FSU Trailblazer: Kent Peacock

By Tamiera Vandegrift on October 17, 2016

For the first time ever, Uloop’s FSU Trailblazer series is turning the spotlight away from the undergraduate population. This week’s Trailblazer is a student in pursuit of his Ph.D while enjoying his first teaching position with nearly 100 students! Our Trailblazer, Kent Peacock is an excellent example of everything a trailblazer should be: passionate, ambitious, and an overall wonderful human to converse with about everything from Hamilton the Musical to pugs. I had the honor to interview Kent and I’m grateful that he took time out of his day to speak with me. Without further ado, let’s get to know Kent.

Image via: Kent Peacock

Q: Where is your hometown?

KP: Home to me is outside of Detroit, Michigan. Moved around a little bit growing up, but home was in the Detroit area.

Q: How do you like Tallahassee compared to Detroit? It’s certainly colder up there.

KP: It’s a big change. I actually love the cold, but I miss the winters. I’m from Detroit, but then I did my Undergraduate and Master’s work along the east coast, Washington D.C. and Boston. I’m much more at home up north. I came to FSU five years ago for my Ph.D.

Q: What’s your program of study?

KP: I’m in the Department of History. In the department, you basically choose four fields for a Ph.D and so, one’s a major field and then you have minor fields. I study gender and sexuality history with a focus on the United States, a little bit of Latin America every now and again. Really gender and sexuality is my main area of interest. Currently, the dissertation is on the period of American history right after the American revolution and I love early American history, so that tends to be where I end up. It can be a challenge because it’s just finding the sources that are not as obvious as maybe if you were doing history of gender and sex in the last 15 years. It’s a lot easier to find things. So that’s always a challenge but it’s also kind of fun because you find things in unexpected places and you kind of learn almost a whole new language at times to know how to search for what you’re looking for because people used different terms back then. It also makes for some interesting just regular conversations with people when you actually talk to them about what you’re actually studying. A lot of the time, unfortunately, at least right now it’s not very happy stories. Looking at lots of divorce cases. It’s all about physical assault or emotional abuse, or things like that. So, it’s not always positive but then you’ve also got funny, little stories that come up that you wonder how these events actually really happened. You can’t always gain enough information just because people didn’t keep it, but you never know what you’re gonna find.

Q: What year of school are you in with your pursuit of a Ph. D?

KP: I’m technically in my fifth year and for the Ph.D, typically, on average it takes somewhere between five and seven years. Here at Florida State, for the History program, it’s about two to two and a half years of courses and then you have to take what are called comprehensive exams, which are basically four written exams, one for each of your fields, to basically show that you know the literature of the field, the main ideas that are out there in those fields. Basically, to prove that if you were asked to teach a course on that field you could do it. You have to do written exams and then you have to do an oral exam, so answer questions in person from the faculty over those fields and then you write the dissertation, which is basically one large research project, which that’s where I’m at right now. That can take, if you’re really good at it, two years, but then sometimes it takes a lot longer and sometimes that’s just it’s hard to find your sources, you have to travel distances. On average, as I said, it’s about five to seven years. There are people in the program here though that have gotten out in I think like three and a half to four. I don’t know how they’re doing it. The people who do it that fast, a lot of them are in the military and they’re on leave to further their education and they basically have to get in done in a certain amount of time. Unlike many of us, like myself, where summers are usually a time off, time for research, or whatnot. If you take courses during the summer and really commit yourself during the summer to finishing the program, you can do it faster, but it’s a lot of work to do it that fast.

Q: Was this a straight educational path for you? Did you go right from your undergrad to graduate school?

KP: Almost. In between my undergrad and Master’s, I worked for about two and a half years. I worked primarily for a non-profit organization. It’s now called the Family Equality Council. It’s a non-profit that works to educate, to provide social activities, and to influence public policy for LGBT-headed families. For a long time, they were working a lot to change adoption laws in the U.S. that didn’t allow either single people or same sex couples to adopt children. They do social events where they basically put on events at public parks, or organize music concerts or whatever for LGBT-headed families to come and connect with others like them and to have kids connect with other kids that have families like theirs so they didn’t feel so much like outsiders or whatnot. I worked with them for about two years. I was their main front office person. I did a lot of different tasks, not directly related to anything I went to school for but a lot of the different skills that you learn in the social sciences and the humanities came into play. Whether that was lots of organization skills, or taking mass amounts of data and trying to make sense of them in certain ways. Things like that. I also worked for another small non-profit for a while, doing some other things right towards the end of that. Right before I went back to school, I worked for a summer camp for one of the big non-profit theaters in Washington D.C. as I do also have a minor in music, although I don’t use it that much anymore. It was a four week summer camp for elementary and middle schoolers to basically explore the arts. I was one of the pianists for it so I just got to accompany people, playing while they’re singing their songs.

Q: Do you still remember how to play piano? 

KP: I do! It’s one of those skills – it’s like riding a bike. You never forget. It might take you a while to get back to where you were. Every once and again here in Tallahassee, I’ve actually been lucky enough to play for some of the musicals around town. Either at Theatre Tallahassee or TCC in their productions once in a while. I’ll get the call and they say, “Hey, we need someone to fill in for something” or “Can you do the run for the two weeks of the show?” It’s a little extra money. It’s a little something different now and again. It’s nice.

Q: What drew you to history?

KP: This is partially a cop out answer here, but we’ll go with it for now. I’ve just always loved it. It’s just always something that from day one of school was always the subject that I was the best at and that I enjoyed the most. I kind of kept with it, although, I will say that my undergrad, my Bachelor’s was actually not in history. Actually, my Master’s was not either, but it’s in a very related field. My Bachelor’s is actually in Sociology, and then my Master’s is in what’s called American Studies, which is kind of American history, but with a cultural spin on it, so it incorporates a little bit more literature and more of the study of American culture as opposed to the history events and people and things like that. I’ve always been drawn to figuring out — It’s not necessarily like the events of history that I’m interested in. It’s about how have cultures and societies kind of organized what their society or whatever and how that then has influenced how people live their lives.

Q: What is your favorite thing about FSU?

KP: Oh gosh. I’m terrible at choosing favorites. This is very department specific but- okay, it’s going to be two things. One is many of the faculty that are in this department. Many of them go above and beyond what I would say they need to do for the graduate students. They see the relationship with the graduate students not just as a you’re here to get your degree and get out. It’s much more of a mentorship and an actual friendship type thing. This is something that should help you throughout your life. This person should be a resource for you. I’ve been very lucky in that many of those faculty that I’ve either had courses with or are on my committees have been people that really see their role in those terms. So that’s one.

The other is our department allows their Ph.D students to have actual teaching experience before they go on the job market, which is not necessarily the case at other places. That is not just being a grader or like discussion leader, but actually then designing your own class, and actually designing all of the lectures and teaching in the instructor of record. It is a lot of work obviously, but it is something that’s really valuable for me going forward.

Q: Are you teaching any classes right now?

KP: I am! This is actually my first semester teaching because a lot of times, Ph.D students will start teaching in their fourth year, because once you’ve passed your exams, you can apply to teach if you want to teach, but I am lucky enough that I am on a five year scholarship package that the fourth year of that allowed me the opportunity to not have any teaching or grading responsibilities so that I could travel and do research for my dissertation. So, I didn’t teach last year, so this is my first semester teaching. I’m teaching the first half of the American history survey, so American history from technically, I think it’s s 1608, which is not correct, to 1877 to the end of reconstruction. I’ve got 94 students and will be teaching the exact same class in the spring.

Q: Do you enjoy teaching? 

KP: I do enjoy it. It’s a lot more work than I was anticipating, but that’s okay. I thought I was on the department’s good side, but they put me at 9:05 in the morning and I am not a morning person. We’ve been struggling through it. I’ve got a bunch of students that are morning people. They come to me having already had a class and I don’t get how they do it. They’re wide awake and I’m like, I need my coffee. It’s been going well. I think they’re a little overwhelmed with midterms going on and such, but we’re plugging along.

Q: What made you choose FSU for your Ph.D over other schools? 

KP: One of the main reasons was, as I just mentioned, was the faculty. I was able to be here and meet some of the faculty, my main advisor in particular. We ended up having a good relationship from that point on and that worked out in that sense. I was deciding between here and three other schools. One got thrown out pretty soon because they didn’t offer me many scholarships. I would have loved to have gone there, but it didn’t make financial sense. The other ones were great options, but it didn’t click when I went and visited them as I did here. My partner goes here as well. We had actually moved down here for him to start for his Ph.D, so I ended up staying.

Q: What do you like to do in your spare time?

KP: What spare time? I am an avid football fan, so probably football, watching other sports is number one. My partner and I, we host tailgates for every home game, and now it seems like every away FSU football game as well, so we have a horde of friends that come over and eat, drink, and enjoy the games. If I have the time, I do enjoy just reading. A lot of times it’s just history books, but once in a while it’s something fiction. Theatre is the other spare time thing, either being in the pit orchestras as I mentioned, or seeing shows around town. That’s always something I love to do.

Kent chows down on a glorious Philly cheesesteak
Image via: Kent Peacock

Q: Since you like history and theatre, have you heard of Hamilton: The Musical?

KP: I have. I am going to be the bad musical theatre and the bad historian. I am not a fan of Hamilton. I can 100% recognize its genius and all the other things that it stands for and such. I have some issues with the way it portrays Hamilton and his ideology and I personally just don’t enjoy the music. It is not my style. It’s not what I like to listen to. I have actually not heard the entire soundtrack from beginning to end. I’ve heard bits and pieces now and again. Would I go see it? I actually don’t know. I’m actually using Hamilton in my lecture in class on Friday because we’re right at the point where he will make a brief appearance. I’m one of the few that’s not obsessed with it. Even funnier, I have owned the biography of Hamilton that Lin-Manuel based the whole thing off of. I have owned it for years and I have never read it. It sat on my shelf, but for whatever reason, I never got around to reading it.

Q: How would you describe yourself?

KP: I have the funny answer, but I don’t think it’s the correct answer. Do you remember the cartoon Garfield and friends? There are many people that relate me to cartoon characters at times. It’s not Garfield and Odie. It’s one of the ones that they use for the show. I don’t know, kind of oddball in a way? Unique? These are all so bland. I mean, if you want the interview answer, I’m a very organized, very precise in a way person, but I always see both sides to everything, and I always see the gray area, so in a way, I can never make decisions about things. My sense of humor is just sarcastic and very quirky and such. That’s a very jumbled answer.

Q: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

KP: This is an easy question actually! In ten years, hopefully the Ph.D will be done. That’s step one. Teaching probably at a smaller, liberal arts-size college, university. Probably in the midwest, or east coast. Hopefully have a book or two that have been published at that point.

Q: Do you have any specific colleges in mind?

KP: No. I’d always love to be teaching at the Ivy League level but in terms of just regions of the country, that’s more important to me than exactly where.

Q: What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment during your time at FSU?

KP: I’m also currently the president of the History Graduate Student Association. Some would call it an honor, some would call it, “There was nobody else dumb enough to take the responsibility”, but I’m now in my second year of doing that. Using that role to enhance the communication between the faculty and the grad students and to hopefully, be a resource to all the grad students in terms of not just professional development, but then building some sort of community within the department. There’s a lot of grad students. There’s 85 of us, I think, and we do many different things. It is hard sometimes to create a sense of community, because there are very few opportunities that we’re all somehow together, but to be in the role that is at least putting out there opportunities, spaces, events to create community and to really make sure that both sides of the conversation are heard: the faculty and the grad students, if there are issues that comes up.

Q: If you could go back and change something in your time at FSU, would you? If so, what would you change?

KP: I think I actually would have worked a little bit harder during my coursework to be honest. Maybe “harder” is not the right word, but to focus my coursework a little bit more. My interests can go off in different directions at times and unlike some who come into the program here or wherever like, “I want to study this and so everything I do will be centered around this”, I am much more interested in learning in general. It would have benefited me a lot more when I got to the dissertation stage if I had figured out and focused a little bit more on the opportunities before to really have everything kind of going towards one goal. I’ll give an example. In one course, if I was doing a research paper, I may have chosen something that I was interested in, but in the end, it didn’t help me move towards gathering all the information needed for the dissertation so once I got to the dissertation phase, I had to spend more time than maybe some people gathering or re-gathering the necessary information to move forward. Part of the problem is with my interest being women, gender, and sexuality studies in a broad sense, I can pick and choose what time period, what place, whatever that I want to do that in, whereas it would have helped if I had kind of limited myself for a while to one place and period. So, I really know that very well for where I’m at now.

Q: What do you think your spirit animal is?

KP: (laughs) It’s either a penguin, or a pug. Yeah, it’s one of those two I think. I have learned while teaching my class that I have an odd affinity for pugs and I keep putting pictures of them in my powerpoints just for laughs.

Q: What advice would you pass on to undergraduates, or even high school students, who are starting college for the first time?

KP: This is going to sound like a teacher answer, but you have to learn time management and you have to learn to take responsibility for your actions. That is, I think, the biggest challenge that undergrads tend to have. There’s no one here in college to hold your hand, to make sure you do things, to make sure you go to class, and it is a hard thing to learn that you need to be responsible for your education and what you are going to get out of it. Some learn it quickly and some, it takes a semester. It happened to me too. The professor is not there to hold your hand through the class. It’s not my problem if you can’t find parking every morning. I’m not gonna help you find parking. It’s nice that you emailed me about that. It’s polite, but there’s nothing I can do.

Image via: Kent Peacock

Q: Is there anything you would like to add that I might not have thought to ask you?

KP: I’m one of the few that does gender and sexuality history specifically in the department. There are others that touch on it, but not many specifically have it as their main thing.

Actually, there’s one other thing I should probably at least get a plug in for is I am also involved with what is the Honors, Scholars, and Fellows Student Collaboration Committee, which is working with the various offices in the Honors, Scholars, and Fellows House, or the Chick-Fil-A building as many call it, to basically find ways to connect undergrads and graduate students on campus. It was something that those who work in the many offices over there have been trying to do. They’ve passed it off to a few of us undergrads and graduate students that have worked with them. We’re doing little things like a monthly coffee hour, breakfast in the morning, coffee and donuts, but then also opportunities for graduate and undergraduates to meet up and hear about each others’ research and interest and kind of create ways for people to make connections.

Q: Is it exclusive to students who plan to seek higher education after their undergraduate years?

KP: No, although it may seem kind of that way. There are many, myself and others, who didn’t go straight through to grad school. Even though we are here for our education, we do have experience in the “regular world”, so it’s also an opportunity for undergrads to speak with individuals who have been in the real world. Not all people in graduate programs want to go on to teach per say. They may need the degree for some other reason, to get jobs elsewhere. In a way, the graduate student is probably a little more in-tune with what the job market is like, so it can be another resource to undergrads in that sense too.

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