Inspired by teachers who encouraged her love of literature and philosophy, second-year student and Weston Family Scholarship recipient Laura Worth is working toward a degree in English with a double minor in applied ethics and sociology, followed by a bachelor of education, so she can, in turn, teach high school and help inspire the next generation.
What are you looking forward to delving into in your second year?
I’m really excited to get into areas I’m more specifically interested in, and the world of humanities. My main interests are English and ethics. And I’m taking a children’s literature course, which I’m really, really excited for, because that’s one of my favourite sets of literature, and it’s something we don’t do in FYP.
How has your experience been making friends at King’s?
Really good. I’m a day student, and I live in Timberlea, so I had a very different first year experience for making friends, because you don’t have a roommate or a bunch of people on your floor. But I’ve met a lot of other day students and other people, and I was able to make a lot of friends through people I already knew. I really liked orientation week—we were all new and trying to figure things out. It really launched you into the social life at university, and it was a fun collection of events.
Do you have any favourite spots on campus?
I definitely hang out here a lot. The couches in the Wardy are probably one of my favourite spots because they’re comfortable and fun.
The library is a gorgeous building, but I cannot work in silence. I’ll go there every once in a while, but I definitely prefer a noisier environment where people are coming and going. Of course, you run the risk of people walking in and suddenly you’re chatting, it’s an hour later, and that essay did not get written!
What has the Weston Family Scholarship meant to you?
It’s been a huge relief, for sure. I’m coming in with student loans, and I’m working throughout the school year and full-time in the summers. It gives me more time to focus on things academically. It’s also made me feel a little bit more confident in my abilities because I feel like going from high school to university, finding out the work is a lot harder than you expected, you can have a lot of moments of, like, am I really meant to be doing this? And just knowing that someone out there thought I should have that just made me feel like, okay, maybe I am in the right place.
What have been some readings that will stay with you?
Montaigne was my favourite author of first semester. He’s who I wrote my position paper on. It was the first time that I read a book where I was just kind of like, I feel like I understand you and I like what you’re saying.
What are your biggest inspirations that help shape your trajectory and where you’re going with what you want to study?
Oh, that’s a good question. Probably a couple of my high school teachers—my English teacher and my philosophy teacher—because my goal is to do my B.Ed. and become an English and philosophy high school teacher after I finish my schooling. They were really, really nice people, and they really got me interested in the fields, and made me feel like they were worth pursuing. I was always interested in English and philosophy, but I always kind of had that underlying voice of, like, well, what are you going to do with a degree like that? But they really showed me that you can learn those things and then teach them to other people and inspire them. They really showed me how important those things were.
Are you going to teach at the high school you went to?
That would be like my ultimate dream. I think that would be really fun. But I also do want to live in the city, so maybe something like Citadel would be nice too.
What is something you really like about your field?
Philosophy and English—and especially teaching them to younger generations—have the ability to make the world a better place, little by little. They show people that they need to look at their actions, and they give people a starting point for how to do that. It’s easy to just get bogged down thinking the world’s a bad place, there are a lot of bad things. But people forget that they can do something about that, day by day in their lives.
Established by the W. Garfield Weston Foundation, the Weston Family Scholarship is a renewable entrance scholarship with a total value of $20,000 ($5,000 per year). It is available to a first-year Canadian citizen entering the Foundation Year Program, proceeding to any area of study at the University of King’s College, and who has a high school average of at least 85 per cent. Learn more about scholarships at King’s.
