After testing into the Honors English program as a Freshman, the ability to write and speak well is the primary reason I have excelled in my diverse career. Without it, I would not have gotten Honors in English, achieved Honors in History as a Rotary Scholar in Barcelona, my ALM thesis in Biology at Harvard, DPhil (PhD) at Oxford or become a Barrister (Trial Lawyer). I have also been able to incorporate the Humanities into the art exhibit for my mother's art and my health-promoting interior design in Chicago, started and C0-curated as an American Academy of Neurology PALF Advocate focusing on Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
In addition, my favorite classes as an undergraduate were the required Humanities I and II in which we learned Art, Architecture and Literature from the ancient to the modern age. I consider this course an indispensable cornerstone of any undergraduate degree. Without it, I would not have had the understanding of buildings and history which allowed me to research and write and defend the nomination before the State Historical Society to successfully register the William E. Metzger House on the National Register of Historic Places. Indeed, the 1894 family rental Victorian house in Grand Forks, ND I have been completely restoring since 2019 and is nearing completion, I have discovered is also historically significant as it has elements of the Aesthetic Movement and transitional architecture and I have written three short presentations about it and another one-act play as a historical character which I plan to stage in it soon. It is also the house where my gifted artist and teacher mother grew up and was a classmate of Lute Olson who lived a few blocks away when he led the Grand Forks Central High School team to the 1952 ND State Basketball Championship. The Humanities allow for the synthesis of academic disciplines so that one can inform the other unlike any other area of academics. It is tragic that history has been eliminated from many high school programs and I hope that the Humanities can fill in those gaps through related disciplines. I am thankful that the University of Arizona had the vision to require Humanities of all Liberal Arts undergraduates during my degree.
