Eleanor Green, Essay Contest Winner in the First-Year Category for English 125, 2023-2024
Despite continuing to pursue a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish, you won’t find a bigger advocate for English classes than Eleanor Green. Not only does she love them for exposing her to “different perspectives” on “various topics”—they inevitably help her to “develop well-rounded opinions” and express her views more clearly. One of the reasons for choosing Dr. Amelia Horsburgh’s section of English 115, for example, was because of this desire to look more broadly—in this case on the subject of food. “Food,” she writes, “is filled with deep cultural roots that provide us with the opportunity to learn and experience different cultures.”
In her award-winning essay, “Serving Inequality: Exploring Gender-based Disparities in Victoria James’s Wine Girl,” she explains that “While food and food cultures have many positive qualities, there are also important downsides, such as sexism in the service sector, that I believe are important for people to understand.” Sharing first hand experience of sexism, she felt responsible in the paper for continuing the work that Victoria James does. As Eleanor writes in her essay. “Through hard work, education, determination, and political activism, women are steadily creating not only a place to survive in the service industry, but a place to thrive.”
Just as she sees a future where sexism and harassment become less of the normal in the service industry, she appreciates other types of media that consider “the future of our world.” For example, her favourite book series is Eric Walters’s Rule of Three—in which the world must contend with the electrical and information grid going down in catastrophic proportions. Similarly, she loves the recent Netflix movie Don’t Look Up—a great allegorical parable about where we might be headed. Not all doom and gloom, however, she also admits to loving the comedy show Brooklyn Nine Nine.
Next year, Eleanor hopes to head to South America to develop her Spanish fluency and engross herself in cultures beyond Canada. As she says, in her advice to current and future students, “There’s no better learning opportunity then getting to share your ideas, listen to others, and develop new opinions with your peers.” No doubt seeking that opportunity in other countries and other tongues only increases the benefit. We wish her the best moving forward!