5 Minutes That Will Make You Love our English Department
This week I read/listened to 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Charlie Parker in the New York Times. I love the playful, ambitious promise this column offers: how might a single 5-minute listening experience get me to change how I feel about a musician or music genre? That got me thinking: don’t we, as teachers, make a similar wager? With our choice of poem, linguistic insight, writing assignment, or classroom discussion, how do we hope to shift the way our students feel about language, literature, or themselves as writers? Can we get them to notice something they didn’t notice before?
In the next 5 minutes, which is how long I expect it will take you to read the rest of my blurb, can I get you to deepen your curiosity about our students’ experiences? Below is a ‘playlist’ of quotations from our May 19th graduation program: three graduates shared their perspectives on being a student in our department, and one graduate read our closing poem. Enjoy reading their voices: you’ll hear different rhythms in their experiences as students – a passion for reading, personal growth, a love of community, and a sense of purpose.
View full texts of student speeches here.
Justine O’Byaw
BA English, with a Concentration in Linguistics, Recipient of the Undergraduate Honors Award
“I remember being in elementary school, stuck inside the library during recess. I felt like the only kid in my class with my nose in a book. I wished I could share that experience with other people. Being an English student at SFSU has taught me that the world is bigger then the one inside my head: that my love and appreciation for English is shared. There is a whole class full of people who love to read. English has taken root, allowing us to grow and flourish.”
Sam Hyder
MA English with a Concentration in Composition, Recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award
“[My] Grandpa Rob….spent his life as a musician. He and my grandma even traveled across the country in a van with shag carpet and a cat. Very classic 70s. On one drive home, I was sitting quietly while the radio played a song I loved. Rob asked why I wasn’t singing along, and I said ‘I can’t sing. You’re the musician, you can do it’. Grandpa told me, ‘It doesn’t matter if you can sing, it matters that you do it anyway’. I think about it all the time. Cause the most meaningful things we ever do begin before confidence arrives. To participate is messy but can be oh so joyful.”
Efi Turnip
MA English Literatures, Recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award
“We read a text not only to determine what it means but to participate in the emergence of meaning: to see ourselves seeing, and so to see differently. The study of literature teaches us to remain open to the possibilities in things as well as to our own possibilities. When we read together, we encounter the potential in each other and make our shared potential the basis for community. This program has shown me that reading is not a solitary pursuit, but a way of being together, and I am forever grateful to all of you for being here with me.”
Leah Flores
MA English, with a Concentration in Linguistics, Recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award
To close our graduation program and send off our graduates, Leah chose to read Ada Limón’s “Instructions on Not Giving Up”.
“Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.”
Ada Limón
Congratulations to Justine, Sam, Efi, Leah, and to all of our 2026 graduates.