A Guide to Becoming a Rogue Scholar

It's been around a year and a half since I graduated university with my bachelor of arts, majoring in English Honours. One of the only reasons you'd do an Honours program is if you want a better chance of getting into a master's program afterwards, in addition to the faculty connections you build. And that was my original plan—I was going to return to my hometown of Winnipeg and get my MA in English, most likely at the University of Manitoba, doing a thesis-based route and publishing whatever I completed. Obviously, none of this ended up happening. During my undergrad, I became enthralled by the idea of being a scholar and an academic. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to get a peer-reviewed paper published, a critical analysis of an Indigenous graphic novel. Although there are publications like the Journal of Undergraduate Research, it is rather rare. While I was initially going to do my honours thesis on poetry through an Indigenous lens, I instead decided to do a…