Dustin Copeland: Finding Purpose in the Process

I don’t remember much of my first meeting with Dustin Copeland ’25 — I was a new opinion editor, still getting to know the people on staff, and I mostly thought of him as the person who ran the weekly editorial meetings, or whose edits would show up on top of mine at 2 a.m.

As I got to know Dustin better last semester — as senior staff, and through procrastinating on readings for our “Poetry I” class together — I began to notice the little things about him: the way he’d drum his pencil on the table as he thought, how he’d climb railings (and door frames, and walls), how he’d never really disagree with anything you said while sprinkling a few validating “dawg”s and “that’s sick”s into the conversation. Eventually, I wasn’t sure that I could imagine the newsroom without him.

“I don’t know anyone who moves through the world the way that Dustin does,” Kei Lim ’25, Dustin’s friend and co-editor-in-chief, told me — and I agree. That unmistakable presence in the spaces we’ve shared on campus has fundamentally shaped the way I now see those spaces, even when he’s not there.

In the Classroom

Growing up, Dustin was surrounded by the physical sciences. Both his parents worked in higher education and encouraged him to take an interest in the sciences — Science Magazine was a constant in his house. Initially, he figured that he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps as an academic scientist. He enjoyed engaging in the physical sciences and wanted to hold onto the familiarity he’d gained with them while growing up. The environment of academic science was one that was familiar to his parents through their jobs — and with his interest in the physical sciences, it seemed natural to follow them into that environment.

“The nested hierarchy of Rutgers is just the most beautiful thing in the world,” he told me.

Although his passion for the sciences developed early, it wasn’t the only path he was interested in. During his senior year of high school, classes were hybrid — and as the only student in his classes who’d opted to return to class in-person, he’d formed close relationships with his teachers in the empty rooms. As the year ended and he prepared for college, his chemistry teacher advised him to pursue the physical sciences, and his English teacher, naturally, told him he should do English.

“I [was] like, ‘I’m really torn right now,’” he laughed.

He’d loved his AP Physics class and working on the robotics team, and while he didn’t plan to major in English, he liked reading and wanted to continue on in the humanities. So, when he arrived at the college, he expected to major in physics and philosophy.

After the first day of class, he realized that the prerequisites for his physics classes, like Calculus II — and the major, by extension — wouldn’t work out.

“I go into the classroom. He writes all over the board. He writes over the shit he’s already written. He does not erase,” he recalled. “And I was like, ‘I can’t take calculus.’”

That semester, he did take an English class because he “couldn’t imagine” not doing so. He also took an introductory geology course the following semester, and found that he loved the environment of the department.

“It’s such a welcoming department, and it has a lot of support for its students,” he explained. “It just seemed like such a good place to be.”

Sofia Tennent ’25, Dustin’s partner, remembered his excitement to explore the open curriculum during his freshman year. “He was always so excited to be here, and every single class he could possibly take was the most interesting possible thing [to him],” she said.

By the end of sophomore year, the choice to double major in geology and English came down to one fact: doing the work for his geology and English classes made him feel good, and doing the work for the other academic areas he’d been exploring didn’t. He decided that not only would he major in those areas, then, but that he’d exclusively take classes in those departments (although he did eventually relent and take other classes). He wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to do after college yet, but now he knew that it would be related to either English or geology, and that made the work he was doing in his classes matter to him in a way it hadn’t previously.

“The point is really just that I suddenly — or not suddenly — had a strong feeling at that point that these classes were important to me and my selfhood … in a real sense,” Dustin explained.

Becoming a “Zü Person”

Dustin had wanted to move to the Zü since his first day on campus: when he first considered applying to Amherst, he looked through the list of theme houses available, and reading about the Zü helped him make the decision to apply. Spending more time with a group of Zü residents and developing an admiration for the people living there helped solidify the decision. However, he ultimately made the move for his health: his sophomore fall, he discovered that he had digestive issues that were being worsened by eating at Val.

He was on a strict elimination diet when he moved, meaning that there was a long list of common ingredients he had stopped eating in hopes of determining what was causing his digestive issues. However, he still felt welcomed in the Zü and his housemates would make a modified, “stupid” version of the meal for him.

“I have so much gratitude … everything about moving there was so different from being on campus and in such a good way — [although] not necessarily always [in] a refreshing or unstressful way,” he said. But while living there came with its own challenges, he appreciated the straightforwardness of the people he met there.

“It was just a community of people, [who] would just, like, straight-faced listen to my shit,” he continued.

The community he found at the Zü has been central to the rest of his time on campus. For Dustin, living in the co-op enables him to have separation from campus with others who also want that distance. He gets community while also having his own space. He is often found hanging out in the house’s kitchen — stationed on a high-top chair pretending to do work — and talking to people as they pass through.

These kitchen conversations are social for Dustin, but unbeknownst to some of the Zü residents, they’re also a source for his reading list. Sofia recalled how Dustin often hears someone mention something they’re interested in and takes it as a cue to check out library books about that interest for the next three weeks — even when he never mentions it to the person who inspired it. For him, it’s simply a way to understand them better.

“It’s never self-centered, the way that he has intellectual interests. It’s never about advancing his own understanding of the world over other people’s — it’s often so he can connect better with other people,” Sofia said.

2 a.m. on Production Night

Community also drew Dustin to the newsroom. His application process for The Student was easier than it was for some others: there was a recruitment event his freshman fall, and since he was the only one who showed up to the event, he was in as an assistant opinion editor. He wasn’t the only new editor in the section, however — Kei had somehow managed to join the section a week before he did.

Dustin grew used to the rhythm of Tuesday production nights quickly, and regularly stayed in the newsroom until 2 a.m. or later, even when he didn’t necessarily need to (and even when it caused him to sleep through his classes the next day). He had a WAMH show his freshman year, which was scheduled for 1 a.m., so he’d head over to Keefe before returning to the newsroom to “hang out” — he was drawn in by the care and focus of the people he met there, and the way they valued the work they were doing for The Student enough to continue working late into the night.

For Dustin, the newsroom — and the relationships he developed within it — felt real in a way that little else at college did. He compared the feeling of working on the paper to being on his high school robotics team: the long hours, the bonds created by the shared work, and the “physicality” — the reward of producing something that you could actually hold in your hands the next day, and the amount of energy and power distributed in the process.

He also discovered what it was like to work alongside Kei. The two didn’t really talk about anything outside the paper at first, which didn’t matter: they both agreed that the foundation of their friendship is that time spent working alongside each other, week after week.

Kei reflected that they came to appreciate Dustin’s constant presence. “I don’t think that he’s someone that takes up a lot of space, but I do think that his presence in a space can really transform it,” they said.

As the two moved up the ranks together, from assistant opinion editors to editors-in-chief, their working dynamic and friendship continued to develop. They became each other’s “work spouses,” and Kei did compare their relationship to a marriage: not just in the intentional division of labor between the two, but in the way they emotionally supported each other and their shared care for The Student — their “baby.”

This shared care was also what was most important to Dustin. Reflecting on his time on the paper, and all of the people he’s met through it, he didn’t emphasize any particular achievements (“Yeah, we did cool things”) but instead highlighted his love for the atmosphere created by editors’ shared devotion to putting out an issue every week.

“Its human components are not interchangeable … but they’re interestingly unified. They’re foliated, to use a geology word: they’re oriented towards one thing and their shared orientation is weird, affectively. It’s a funny atmosphere to begin with, and I really like that atmosphere, and I really like what can be produced by it,” he said.

At a Crossroads

Dustin told me that he’d always known that he wanted to go to grad school, and his decision to write a thesis felt aligned with that desire. But it would not only be preparation for grad school; it also felt like a prerequisite — it spanned a much longer length of time than his classes would, and could serve as a test of his interest in that type of long-term project. First, however, he needed to decide which of his majors he’d be completing his thesis in.

For a while, he entertained both possibilities. He finished a proposal for an English thesis the spring of his junior year. He wouldn’t need to make a final decision on a geology thesis until senior fall, so he spent the summer between junior and senior year doing lab research for Assistant Professor of Geology Victor Guevara, while also beginning the reading for the English thesis he’d proposed.

Much of his time doing geology research that summer revolved around a one-week trip to Penn State: The lab needed to collect data using some instruments hosted there, and he needed to prepare to use those instruments and analyze the data collected. When Dustin, Guevara, and a labmate travelled to Penn, they stayed in an Airbnb a mile away from campus but couldn’t find parking near enough to campus to justify driving. So, they walked: every day at 7 a.m., in 95-degree weather.

It was a surprisingly good experience. Along the way, Guevara would point out geologic features of the neighborhoods they passed. When they finally entered the basement that held the instruments they needed, it felt like walking into the “near future.”

“It was a completely different energy,” he remembered. “Not, like, sci-fi, but it was clean and polished … and they had these futuristic machines … It was amazing.”

The experience gave him an idea of what doing a geology thesis, and potentially going to geology graduate school, would be like, and the reading he’d been continuing to do for his English thesis did the same. Ultimately, he chose the English thesis. He did love the community and work of being a scientist, but English professors were the type of person he felt “an intense desire” to be like — and he didn’t feel that way about geologists.

“I just don’t think I could sustain the work,” he said.

Alongside his English thesis proposal, he’d applied for a travel grant from the department for a critical project that could serve as the eventual basis of his thesis (although the work he did ended up diverging significantly from both his thesis proposal and the critical project he’d devised). He wanted to write about road narratives, so he asked for funding to take a road trip.

“I’m just really obsessed with the constant figure of the car, and the mobility it entails,” he said.

Fixing cars is a family tradition, and so is taking long trips. His paternal grandfather was from Virginia Beach, and when he decided to leave, he drove the family across the country. His grandfather wanted to stop in San Diego, but Dustin’s grandmother told him she wouldn’t go any farther than Phoenix — so they stopped in Phoenix. There, he worked as a civil engineer and would have broken cars lying around, which he taught Dustin’s father to fix. In turn, Dustin’s father enlisted his two sons in fixing the family’s cars, but to varying degrees of success. When Dustin was 12, he overheard his father talking to his grandfather on the phone about his sons (naturally, while doing some repair work).

“[His brother] loves to get his hands dirty, but he doesn’t really care about … how it works, “Dustin recalled his father saying. “The other one, [Dustin], cares about how it all works — but fucker doesn’t like to get his hands dirty.”

“From that moment on, I determined [I’d] get my hands dirty,” Dustin ended. He joined his father in the garage, and became more invested in the engineering aspect of the work.

Now, for his critical project, he was thinking about cars and road trips in a much different way, but he still wanted to get his hands dirty — he cut his lab work a week short, and spent a month on the road.

He started in Massachusetts, and drove to Seattle before picking up Sofia and continuing down through California, Arizona, and Tennessee, before finally heading back up to Amherst just in time for classes to start.

Dustin wasn’t sure whether his idea would pan out — whether he could “find some sort of critical usefulness in the state of consciousness that is produced by the interstate,” but when he met up with his thesis advisor, Associate Professor of English Anston Bosman, in Arizona, Bosman encouraged him to keep going with the project.

In the end, he described his thesis as writing “about the ways these contemporary-ish American novels from the last two or three decades use, or sometimes misuse, cliches associated with American road narratives.”

To him, the physical space of the road and how that space is represented in the media have blurred together. We instinctively know what clichés he is referencing — ones of personal self-discovery and individual transformation enabled by driving long distances — because we’ve already seen them in action, and, in driving, we sometimes buy into those clichés and reinforce the “hyper-real” picture of the West that has replaced the West as it is in reality. The four pieces of media he discussed in the thesis are not all “road novels,” but they all engage with these clichés — and the genre, by extension.

When I interviewed him, he hadn’t received the results yet, but his advisor had told him that the consensus among the readers was that it was “non-shitty.” He had also decided to take a break before applying to graduate school — this fall, he will be moving to New York. He’s applied to some fellowships, but he also wants to take some time to work in an community-oriented environment like the ones he’s enjoyed most — like The Student.

“I want to work doing … something with this like common orientation, [this] shared devotion. And that means, materially: publishing house, bookshop, [or] restaurant. That’s pretty much it,” he said.