Her interests read like road signs at the intersection of humanities and technology: engineering, music, education, writing, ethics, culture. Yet two months before graduating from college, Amy Van Epps realized she didn’t know what she wanted to be when she grew up.
Expecting to pursue a mechanical engineering career, Amy had majored in engineering science. She also loved singing locally and her part-time library job. Each part of her student life fueled a different passion.
As an undergrad, Amy began to recognize that her part-time work in the college library energized her; her engineering studies didn’t always do the same. “There’s a realization which the process of growing up provides to many of us, and it happened for me during senior year,” Amy says. “It’s that technical skills are not the central monolithic things many consider them to be. We all need to learn an appreciation of the world, of different people. We need to stretch to see beyond our present field of view, to be more cognizant of how we can each fit in a changing world.” And she started to realize that a career in mechanical engineering might provide a focus which would be more narrow than she’d hoped for.
After completing her engineering science degree, in a leap of faith, she took a job at a university library. It was “a technical services behind-the-scenes kind of job,” Amy said, which took advantage of her aptitude for technology. “And since I worked with students regularly, it helped me broaden my view. I loved helping them with their studies and seeing them build the confidence they needed to chart their own course.” The job led Amy to build a career with a dual focus: library science and engineering education.
In her work at Purdue, Amy says, “I enjoy getting to know who our students are both inside and outside of class. Building trust is rewarding. Students have brought me things I might never have taken to a professor when I was an undergrad!
“There’s a balance we all need to find between school life and home life,” Amy says. “It’s important to find our passions. If my parents and professors hadn’t encouraged me to follow mine, I might never have had the chance to provide that same encouragement to our students here.”
Amy continues her passion for singing as a member of the Lafayette Chamber singers and other area music groups. “Off campus, people know me mostly for my singing,” Amy says. “A busy day can make me not want to go back out for an evening rehearsal. But I find that singing provides a different way to apply myself, to think about things, to tap into my artistic side. Through music, I get to change into a different version of myself, to help build another community. That’s reason enough to stick with it. I usually leave rehearsals feeling energized.”