Ben DeVries

Ben DeVries '15 got a little taste of everything as a student at Calvin—and now he's applying that knowledge in graduate school.

Current role: Grad student in American literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ben is also a regular contributor to The Post Calvin blog, where Calvin graduates reflect on their post-diploma years.

What opportunities did you have as an English student that prepared you for finding a career?
I could point to a number of career-prep opportunities I had as an English student that would merit words like special or remarkable. These opportunities feel like events when I think back on them—experiences with a clear before and after. Topping off that list is the work I did as a volunteer for Calvin’s Festival of Faith and Writing, as well as my January spent on the snowy streets of Boston, researching nineteenth-century American writers.
But in the years since I graduated, the opportunities I’ve come to appreciate most are the ones that, at the time, were the easiest to take for granted. Here’s a big one: class size. Compared to the lecture halls familiar to many of the undergrads at the Big Ten University where I now TA, Calvin English classes are refreshingly small. And the size of them encourages not just generative conversation among peers but also, importantly, an easy rapport with professors. In my case, that rapport led to mentoring relationships that I value to this day. It also gave me the courage to undertake a number of independent studies with my professors, including the honors project that later became my writing sample for grad school.

What part of the English program was most unexpected for you?
You wouldn’t know it from a casual walk through the department, but Calvin’s English professors can whip up a mean batch of soup. Seriously. So if you ever find yourself at the English department in January—which you should, since the English program offers a battery of knock-out interim courses during January—and if it also happens to be a Monday, swing by the department lobby for Soup Monday. Even today the mere thought of a particular spicy butternut squash soup works on me like Pavlov’s bells.

What about Calvin specifically prepared you for this next step in your journey?
Although Calvin’s English department deserves the credit for my decision to pursue graduate studies in American literature, it is the college’s broader commitment to liberal arts education that I consider invaluable to my journey. Because of Calvin’s robust core curriculum, I was exposed to concepts and disciplines that I would never have discovered on my own. I dipped my toes into age-old theological debates. I learned about the origins of American popular music, the factors contributing to the October Revolution, the history of the periodic table. In ways that have been immensely beneficial not just to my career but to my everyday life, I saw how subjects as apparently disparate as physics and history, philosophy and mathematics speak to one another. More to the point, I came to appreciate how little I finally know—about anything, really, and that realization is as humbling as it is inspiring. As Hamlet puts it: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

What part of Calvin’s mission resonates with you, and why?
Calvin’s mission statement speaks of preparing students to be “Christ’s agents of renewal in the world.” I struggle to imagine a more audacious, a more scandalous, a more beautiful mission. Calvin College takes seriously the belief that God calls us, even in our sin and brokenness, to bring shalom to a world that belongs to him, down to the last square inch. As such, Calvin maintains that engineering and social work, as much as preaching and worship-leading, are profoundly moral actions, and it is this effective expansion of the domain of the Christian that resonates with me. According to Calvin’s mission, my work as a teacher, researcher, and writer has the potential to participate in the renewal of God’s kingdom.