Meet the Staff: Professor Ilse Bussing Talks About her Academic Life

Meet the Staff: Professor Ilse Bussing Talks About her Academic Life

By G. Porras.

Having a great love for teaching and research, Professor Ilse Bussing has delighted hundreds of English majors with her humbleness and professionalism since 2012 when she first began teaching at  Letras School. In an interview with The Cult News, she shares the various academic challenges she has gone through in her life.

After discarding the idea of studying psychology and realizing that she had a particular skill for literature courses when she was in high school, Ilse decides to major a B.A. in Compared Literature at William and Mary University in Virginia. This, she considers, was her first major challenge which she overcame thanks to her dedication. “I had to write and write and write and read and read and read like a maniac. I was basically writing an essay a week for my courses and reading like a hundred pages a day,” Ilse remembers. For her, this experience was both challenging and unique as she was immersed in a completely different culture, in an "all-brick campus." The many hours spent reading, writing and looking for books at the library were not over as Ilse decided to pursue a Masters in Latin-American Literature, at the University of Costa Rica, a place that has been her home since she was a child.

Certainly, the fact that she grew up in front of Medicina’s school and that her father was aprofessor in Biology and a researcher at the U.C.R influenced Professor Bussing enormously, who shares her father´s passion for research. This discipline, together with her unquestionable love for Gothic Literature drew her to undergo a 3-year research project at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. She instantly fell in love with the campus and the wonderful libraries. Her thesis under the name of The Haunted House in Mid-to-Late Victorian Gothic Fiction was part of her research work to earn a Ph.D. in Gothic Literature.

Naturally, her academic achievements did not happen by chance. “There are no free lunches as my father would say,” she says. Nowadays, due to her hard work, discipline, and persistence, Ilse inspires her students with her outstanding classes and publishes academic articles in different journals in the United Kingdom.

 Ilse has had a long and rewarding academic journey; therefore, her advice for English majors is “to be very hardworking and very persistent,” as these are the attitudes that lead to success.