Lucas Drerup

M.A. English ’15

Like any self-respecting liberal arts student, Lucas’s path has been a circuitous one. After realizing that he did not want to measure sidewalks for a living, he left Ryerson’s urban planning department in 2001 and fled to Europe and the near East for a year of ostensible self-discovery. Upon his return, and in the absence of any adult interests or ambition, he attended the University of Ottawa for English Literature, graduating after four years spent squandering his student loans on compact discs. Eager to put his degree to work, Lucas moved to Calgary, where he painted houses for a year. An attempt at living in Central America ended with an ill-advised six-day bus trip from Honduras to Ottawa. At a complete loss, Lucas threw up his hands, scrounged enough money together to buy a one-way ticket to Thailand and fled again. Three months later he was teaching English in Taiwan, where he would stay for nearly six years.

He returned to Canada in 2013 with his wife-to-be and attended graduate school at Carleton. After graduating in 2015, he moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where he teaches middle school English. He has fallen in love with the shabby vibrancy of his adopted city and finally feels as though he is doing something of value by helping to unlock some of the incredible potential that hides there, camouflaged by overt poverty, structural prejudice, and middle-class apathy.

He credits Carleton’s English department with renewing his faith in the value of great teachers, and hopes to one day become one.