Shelby Jarrett, age 23, grew up in Madison County, Georgia. Shelby says\u00a0the rural county has\u00a0a very strong sense of community. She grew up on a farm raising livestock, and even though she was an only child, the entire community, not just her\u00a0parents, took responsibility for raising her and the other children growing up there. She remembers it fondly and still travels home to visit her parents when she can.<\/p>\n
Because she grew up in such a remote area, Jarrett spent a lot of time reading. Like many children of her generation, she developed an especial fondness for the work of J.K. Rowling. Having never quite outgrown the series, she was delighted to visit the Elephant Cafe in Edinburgh this summer, which is generally acknowledged as the birthplace of the Harry Potter series.\u00a0The series made Shelby love words and writing, and even though it was fiction Rowling still managed to create a real world for so many people.<\/span><\/p>\n This is not to say that her taste in books has not grown over time. Of the books she has read lately,\u00a0her\u00a0favorite is entitled\u00a0My Own Country.\u00a0<\/em>This memoir\u00a0was written by the Indian-American physician Abraham Verghese who lived and worked in rural Tennessee during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. As a person of color who was working with a generally reviled portion of the population (namely, the LGBTQ) community, Verghese experienced firsthand both the stigmatization and moments of acceptance experienced by patients with HIV. Jarrett\u00a0loved this book for its incredible story, the author’s writing style, and\u00a0for what she learned about HIV\/AIDS.<\/p>\n So too have developed her career goals over time. Jarrett began her graduate studies hoping to pursue a career in the publishing world after a series of related internships. After spending some time investigating\u00a0health and medical journalism, Jarrett thought very seriously about switching concentrations. “It’s very, very interesting to read about obvious topics like cancer and obesity… but really everything [is] a health story,” she says. However, after considering the matter seriously, she decided it was best not to backtrack in her degree and\u00a0is therefore continuing with her original instinct to pursue academic publishing. “A job where I got to read books all the time would be awesome!”<\/p>\n She is unsure about what specific area of publishing she would like to pursue, however, which also creates uncertainty in where she would like to be in 5 years. After living in the Athens area for most of her life, she\u00a0hopes to be somewhere new.<\/p>\n Shelby’s six years at UGA have thus far been the result of practical decision-making. She originally chose UGA over other schools, like Washington and Lee, because the Zell Miller Scholarship made the cost of attendance so affordable. She wasn’t sure she would continue at UGA for graduate school but ultimately accepted an assistantship at the university. Despite choosing UGA over her dream schools, she says she doesn’t regret the decision. During her time at UGA, the worst course Shelby experienced was through a Women of Sub-Saharan Africa class. Though the class discussions were intensive and in depth, the professor graded unbelievebly harshly and gave no acknowldgement of the worthwhile class discussions.<\/p>\n No matter where she ends up after grad school, however, she will miss the\u00a0sense of new beginning that comes with each semester, a quality of college life she will miss after leaving UGA.<\/p>\n Jarrett\u2019s favorite piece of writing thus far is a piece that she wrote about nutrition in rural south Georgia schools. According to Jarrett, she values this piece because it allowed her to feel like a real journalist for the first time. \u201cI got to leave Athens for a week to work on the story and was actually able to spend time interacting with kids about the food they were eating at school versus at home. It felt so much more like real journalism than most class projects at Grady,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n Shelby\u2019s grandmother once told her \u201cthis too shall pass\u201d, which means no bad situation can\u00a0last forever. Whenever she is facing a challenging situation\u00a0or struggling with school, this phrase comforts her and makes her\u00a0believe that she will get through it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Shelby Jarrett, age 23, grew up in Madison County, Georgia. Shelby says\u00a0the rural county has\u00a0a very strong sense of community. She grew up on a farm raising livestock, and even though she was an only child, the entire community, not just her\u00a0parents, took responsibility for raising her and the other children growing up there. She … Continue reading Shelby Jarrett<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":313,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-classmate-profiles"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7Ndkv-1m","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/313"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/magwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}