Hometown: Indianapolis, IND

A Scholar and an Athlete
A state tennis champ in high school, Jaffee loved that Davidson’s Division I tennis teams practice on courts smack in the middle of campus. He loved that the campus is a registered National Arboretum, loved the neoclassical architecture, and especially loved the academic rigor. “That’s played out interestingly. Tennis became more difficult because I was falling in love with what I was studying in the classroom, and I found myself desiring to use my time and energy in different ways. I’m a slow studier. I like to delve into what I’m studying.”

A Shared Byline
“I didn’t expect to become such close friends with my professors,” Jaffee says. He got a Davidson Research Initiative (DRI) summer grant to work with Associate Professor of English Suzanne Churchill, and now they share a byline on “The Free Verse Controversy” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines.

Passing It On
Senior year, he brainstormed a way to pass on his love of writing. “We’re looking at it as a transitional program, to give students a taste of teaching as well as learning, through a series of writing studios throughout the semester, within the context of one professor’s class. I’ll be able to give them cumulative advice,” he says of the Writing Fellows project with Churchill and the English Department’s Writing Center. “There’s obviously a link between teaching people to write and teaching people to think.”

Looking Ahead
“I’m going to apply to architecture school. I’m just searching for anything where I can be involved in creative production. You know you can design a building, but is it going to stand?... I came to Davidson interested in reading, but I didn’t know how empty reading can be if you don’t write afterward. Produce something. Create something.”