The Lawrentian

Issue date: 3/5/10 Section: Features

Media Credit: Minh Nguyen Gilbert was the recipient of the 2008-09 Freshman Studies Teaching Award.

Young: Tell me about how you came to Lawrence.
Gilbert: I grew up in the Minneapolis area. When I was five we moved out to the suburbs. I grew up in Minnetonka. I went to Carleton College, and went there as a scientist. I took all these science courses, and got to the end of sophomore year and decided I wanted to be an English major, which astonished my parents, but it was a premonition about how I was interested in lots of different things and didn't want to narrow my focus too early. So I majored in English, and did a lot of theater [at Carleton].
After Carleton - I met the woman I later married there - [my future wife and I] were feeling kind of self absorbed, so we went to West Virginia near Charlottesville and did volunteer work for seven years in a residential community with developmentally disabled adults. It was a cluster of group homes on a 400-acre farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was really interesting, intense work. We were house parents, essentially. We got room and board, and at that time, 50 bucks a month. Fortunately, it was like the Peace Corps in that you accrued severance pay, and so we had pretty good savings when we finally left in 1987. Our older daughter had been born there [in West Virginia], but we needed to get back up here to where all of our families were. For a while we lived in southern Minnesota across the river from La Crosse, and we rented a little farmhouse. I worked down the dirt road at a sprout farm. These old hippies were out in the country growing and selling [all types] of sprouts. Instead of a mason jar, they were growing them in 55-gallon drums with a computerized watering system. I computerized their finances and did other things for them for about a year, but decided it wasn't a long-term solution, so I went to graduate school. At the same time, our daughter really enjoyed going to the La Crosse public library, and she was teaching herself to read, so she would just go through a pile of books and I would stand around keeping an eye on her and watching what was going on at the library. It was looking to me like a really interesting place, and eventually I realized that people actually get paid to work in libraries. So, I went to graduate school in Madison at the School of Library and Information Studies there, and when I was done I started looking around for a small liberal arts college to work in, and Lawrence came up, so we moved in 1990 and have been here ever since.

Continued...

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