David Armstrong, MA 2020
Upper School Latin Teacher, Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School
I arrived at Wash U for the MA in Classics program fresh off the heels of having completed another graduate program in Religious Studies at Missouri State University. At my alma mater, I had minored in Classical Greek, taken additional courses in Hebrew and Latin, and my original plan in coming to do the MA was simply to round out my knowledge of the ancient world in preparation to apply for a PhD program in New Testament.
While my love of Religious Studies has not declined, I found so much more than I set out looking for in Umrath Hall. First, I finally had the chance to really sit with the languages, histories, philosophies, poetry, and oratory of the Greeks and Romans in a way that I had not had the opportunity to do previously. Through surveys in Greek and Latin literature and seminars in specialized topics related to the research interests of a dazzlingly talented faculty, I felt for the first time like I had really become a classicist. Four years after graduation, I teach full-time Latin (& someday, Deo volente, Greek) at a local St. Louis independent high school.
Second, I was not just taught to read Greek and Latin: I was taught to connect classics to the human experience. It is not possible to read Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Callimachus, Horace, Vergil, Ovid, and the like and not come away with some really good material for the big questions. And the MA program centered those questions in big ways, both in our classrooms and in extracurricular discussion.
But third, and most important: the grad program gave me great relationships with amazing professors and a wonderful cohort of friends. The best part of humanism is surely the humans you share it with, and I promise you’ll find that to be true here. I know I did.
