Sasha Nikanova
Senior Staff Writer
The Wayfinding Project, coauthored by Professor Karen Lunsford of UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), is exactly what its name suggests: a research initiative about students finding their way. For this project, Professor Lunsford and her team examined the writing journeys of UC alumni 3-10 years post-graduation. They surveyed alumni from UC Davis, UC Irvine, and UCSB about the role that writing plays in their professional and personal lives.
Professor Lunsford spoke with The Bottom Line about her project: “At first we were going to focus on millennials [alumni], but that group was hard to define, so we narrowed it down to alumni who graduated within three to ten years ago.” The findings of this study could be described as nothing less than counterintuitive and, at times, shocking. As Professor Lunsford commented, “We were surprised to find that a lot of alumni write not only professional [stories] but also creative ones. Nostalgia is a prominent theme in their works.” Even those alumni who did not have writing, either professional or creative, as part of their career, still chose to regularly write stories inspired by their lives or the lives of the people who are close to them.
When asked about what inspired her to initiate this project, Professor Lunsford replied that “This age range is not paid enough attention, so it was important to interview an underrepresented group of people.” According to the official website, “the Wayfinding Project is designed to attend to alumni’s experiences after they have left our campuses and are making transitions from collegiate to career and personal lives beyond their time as undergraduates.”
Many alumni felt like their writing was connected to their studies at university, and it acted as a complement to their professional field but not the focus of it. “Many alumni’s writing started as a project that they had to do in a writing class that they took in the UC system,” Professor Lunsford noted. She briefly described the story of an alum who used the craft of the written word to express her identity and “wrote about her uncle who witnessed 9/11 firsthand as a way to deal with it.” One of her favorite stories centered on an alum who “accidentally” became an author: “He posted an excerpt of a political commentary that he wrote on Facebook, and the tweet was reposted on other social media until it went viral. Then, he woke up the next day to find out he was an author.” For this particular alum, this little political blurb was “the most meaningful piece of writing he had ever done.”
Besides writing being a way to express one’s creativity, the project found that many alumni use writing as an applied skill in their jobs. Professor Lunsford stated that “some alumni use writing to engage in personal branding or marketing.” She recounted a story about one alum who “used writing to promote her makeup brand … [it] grew quickly and later became an important part of her career.”
During their research, there were a lot of cases where alumni accidentally found out that writing was useful in their professional careers.
When asked if she believed that writing should hold more merit in our society, she said, “Definitely. It is a skill that applies to a variety of different fields.” In a world that prioritizes STEM over the humanities, it is more important than ever — especially with the rise of artificial intelligence replacing creative arts — to recognize the enduring value of writing.