No limits: Math, chess, reading, and acting are among new professor's loves

Rob Fisette majored in math in college, but he also spent a great deal of time studying English literature and working on theatre productions. He doesn’t believe in limiting himself—or others—to one discipline.

“My opinion of a liberal arts education is that smart people are smart people everywhere,” said Fisette, who is teaching mathematics at Randolph College this semester.  “They should be able to understand all the numeric aspects of life as well as all the artistic ones.”

“One of the main problems that students have in approaching math is this impression that they have things that they’re good at and things that they’re not good at,” he said. “They classify math in the category of things they aren’t good at because they’ve never had a good experience there.” Fisette hopes to change that for his students.

Fisette, a native of Rhode Island, attended a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. While he had chosen to major in math, he also declared a major in English to help him keep up his love for reading. (His favorite author is Hubert Selby Jr.)

He began acting on stage when a college friend was producing “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” He enjoyed the experience, so he continued participating in theatre. During his senior year, he directed a performance of “Sweeny Todd.”

He said there are many connections between the fields in which he studied and participated. “A lot of the skills that you develop in math really help in studying literature and analyzing problems in any field,” he said.

For example, mathematics teaches the importance of breaking a problem into smaller component parts. “Rather than be overwhelmed by it, just break it down into small parts that are more manageable,” Fisette said. “This is applicable whether you’re analyzing a short story, or you have some role for a play that you're trying to figure out.”

After college, Fisette worked in a mailroom in Chicago. While there, he picked up chess as a hobby to keep his brain active and entertained. After a couple of years, he realized that he was missing school and mathematics, so he prepared for graduate school and attended the University of Oregon.  He wrote his dissertation about algebraic curves.

Fisette is teaching at Randolph this semester while mathematics professor Yesem Kurt is on sabbatical.

When he isn’t teaching, Fisette’s main hobby is chess, and he also enjoys cribbage, racquetball, reading, and biking.

New professor's research explores power of words in politics

If you want to parse the language of the latest political advertisements, Vincent Vecera will be happy to join the conversation. If you would rather talk about 1960s jazz music or more recent hip hop, he still would love to talk.

Vecera, a new political science professor at Randolph College, believes words become weapons in politics. He especially enjoys digesting political messages to see the power behind the words. “I don't really follow sports because politics is my sport,” he said. “Politics is the only sport where the trophy matters. The trophy is the order of human civilization.”

In graduate school at the University of Minnesota, Vecera studied the way language sways public discourse. He spent 3,000 hours reading newspapers from across the 20th century and recording the arguments made on a variety of legal issues ranging from abortion and gun regulation to rent control and marriage. He focused on how using the language of civil and political rights changed the discussion of those issues.

“What I showed in my dissertation is that the words we use matter,” Vecera said. He is now writing a book based on that dissertation.

His assessment of the current presidential election? It is more boring than usual, he said. “In one sense, the power of words has been decreased because there has been more material lying,” Vecera said. He predicts a much more interesting 2016 election with a comeback from the party that loses this year.

Vecera chose to teach at Randolph because of the spirit of community that he felt when he visited the campus. People around campus seemed to know and respect each other, he said. The dedication to the school’s honor code strengthened that feeling of community.

“Every college has an honor code, but I was struck by how, throughout my meetings here, people kept coming back to that,” he said. “It was a really wonderful testament to a culture here.”

“I always wanted to work at a small liberal arts college—Not only a teaching college, but a place that had a sense of community and values,” Vecera said. “That made my decision to choose Randolph, instead of a couple of other places, very easy.”

When he is not teaching or writing, Vecera has a passion for music. He listens to five or six new albums each week. He owns about 2,000 records, and he deejayed many parties in college. Some of his favorite genres include 20th century classical music, jazz from the late 1950s and 1960s, and underground hip hop, he said.

Since arriving on campus, Vecera has been impressed by how welcoming and warm everyone has been—and how warm the temperature has been to him since he is acclimated to Minnesota weather. He feels that he is in the right place. “A tenure track position at a place like this is, to me, like winning the lottery,” he said.

New biology professor enjoys traveling, riding, remodeling, and teaching

For the past three years, Amanda Rumore and her husband have been restoring a 1920s farm house not far from Randolph College while she finished her Ph.D. This fall, she joined the Randolph faculty teaching biology.

Her first week of teaching here brought a pleasant surprise. "Half of my students turned their homework in early, which has never happened for me before,” said Rumore, who received her Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in May.

Amanda Rumore and her husband Michael hiked across a high-altitude glacier
in Europe this summer. She recently began teaching biology at Randolph.

“So far, I have been impressed with how engaged the students have been in the classroom,” she said. “They seem interested in the material.”

Rumore started college wanting to study interior design but later switched her focus to biology. Microbiology courses drew her interest towards biomedical research while an undergraduate at Virginia Tech.

While working towards her Ph.D.,  she researched the interactions between humans and fungi. “I specifically study fungi that cause allergies and asthma,” she said. “My focus is on understanding the mechanism by which the fungi can cause an allergic reaction in humans.”

She and her advisor worked on a minimal budget as they began that line of work. Eventually, their research attracted two grants worth a total of about $1.3 million.

Rumore was offered a position teaching at Randolph this year while Kathy Schaeffer is on sabbatical.

When she is not teaching or researching, Rumore enjoys traveling. This summer, she and her husband traveled to Europe and took a train to the highest point on the continent—Jungfraujoch, at 12,000 feet. They hiked 2.5 miles across the Aletsch Glacier, which took more than two hours due to the thin air present at that altitude.

She also enjoys riding horses (she competed against Randolph when she was an undergraduate) and working on her home remodel, which is the topic of her personal blog.