English At 50 | University of Waterloo

If you use UW’s libraries at all, chances are that your university career and Sharon Lamont’s (BA 1978, BA 1980) have overlapped. Sharon is the Director of Organizational Services for UW libraries and manages their operating budget. While a student, she worked as casual part-time staff for the library to help fund her degree. Library work taught her about the career opportunities available, and she applied for the first full-time job offering that came up after she completed her schooling. Since then, she has held various jobs within the library, a place she loves.

Having grown up in Kitchener, Sharon intended to attend a university away from home. However, her parents moved to Washington D.C. the year she began her university degree, and with her family so far away, she decided to attend UW and live at Conrad Grebel because it was familiar and she felt connected to the student community. This also allowed her to remain close to friends outside the university. Living on campus taught her how to live among her peers.

Attending UW taught Sharon many lessons about growing up. She had easily handled the work required in high school and did not anticipate the increased difficulty of coursework at the university level. She was devastated the first time she failed an assignment, the first paper she had written for Dr. Jack Gray’s Shakespeare course. “The idea that you had to synthesize your thinking before writing your thoughts down was a big learning lesson.” Dr. Jim Stone earned Sharon’s respect and appreciation because he would always provide corrections and explanations of how to improve her writing on the essays she wrote. She came to value the time and effort it took him to provide her with the valuable feedback that helped her to become a better writer.

Professors Dr. George Hibbard and Dr. Ken Ledbetter are also among the faculty Sharon remembers fondly. Dr. Hibberd would read and recite Shakespeare during class. “He was just out of mythology.” She found Dr. Ledbetter’s classes the most fun and later became a teaching assistant for his English writing course: “he was able to connect with so many different kinds of people in so many different ways and seemed ahead of his time.” For much of her early life, Sharon aspired to become a teacher, but teaching the tutorial, she “realized I couldn't imagine doing this every day of my life and realized I didn't want to be a teacher.”

Sharon learned that it is important to consider how others might read and understand a text and applies this to her own writing. Having the ability to transfer one’s knowledge to the reader in a way that is understandable is important to her. She realized the importance of this ability from all the paper writing she did as a student. “This lesson has been very useful to me,” she says. “My ability to articulate my thoughts, in writing and verbally, has helped me to get promoted within the library system.”

Mrs. Sharon Lamont (BA 1978, BA 1980)