news
With the Fall Semester at NCSSM almost at the half-way point, the school’s newest students and employees have finally settled into the rhythms of life in Durham and Morganton. Gone are the days of nervous anticipation, wondering what the new job – or in the students’ case, their new home – would be like. In its place are plenty of new faces and routines. Over the next month we’ll be rolling out the impressions of a handful of those newest members of the NCSSM family in a four-part series of short pieces. First up is Katy Doll, a new instructor at NCSSM-Durham.
Making connections
Katy Doll, a native of New Orleans and a new American Studies instructor at NCSSM-Durham, set up her office just a few weeks before the students returned in August. Doll had long been familiar with NCSSM-Durham – a number of her close friends as an undergrad at UNC-Chapel Hill were graduates who’d spoken highly of their NCSSM experience – so she knew that she would be encountering students who, as a whole, were a bit more advanced academically than many of their peers in other schools. In fact, NCSSM’s highly-regarded academic rigor helped displace any uncertainty she might have otherwise had about leaving a university classroom for a public high school classroom.
Still, she wondered how teenage students at a STEM-focused school would respond to her American Studies course.
“You don’t come to Science and Math because you want to go into our American Studies program, right?” she says.
She’s no longer concerned about that.
“I’ve been very happy with how willing all the students are to engage in my class, even if it’s not what they see as their primary academic focus.”
There’s one other thing that has surprised Doll as well: “The students in this class are mostly 16 years old, so I thought maybe there would be a little bit more hand-holding, but frankly, I think the students here in the American Studies program are already making better and faster connections than many of my previous college students.”
All interviews in this series were conducted prior to Hurricane Helene and its devastating effects on Western North Carolina. Our thoughts continue to be with those who have suffered so greatly in its aftermath.
