Wayne Chang, Essay Contest Winner in the First-Year Category for English 115, 2023-2024
Wayne Chang is studying part-time toward a degree in Creative Writing and took ENGL 115 as part of the requirement for completing that program. However, he also thinks that English and literary studies are valuable strings to his critical and creative bow, beyond providing credits for a post-secondary qualification. English classes are obviously a good fit with creative writing, since in order to write well it helps to be well-read. At the same time studying and writing about literature enables you to broaden your perspective and cultivate empathy, while it also inculcates critical-thinking skills that help in understanding and analyzing the broader world. One way in which Wayne’s work in ENGL 115 helped in this intellectual process was by providing space for him to think critically about the effects of emergent generative-AI on art, artists, and creativity in general. In his award-winning essay for that course, Wayne delved into this pressing subject more deeply, clarifying his own thinking about AI’s profound implications for creative work (Wayne works full-time as an illustrator, so the benefits and risks of AI have personal and professional as well as societal scope for him). Beyond academia, Wayne is an avid fan of sci-fi and horror, genres he finds both entertaining and thought-provoking (he recommends checking out The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, the short-story collection Exhalation by Ted Chiang, and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049). Finally, Wayne’s advice for future English students is to stay curious: “You never know where you might find a source of great inspiration. Even if a topic seems initially uninteresting, there’s almost always a way to find a personal connection to the topic. If you’re able to do so for every class, they will become infinitely more fascinating and easier to do well in.”