Professional people person:
Williams Honors Scholar teaches, guides and inspires

Whether Nina Barnes is giving tours of The University of Akron (UA), teaching classic literature to local high schoolers, or chanting with the AK-ROWDIES at an Akron Zips soccer game, there is one keynote, one refrain, that rings through all her thoughts, words and deeds: “I love people.”

A senior Williams Honors Scholar majoring in both education and English at the University, Barnes, like Catherine Earnshaw in one of Barnes’s favorite books, “Wuthering Heights,” wants all of life “to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee” — and to this jubilee everyone is invited.

“I’ve had so much fun here, and I don’t want to leave this atmosphere, this lifestyle, and I want other people to experience what I’ve experienced at UA,” Barnes says. “I don’t know if it’s just my obsession with the University or what. … It’s just a passion.”

As a student assistant in the Office of Admissions, she shares that experience, that passion, by giving campus tours to prospective students and their parents, and by accompanying admissions counselors on their visits to recruits.

In meeting with prospective students, Barnes recalls the time when a UA admissions counselor (currently the senior assistant director of admissions), Chris Stimler, visited her small high school in Sharpsville, Pa., and shared his experiences, his passion, in a meeting that inspired her to explore UA.

“He sat down separately with me and asked what kinds of things I did in high school, what I wanted to do in college — and, for everything I mentioned, he pointed out how UA had something for me,” she says.

After that meeting, Barnes and her father started attending Visit Days at the University, where she learned that students in the LeBron James Family Foundation College of Education (LJFFCOE) gain experience in local schools as early as their first year.

“We were just blown away by that,” says Barnes, who recently appeared in a UA commercial with LeBron James, whose I PROMISE School partners with the LJFFCOE. “And it’s true, I was in a middle school classroom, observing, my very first year, and I’ve been in the classroom, getting experiences with teaching, ever since.”

Barnes is currently participating in a group-teaching field experience at Barberton High School and will begin student teaching, taking on the responsibilities of a full-time teacher, next semester, before graduating in May.

Her interest in teaching began in much the same way as her interest in the University — through the infectious enthusiasm of another.

“My AP Composition teacher made so many connections with the students that I loved coming to class — there wasn’t a day that I didn’t want to go to school, and even if I was sick, I acted like I wasn’t because I didn’t want to miss it,” says Barnes, who jokes that she caught another sort of sickness, endemic to English majors, that makes one delight in diagramming sentences.

That feverish passion was further inflamed in the Drs. Gary B. and Pamela S. Williams Honors College (WHC), where, living in the Honors Complex, Barnes found an entire community of students sharing her love for learning, and for people.

“The Honors College, with the Honors Complex in the center of campus, is kind of a built-in Living-Learning Community on its own,” she says. “We’re all different majors, but we’re taking Honors Colloquia, and Honors sections of intro courses, and studying together. It’s like a big family.”

And, as a UA Ambassador, Honors Delegate, New Student Orientation leader, and co-president of the AK-ROWDIES, Barnes is one of the more active members of that family — and one of the most mobile. She not only travels across the country to cheer on Zips sports teams, but she traveled all the way to Italy a couple summers ago, thanks largely to the WHC, which alerted her to the study abroad opportunity and allowed her to take 400-level history and archaeology courses in Italy in fulfillment of Honors Distribution requirements.

“One of the big perks with the Honors Distribution and Honors Colloquia is that you are encouraged to take interesting courses not related to your major,” says Barnes, who took an Honors Colloquium on jazz. “So say you’re an art education major, and you want to take a course on polymer science and cooking, you can.”

While Barnes is currently working on her Honors Research Project — an instructional unit plan that introduces high school students to Victorian literature through “Wuthering Heights” — she’s also looking forward to a career either in teaching or in higher education as an admissions counselor.

Whichever path she chooses, she will be doing what she loves best: sharing her experiences and passions with others — and letting them know, as Stimler and her AP Composition teacher let her know, that the future is theirs for the taking.

“If my students leave my class remembering anything, I want it to be that no matter what it is they want to do, they can do it,” Barnes says. “And to prospective UA students, and especially Honors students, I would say, take advantage of every opportunity and resource you can. Wherever you want to go, the University can get you there.”