguistics courses.

Alice R. Fox Memorial Award in English: Emily Perez

  • Awarded to a student who, in the judgment of the English Department, has achieved excellence in English.

Class of 1917 Award: Matthew Moyer

  • Awarded at the end of a student’s junior year to a person who, in the judgment of the English Department, excels in the general field of English.

Class of 1922 Award: Hadassah Stoltzfus

  • Awarded to a senior who has demonstrated outstanding proficiency in the use of English.

National Day of Action

Friday, April 20th is The National Day of Action Against Gun Violence in Schools. Inspired by the brave students in Parkland, Florida, and across the nation, Millersville University students, parents, educators, school staff, administrators and community allies will join together to take up the students’ call of “No more” during the National School Walkout.

The last poster-making session will be on Tuesday, April 17th at 6pm in 310 Breidenstine. We will discuss the aims of Friday’s event, show examples of posters from recent anti-gun-violence rallies, and experts (art students) will be on-hand to help make posters. There will be plenty of supplies on hand courtesy of MU administration.

The group asks participants to research past shooting victims in advance, print out photos (with names, and which shooting) to bring to the poster-making session. These photos will go toward making a giant, participatory group collage, which will stand behind the stage on Friday, imprinted with the words: Enough is Enough! The New York Times published an article “After Sandy Hook, More Than 400 People Have Been Shot in Over 200 School Shootings” by Jugal K. Patel; the group recommends using this resource to begin researching.

On Friday, April 20th, the main event will be held in front of the Library (if rain, in the SMC) from 10am-1pm. The movement is powered and led by students around the country to protest congressional, state, and local failures to take action to prevent gun violence.

America is the only country in the world where so many people are killed by guns, and yet our leaders do nothing about it. In many states it’s more difficult to register to vote that it is to buy a rifle. Apparently to some politicians, a vote is scarier than a gun. We’re changing that. Our Mission

As of this publication, the MU event is sponsored by:

  • African American Studies
  • The Alliance for Social Change
  • American Association of University Women at Millersville University
  • Art Club
  • Center for Civic and Community Engagement
  • Center for Disaster Research and Education
  • Center for Public Scholarship and Social Change
  • The English Department
  • Frederick Douglass Black Culture Celebration
  • The Gender Issues and Social Justice Committee of APSCUF
  • The Honors College Student Association
  • The MU Philosophical Society
  • NAACP College Chapter at Millersville University
  • Office of Diversity and Social Justice
  • Philosophy Department
  • President’s Commission on Gender and Sexual Diversity
  • School of Social Work
  • Women’s and Gender Studies
  • The George Street Press

For more information on the national event, visit this website.

PEN World Voices Festival Trip

On April 19th, Dr. Jakubiak’s New Dimensions to World Literature class will go on a trip to New York City to see a panel of writers at PEN World Voices Festival. The panel, called Cry, The Beloved Country, consists of authors from around the world: Ryszard Krynicki from Poland, Serhiy Zhadan from Ukraine, Marcos Aguinis from Argentina, Ngugi wa Thiong’o from Kenya, Hwang Sok Yong from Korea, and Negar Djavadi from Iran/France. The panel’s web-page writes, ” No matter their origin, writers across the globe encapsulate the spirit of resistance by giving a voice to the oppressed. In an evening of solidarity and community, writers from seven countries share their stories of pain, rage, and suffering while living under oppressive regimes. Hear the voices of the unheard; join us in celebrating these moments of resistance.”

Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o Photo credit

The class has already studied some of the work of the renowned Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a novelist and theorist of post-colonial literature. Ngugi will discuss the role of literature in autocratic regimes with his fellow panel members. This experience will give the students, all BSE majors, an opportunity to broaden their knowledge of world literatures and interact with the authors of books they have studied and may choose to teach in the future.

In addition to attending PEN World Voices festival, the group will take a guided tour of the new Tenement Museum of Immigration on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which will give the students a hands-on lesson on the history of American Immigration. The tenements housed over 15,000 working class immigrants from over 20 nations while the tenements served as residences, according to the Tenement Museum’s website. The museum wishes to preserve the history of immigration and enhance appreciation for the role immigration has played and continues to play in shaping America’s evolving national identity.

Title Image Credit