The Greater Hartford Campus Writing Center is proud to announce that the Winner of the 2014 Writing Contest is Sierra Rice! Her essay, titled “Nation of the Controlled,” can be found here as well as on our contest webpage. We were able to schedule an interview with Sierra, which appears below.
When you wrote your paper, what attracted you to the topic of control?
I really didn’t come up with the topic of control on my own, it was the foundation of what my paper was supposed to be about, but I did chose to specifically focus on control within the educational institution as a means of suppression and I used Michele Foucault’s Panopticism, and Laura Kipnis’s Loves Labors to kind of back up this idea that I had about the educational system.
Can you tell us a little about your writing strategies? How did you go about writing this paper?
Well, for my writing strategies what I first tried to do was come up with a list of different forms of control that I could possibly talk about, and that list included a wide variety of things, so from that list I ultimately chose to stick with education because I believed that it was the strongest point I could get across because it is something that I’m passionate about; I do like education and I like learning and I thought that it was really interesting to kind of look beyond what we see as the educational system and kind of see it as this form of control.
How important were multiple drafts to your process? Were there any components that changed or were dropped across the writing of the essay?
Multiple drafts were extremely important because I first started out talking about three different forms of control, I think the two that I can remember off the top of my head are education, and I think the other one had to do with hospitals and the way the medical world is kind of set up in the system of control, but as I did a couple of drafts I later dropped the other two ideas I was talking about and focused on one aspect of control which in my case was education. That definitely made my essay stronger because readers were able to understand the idea I wanted to get across by just referencing this one organization that is controlling.
Has the work done with this paper impacted your perception of the world around you?
The work that I’ve done with this project definitely makes me more curious to know about this hidden form of control that we experience daily, but for the most part I think it was just a learning experience and I’m definitely appreciative of it because it made my writing skills much stronger, and it makes me curious to continue research about this social theory of panopticism that was introduced to me by Michel Foucault, one of the writers that I did use as a source in my essay, and I’m definitely curious to hear other peoples ideas about it as well.
Tell us a little about how you’ve grown as a writer over your time here at UConn.
Well I grew as a writer here at UCONN by taking English 1010 with Prof. Gagnon; he is definitely adamant about building strong writers and I’m very appreciative for his influence. I think that I came to UCONN with the idea that I was already a good writer and then Prof. Gagnon talked to us about things like writing techniques and encouraged independent thinking and I saw that I had a lot of improvement to do so I definitely used the information he gave us to develop stronger writing skills that I believe are going to stick with me for a really long time.
What are your plans for the future? Do they involve writing, and if so, how?
Um, my plans for the future…I’m just trying to take it one day at a time, I’m not fixated on one main goal because I have a lot that are equally important. Some of these goals do involve writing, even if its just writing recreationally; writing is always going to be a big part of my life because its something I love to do, it relaxes me, and I’m never going to get rid of it so luckily if I do find myself in a job where I get to do a lot of writing I’ll be happy about that, but if not, you know, I don’t have a problem with it being a weekend thing.
Many thanks to Sierra for her thoughts.
Next November we’ll begin looking for new submissions to our 2015 Essay Contest, so make sure you keep your work this Spring–you could be the next winner!