Jennifer Stamp Faculty, Science Blind conformity really bothers me. Doing things for the sake of it is the worst. People find that really funny about me, that I’m from Newfoundland. And I use it, if it’s gonna be helpful. They find it endearing. People think people from Newfoundland are friendly, and generally that’s true. They think people from Newfoundland are funny, and generally that’s true. There are boring Newfoundlanders, for sure, but maybe there’s fewer of them than in other places. When I first moved here my accent was so thick people didn’t understand me. I’m like, ‘This is Halifax.’ And I’d been here before. Everybody goes through the transfer shock, but I was surprised at how difficult I found the transition. Not just university. Everybody that grew up in my town, not only did they look the same, they had the same last names. Everybody was a Murphy or O’Brien or Walsh or Morgan. We were the only Stamps in town, though. They split up for good when I was 16. There were rumblings of it beforehand. At 16, as long as my hair looked good, I didn’t really care. But that’s my family culture. My parents get along. You know, the first few years my dad wasn’t dying to hang out with my stepfather but if there was something happening like my graduation, everybody came. My brother got married at my mother and my stepfather’s place, and my dad came up and stayed there. I have two daughters, 18 and 22. They are quite outspoken, both of them. I see them as quite different. They have very different aspects of their personalities, but in the outside world people find them quite similar. So, I think what they got out of life with me is that first of all they’ll talk to anyone. They’re quite outgoing. They’re half Turkish and they now have an Icelandic nephew. They haven’t travelled all over the world, but the places they’ve gone, they’ve been there, right. They’ve been exposed to different kinds of people, different cultures, and I would feel comfortable putting either one of them anywhere. Everybody is some type of nerd. I don’t see that as a negative, it’s a compliment as far as I’m concerned. I’m just curious about a lot of things. I guess the reason why I see my scatterbrained-ness or my creativity as a plus, is that it has opened up a pile of opportunities and different ways of thinking that I wouldn’t ever have been exposed to and my life would have been very different had I not been open. It’s a bit scary to do new things, so just having the guts and the motivation to try something new or to speak to somebody who is different than you or having a really strong opinion about something — that has almost always worked out for me. Even if the most immediate thing didn’t work out, I learned something from it. Blind conformity really bothers me. Doing things for the sake of it is the worst possible thing. Like Christmas shopping. You have to buy a gift for this person. Why? Every day is Christmas for us, really. Nobody in my life is suffering, or if somebody is, we’ll rally around and get them that thing they need. So doing things for the sake of it, I hate. It’s like ‘That’s the way we always do things.’ That’s basically a way to make sure I’m not going to do it, is to tell me that’s the way it’s always been done. I teach a lot of first-year students. You get all these emails from students, and it’s like ‘You could answer this yourself.’ I would say 'It’s in the syllabus.' I went and wrote this song. I nicked the music from someone else, a Turkish pop singer from the ‘80s. It’s a really catchy tune, but nobody here knows it. It’s about unrequited love, but I changed the words and wrote a song called Check the Syllabus. This was the first year I did it live. One of my students took out their phone and put the flashlight on and started waving it. Then a bunch of them started doing it. It was so much fun. ← Hemant ↑ Home Frederick →
