The way Maddy DuQuette figures, everything that happens to a person can be both of your own making and also for an unknown reason that you might discover later in life.

How else can you explain how this enthusiastic young woman who is a noted math whiz could end up as a Clark Honors College English major with a minor in creative writing? What other reason would someone who played competitive soccer most of her life present as not being interested in squaring off against others?

And how do you explain the cheery demeanor of a person who says that her perfect day consists of a Chai latte and a good book to read on a park bench?

“I think it’s truly like everything will work out no matter what you choose to do with your time,” says DuQuette, who also has a minor in business administration. “I’m an optimist and it allows me – because of past experiences – to be in a good spot, focusing on the now.” 

For the kid from Wilsonville, Oregon who has always pushed herself to do well, not being sure about her academic destination proved to be a somewhat perplexing. She has older half-siblings but she more or less grew up in a household as an only child of a Nike executive and a retired Microsoft analyst. DuQuette loved school. Her parents weren’t strict and allowed her to explore her interests.

“All they said to me was they expected me to do my best,” DuQuette recalls. “I wanted to impress them and get A’s but they didn’t try to force that on me.”

In fifth grade, a teacher noticed her penchant for solving math problems and put her on “an advanced route,” she remembers. “I liked everything – reading and writing, math, other things. I actually didn’t think I was that good at the math, though.”

She describes sixth-grade math as the most difficult thing she faced, but as she studied the subject in middle school it was “off to the races in math,” she says.

In high school, her math acumen was all but legendary. She was one of the few students at her school who took first-year calculus as a junior. “I didn’t want to step back from it,” she says. “You kind of just stay on that track with where teachers see you.”

When she first started at the Honors College, DuQuette had an interest in political science. She took a few classes but didn’t really know what she wanted to take on as a major. She noticed other students getting stressed out about what paths to take and she started to wonder when she had to make a decision.

She thought about a career in publishing. Accounting was somewhat of an interest. But it wasn’t until fall term of her sophomore year that things came into focus – only after they got a little fuzzy first.

DuQuette says she hit a low point. Part of the issue was that she had been living with a roommate and things weren’t working out. “I was bummed for a variety of reasons,” she recalls, so she decided to take some time off during winter term.

She worked at a restaurant job in her hometown and lived with her parents. “The first day I woke up at home, I knew I had made the right decision,” she recalls. “I felt refreshed. It gave me the time I needed to look at what I really wanted to pursue.”

When she came back to UO and the Honors College, she felt like she had a new lease on life. She and her close friend ended up living together, which made her final years at UO fantastic, she says. She also dove into her academics – not as a chore, but as something she loved to do.

She picked back up her campus job as a math tutor, because she had figured out that she loves helping others understand complex subjects. And she also spent last summer studying abroad in Siena, Italy. The most exciting parts of the trip included traveling to Rome, Venice, Cinque Terre and Greece.

She rounded out her coursework by taking a variety of English and business administration classes.

One class in particular – English 392 “American Novel” – focused on the development classic books from 1900 to present. DuQuette ate it up, swooning over books like Toni Morrison’s “Sula” and “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger.

“I’ve always loved to analyze the English language itself,” she says. “I’m a nerd that way when it comes to grammar, sentence structure and all that.”

DuQuette credits Casey Shoop, a CHC senior instructor of literature, who taught her in a different Honors College class. His influence, she says, helped her formulate her thesis, “Girl on Fire, Girl on Display: Femininity and Gender Performance in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games.”

“The Honors College and the professors are such a good influence on all of us,” DuQuette says. “They push us to think on our own. The experience has made me a better thinker.”

Shoop says DuQuette is “absolutely gifted in her ability to move between the surface level of language and its deeper thematic and formal resonances.

“She has that rare gift to find the seams in texts and study the pattern and weave their construction. What’s more, she’s able to do this not only in dense and sometimes forbidding works like the satires of Nathaneal West or the films of David Lynch, but also with pop culture texts like the songs of Taylor Swift, one of her abiding passions.”

As she prepares to graduate, DuQuette says her plans – for now – are simple: Take a celebratory trip to France and Greece, meet up with her old friends in Oregon and take a gap year where she hopes to volunteer her time to a worthy cause. When all is said and done, she plans to look for a job in publishing – on her own terms.

“Things happen to people all the time,” she says. “The way I look at it, you have to respond and be positive. Make things happen for yourself because no one will do it for you. If you don’t, you’ll be disappointed. I always try to be positive.” 

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