Brandi Ferrebee ’10

I'm Brandi, the proud owner of a recent Oberlin College English degree. My hometown is Winchester, Virginia, a fairly rural area a few hours outside Washington, D.C., where I lived up until I left for college. (Ask me what it's like to grow up in the house your great-great-grandfather built with his own hands.) Leaving Winchester didn't seem at all likely until I declared to my parents at 15 that I was going to go to college (I'm the first on either side), and that I wanted that college to be Oberlin. They weren't quite ready for so much change all at once, so I spent a year at a large public university in Virginia before I transferred here.

I embraced the liberal arts mindset by taking a wide variety of classes at Oberlin: a drawing-heavy architecture class, an organismal biology class, a course on the writing of William Faulkner, a grant writing class which allowed me to write and submit a grant for a nonprofit organization, a mythology class, a semester of Italian, and an American history class about Oberlin. My final project for my English major was an exploration of the similarities and differences of the regionally- influenced storytelling of William Faulkner in Dry September and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I absolutely love the interdisciplinary nature of classes here and how passionate professors and students are, and I can't speak highly enough of how much I've learned from others inside and outside of the classroom.

As a student, I worked for the Admissions Office, gave tours of the incredible Allen Memorial Art Museum, was an RA, and served as the chair of the Transfer Student Organization and of the Oberlin Swing Society. (Generally, I like knowing things, and sharing all those things I know with anyone who will listen.) I still swing dance constantly, and I've recently discovered the joys of cooking with local produce.

By the way, I am employed in this first year after graduation, much to the pleasure and shock of my family, who were worried that a liberal arts degree was going to somehow cripple my future. I'm working for the Office of Communications in a one-year Media Relations fellowship, which makes me the person in the office who connects Oberlin to the local media and student news publications and also the proud counterpart to Miss Ma'ayan Plaut.

Please fulfill my undying need to answer questions by commenting on my blogs or e-mailing me at brandi.ferrebee@oberlin.edu.