New Ways With Words
The English department at UCLA invites students to embrace both the canonical and the unconventional. Shakespeare and hip-hop sit in the same syllabus. A zine about Tyler the Creator earns the same serious attention as a seminar on medieval literature. Fanfiction, written since childhood and posted to online archives, turns out to be an excellent companion to studying clinical psychology. The throughline, as both Leslie Juarez and Katherine Song discovered, is that the story you make from wherever you are is the one worth telling — and that the faculty at UCLA will take you seriously in that endeavor.
Juarez didn't plan to apply to UCLA. Growing up in Downey, California, transferring from Cerritos College, she aimed for Cal State campuses until her sisters pushed her to reach further. She applied on a whim, got in, and arrived to find that the English department was nothing like she expected. She found a vibrant dialogue about what literature is and where it lives, from Shakespeare to Tyler the Creator.
During a course with professor Uri McMillan, Juarez discovered the zine. She found the self-published, collage-style form that blends image, text and design a fruitful mode of critical and creative expression. Her first project used cultural theorist Dick Hebdige's writing on subculture to examine Tyler the Creator's annual Camp Flog Gnaw festival and the community of self-expression it generates among fans. A senior seminar on public Shakespeare produced a second zine connecting "The Taming of the Shrew" to "10 Things I Hate About You," tracing feminism and music through four centuries of adaptation.
In her senior year, Juarez has been working inside the making of literary history. As a research assistant in the UCLA RAP Lab, she spent the year working one-on-one with Professor Adam Bradley on his second anthology of rap. For a follow-up to Bradley's landmark "Book of Rhymes," Juarez helped research artists, annotate songs and navigate the complex permissions process required to excerpt. She is also enrolled in Bradley's Hip Hop and Poetics course, where students analyze rap as literature, transcribing lyrics and studying rhythmic patterns the way they might study a sonnet. Kendrick Lamar, Tupac Shakur and Shakespeare are not as far apart as they seem.
Song arrived at UCLA from San Francisco as a psychology major with a long history of writing that had nothing to do with school. Since elementary school, she had been writing fanfiction — posting on AO3, the Archive of Our Own, a vast online platform where writers publish stories that extend, reimagine, or depart from existing books, games, films, and shows. She moved through fandoms quickly, writing intensely about each one before moving on. The practice was, she realized later, a form of character study — the same impulse that would eventually draw her toward clinical psychology research.
At UCLA, she found ways to take that impulse seriously across multiple disciplines, from poetry to visual-novel type game building. Through the ACM Studio Club at UCLA, she learned to write for video games, along the way picking up the coding language Ren'Py. In professor Daniel Snelson's web writing course, her final project merged everything: a prototype AO3 page whose content shifted depending on what a reader commented, reflecting their own biases back at them. It required both her years of fanfiction fluency and the programming she had learned in the club.
Her creative writing capstone, completed with professor Juliana Wang, became something more personal. For a course on Asian American literature, Song interviewed her mother in Chinese — translating it herself, without assistance, leaving the gaps blank where her language ran out. The result was a fragmented story that embraced its incompleteness and struggles with communication, she said.
Song hopes to move into clinical psychology research, with plans to keep writing on the side. Juarez is taking a gap year to prepare for grad school in English and education.
