Meet Tess McRae

I made the choice to switch to INDS during my junior year after feeling increasingly constricted in my pre-defined major. I was studying English on the Communication & Technology track, analyzing the rhetorical objectives of various kinds of "texts" (i.e. genres of communication). In the gateway courses for the major, my peers, instructors, and I explored a broad array of texts including board games, poems, and music... but as we progressed into upper-level classes, we focused predominantly on the texts of scholarly books and papers. The rhetorical study of multimedia texts (and, notably, art) was something that deeply fascinated me, and I was distressed to be moving away from it when it was the thing that had drawn me to the track in the first place. In addition, I felt like my academics were insufficiently aligned with my growing sense of purpose in community engagement work, which I was exploring through extracurricular activities. When I shared with each of them that my frustration was reaching a breaking point, David Hoffman, Romy Hübler, and Lia Purpura—dear supervisors and professors of mine who went on to become my degree mentors—recommended that I consider the INDS program, so I signed up for INDS 330: Ways of Knowing. My instructors and peers seemed to be asking the right questions: challenging our conceptions of studenthood and academia as a whole; encouraging us to leap off of paved paths and "claim our education." I learned quickly and profoundly that the unique exploration I wanted to take was not only possible but within reach. Once I discovered that the winged sandals of agency had been on my feet all along, there was no going back. I took flight as an INDS major... and I have only continued to soar.