Dr. Jessi Thomsen is a dedicated and accomplished professor whose compassion has left a lasting impact on her students. However, she didn’t always plan on teaching. It was through following her heart and her passions that she got to where she is today.

Dr. Thomsen originally wanted to be a pharmacist. However, partway through the program, she realized her heart wasn’t in it. “I had bought in a little bit to the idea that doing a degree in art and English wasn’t going to get me anywhere—until I realized that trying to do the thing that didn’t fit wasn’t going to work out anyway, and so that gave me permission to go back to art and English,” she says. Her time in pharmacy school showed her that what she actually wanted to do was teach, realizing that “the thing that I liked the most when I was in pharmacy school was actually talking with patients and doing patient education.” She earned a BA in Studio Art with a minor in English and a Master’s in Education at Creighton University, before going on to teach middle and high school English for several years. She decided to return to school because she wanted to teach AP English classes, which requires a Master’s in English.

However, while pursuing her MA, she realized that she wanted to teach at the college level instead. One of the appeals of teaching at a college was that, unlike teaching at a high school,, she had more opportunities to learn with a better balance between research and teaching. “I was really interested not just in doing the teaching but also doing the teaching better… and figuring out what it was that I cared about with the things that I was teaching,” Dr. Thomsen says. She was also introduced to the field of rhetoric and composition, and found her calling. “Within rhetoric and composition, I’m really interested in how rhetoric is a means of understanding how we function in the world around us and our relationship to everything that we are part of,” Dr. Thomsen says. She went on to receive a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from Florida State University and started teaching at WKU in Fall 2022 as an assistant professor in the English Department.

One of Dr. Thomsen’s favorite parts of teaching at the college level is that she has the chance to learn from and with her students. “Every time I walk into the classroom, I know that I’m going to learn something,” she explains. She loves getting to see all that her students bring to the table. She also cares a lot about her students as people. “I want students to learn things, but actually, more importantly, I want to make sure they feel cared for in the classroom,” Dr. Thomsen says. She feels that if people in her classroom feel cared for, then learning will naturally follow: “I always hope that students would say that they felt like they got to be people in the classroom and they weren’t just students.” Dr. Thomsen also hopes that students see her as approachable and accessible—that if they are struggling in the class or are curious about learning more, they can come to her.

Dr. Thomsen’s research areas include posthuman and feminist rhetorics, reflection in writing, rhetorics of sustainability, and mentoring practices. Recently, Dr. Thomsen collaborated with one of her former students as well as her former advisor to present a workshop at the Feminism and Rhetorics conference on rethinking how to frame mentoring relationships in more productive ways. The workshop, titled “Radicalizing Mentoring as Activism and Advocacy,” focused on the idea that mentoring is a reciprocal process and a complex system of people, organizations, and conversations. “We engaged in storytelling about our mentoring experiences, asked participants to tell and reframe their own mentoring relationships, and created maps of our mentoring networks and support systems,” Thomsen says.

When she’s not teaching or writing, Dr. Thomsen enjoys painting and drawing, and she uses some of her art to decorate her home. She has recently started attending the Painting Discussion and Critique (PCaD) meetings led by students in WKU’s Art and Design department. Her interests also include playing volleyball, building LEGOs, cooking, and gardening. She regularly watches Star Trek with her partner and her golden retriever, who is named Janeway after a captain on the show.

Her advice to English majors is to remember that English is interdisciplinary. “We can always bring in different viewpoints, different perspectives, different ways of knowing and getting to know the world around us,” Dr. Thomsen says. She believes that, often, English degrees can feel very text-based, but “being willing to open up to that interdisciplinary nature, I think, is really helpful and shows how English and writing and literature applies in a lot of spaces that we might not have seen otherwise.”