Hello, greetings, salutations, et cetera. Welcome to my site. If you are here, chances are you are one of my parents or, if I'm lucky, a potential employer already charmed by me in person and merely seeking validation of my good first impression.
As the header proclaims, my name is Katherin Fitzpatrick. I am currently a junior at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ, and will graduate in 2010 with a degree in Writing Arts with a focus on Creative Writing, a double minor in Psychology and Advertising, and a concentration in Honors Studies.
My main pursuit, now and for many years, is writing, with a particular interest in poetry, short fiction, and essays. Since the first poem I wrote in elementary school (about the daydreams of a cat), I have been working to become a writer on par with the authors of the books I love so much. My influences are diverse; I can point to Dave Barry, Margaret Atwood, David Sedaris, Gabriel García Marquéz, Kate Atkinson, and Flannery O'Connor, as well as television shows, movies, music, and comic strips.
During my time at Rowan, I have earned exemplary grades in my writing classes, won 2nd place for poetry in a competition that included graduate students, and been asked to participate in a professor's web-literacy research with the possibility of writing a paper for publication.
The Writing Arts program at Rowan University is ideal for developing my writing. It is the only program in the country that focuses on writing for the sake of the art, rather than as a subset of English or merely a professional tool (though it provides an excellent specialization in that aspect, as well). It is an extremely flexible major, to the point of being nearly self-designed, and the end result is a solid liberal arts foundation.
My interests are diverse, ranging from literature to science to philosophy, and my chosen educational path reflects that. Within my varied major and minors, I have taken classes such as "Literacies in Today's World," "Mobs and Crowd Mentality," "Biology, History, and the Fate of Human Existence," "The Writer's Mind," "Psychology of Human Sexuality," and "Contemporary Moral Problems," to name a few.
Though my approach to learning might appear dilettantish to some, I prefer to think of myself as a jack-of-all-trades, able to synthesize and apply information from many sources. Learning does not end with formal schooling; though my classes are scattered across several fields, I am a lifelong learner and have ample time to deepen my understanding of the topics covered within.
A little about the site: it was created as the final stage in a semester-long lesson in web-design as part of my Writing, Research, and Technology class. The lesson began with exercises in basic HTML, moved on to include CSS, and finally to a more advanced, sophisticated design suitable for a professional site. My site's aesthetic is inspired by the colors and Art Nouveau detailing in the hallway of my home; all images (except the scroll in the background, header, and footer) are direct photographs or composites of things in the hall.
