An Interview With Allison Wall

Allison Wall, an alumni and tutor in the Academic Resource Center at Friends University, is an interviewee for the English Club's social media campaign #PeopleOfFriends. Thank you, Allison!

What do you do here at Friends?

"I work in the Academic Resource Center as a tutor of writing and as a supervisor."

What brought you here?

"I came to Friends first as an undergraduate student studying vocal performance and graduated with degrees in English Lit and Music. I went to grad school and then came back to work in the ARC because I worked as a tutor when I was here before and really enjoyed that job."

What do you like the most about Friends University?

"The atmosphere on campus. There’s a pretty strong sense of comradery, even among different departments, especially with the student population.; everyone seems to get along and enjoy each other, which is especially evident in the Academic Resource Center, I think. Work tends to be joking, fun conversations while you’re also working with students.

"So, yeah, I think the atmosphere of Friends is really positive."

How has Friends University shaped who you are today?

"Friends has shaped my life probably more during my undergraduate years here. I was here for five years from 2008 to 2013 and during that time, I started as a vocal performance major and wanted to be a classical music star and I was very focused on it and very driven.

"But plans kind of fell through and I had to switch my major for vocal health reasons. Friends was there, bridging that gap of ‘that’s who I thought I was, I don’t know what I’m doing now. What the heck am I going to do now?’ Because Friends offers lots of different programs, I was able to switch to English lit, which is something I also really enjoyed, and still get a bachelor’s in music.

"I think I learned a lot about myself here as a young person and as a young adult, like how to flex when life doesn’t go the way you want it to. Friends was a stable environment to have all that kind of craziness go down in."

What is your greatest contribution to Friends?

"I contribute to - well, I hope I contribute to – quality of composition assignments and students trying to figure out how to write papers. I was a Singing Quaker, so I hope I contributed to the quality of that group while I was in it, too.

"I hope to contribute more in the future than I have in the past. We’ll see; maybe I have more contributions yet to make."

How do you like to give back to the Wichita community, the campus community, and/or the world?

"I enjoy one-on-one interactions with people where I can somehow help them get from where they’re at to where their goal is. I do that tutoring, I do that talking with new tutors, I do that with private music students that I teach.

"Maybe it’s not a huge change-the-world type of thing, but the people in my circle, I hope I can ease their path a little bit.

"There’s this short fable story I read when I was a kid that I really, really liked about this little girl who had a blind little sister and she felt so sorry that her sister couldn’t see that she wanted to help. So she went to this wise old witch woman who lived on a mountain and the witch woman said, ‘Take this thread all the way around the world and your sister will be able to see.’

So she started on this journey that would take forever long and she had to go over this really rough terrain where there were no roads and she realized the thread behind her was golden. Whatever it touched – it was making stairs up the mountain and it was making roads where there hadn’t been any – so the story was about easing the path for people who would come after her.

"She gets home and the little sister can see and it’s great and she improved the world.

"I hope I can do things like that with my time and my life that would help ease other people’s paths, even if it’s ten people at a time, not billions of people. That’s what I hope for and that’s what I strive for."

What is one thing you want to tell the people of Friends University, Wichita, and/or the world?

"Make it your job to find the positive in situations. That sounds like such garbage, but, and I’m generally a really negative, pessimistic person, but I’ve practiced positive self-talk and finding the positives in things and you literally have a better day.

"So have a better day. Don’t focus on the bad stuff, don’t let it spiral you. Don’t treat other people bad because you’re having a bad day. Focus on the positive things and encourage other people.

"High-school-me just rolled over in the past like, ‘Who even are you?’ I never thought those words would be coming out of my mouth. It sounds cheesy, but people say it because it’s actually true."

What is one question you wish we would have asked and how would you answer it?

"I’m not very good at that. In grad school, whenever we’d have visiting authors come and we had to write questions so we had something to ask them, I’d always be like, ‘I don’t know.’

"Maybe something about ‘What do you do when your time isn’t revolving around Friends?’ because people have other identities and version of themselves.

"And then I would answer that with ‘I’m trying to be a fiction writer.’ I’m trying to devote a lot of time to that."