New #bsuenglish academic advisor Jennifer Wells earned her undergraduate degree from Ohio State in 1990. She was always interested in liberal arts, but started out as a film major before she chose to pursue an art history major. She has a passion for studying abroad that she hopes to share with her students. 

What are your office hours?

My office hours are Monday through Friday, 8 am to 5 pm. Occasionally, I have meetings on Wednesdays, so Wednesday mornings usually aren’t good. A lot of students schedule appointments. But if somebody walks in and I’m free, I am happy to see them.

What are you currently reading, if anything?

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. You need to read that book! It’s a real story. And it’s about a woman who, back in the 50s, had ovarian cancer and the hospital took some cells from her. She eventually passed away, but her cancer cells grew like nothing they had ever seen. So they started using her cells to do experiments on and they’ve made all this medical progress just from her cells. And it talks about her family and how they didn’t know the hospital was doing this and it gets into a real medical-ethics murky area. Lacks’s cells are still alive. Her cells are still growing from the 50s. They just keep regenerating and regenerating and growing new cells.

What is a book that you think everyone should read?

I have a book that I love. It’s fiction. It’s very small, it’s a very quick read. But it’s called Rain by Kirsty Gunn. It was something I just picked up on a fluke at a bookstore. I read it and I was drawn right in. It was just something I completely related to (even though it takes place in New Zealand and I have no experience in New Zealand). I still felt like I was right there. It was about a twelve year old girl and her family.

What are the biggest mistakes that you notice students tending to make?

Probably the biggest one we see here is waiting too long to take the Writing Proficiency Exam or not even realizing that students have to take the exam. Another common mistake is that students wait too long to come see me before registration. So they’re waiting until the last minute and then they can’t get in. I think it’s a good idea just generally to check in with me. I want to know that you’re okay and things are going okay, even if it’s boring or you don’t really have anything to talk about. And it helps me to get to know the students.

Are you working on any projects at the moment?

Really, I’m still just learning. They want us to update the four year plans for students on DegreeWorks. So I’m kind of getting used to that. I have other advisors I talk to and we all help each other. I don’t really have other projects yet. I know we are going to be looking at doing some group advising  before summer and fall registration starts, so hopefully we’ll have some more information about that coming up soon.

What are some of your hobbies and interests?

I have always been interested in art. So, I do paint, I do a little bit of sculpture. And back home in Columbus, my family is involved with a scholarship at Ohio State. It involves making a gigantic cake shaped like Ohio Stadium. It’s about a 300-pound cake. My cousin started it as a dare one year. We’re still doing it 26 years later. I paint all the little figures we put in the stadium and around the stadium. It takes nine of us about a week (with people taking off work and everything). We’ve raised more the $150,000 for students and it goes straight into a scholarship fund.

What piece of advice would you offer your students?

Don’t be shy to ask for help. The one thing virtually every other former college student I ever talked to says, “I wish I would have taken advantage of the resources I had in college. Why didn’t I do that? I should in the writing center, I should have been in the math tutoring center. I should have been in all of that.”