Danica Surman ’14

Mac was a great college to go to for being politically engaged and civically minded.

Danica Surman ’14

Teaching Social Studies at the middle-school level is intense; it includes economics, geography, history, sociology, anthropology, and even psychology. My coursework prepared me for some of this, of course, but one of the best things I learned at Mac was how to write on a deadline. I am constantly having to create short readings for students, do research quickly, find primary sources, fact-check textbooks. All the work I did learning to write for different audiences and to write short instead of long makes my job easier every day. 

At Mac, I was planning for a career in politics or government. I did a legislative internship in Minnesota, an independent study managing a state legislative campaign, and started a PAC in my senior year that raised $35,000 and hired field staffers to help flip seats in districts with large college-student populations. I learned how to run political events, write speeches, and did experiments as a campaign manager that became a paper read by a number of political operatives in Minnesota. After college, I moved back to Texas for personal reasons. Because that meant leaving my network behind in Minnesota, the political work I could find in Texas was never very satisfying. So I did nonprofit work while taking classes for my teaching certification. 

Even though when I was at Mac, I had no idea that I would end up as a teacher, so much of what I did there has been useful to this job. In my First-Year Course we spent the semester digging into foundational American political texts, and I learned how to closely analyze primary sources. That focus on argument, on rhetorical purpose, on political and constitutional debates that dominate the first half of US history gave me the opportunity to think about texts in different ways and showed me how to make things relevant for my students. And having been involved in the nitty-gritty of politics and government through upper-level courses and internships gave me a much better understanding of history.

I had professors who let the class convince them to go see visiting political candidates, who were great at pushing us within our field, and whose classes unintentionally helped me in my future education career because they showed me what good research and teaching looked like. Building strong relationships with my professors—people who have their own professional networks—and maintaining those relationships has given me leads on jobs, references, and mentoring to this day. 

Last revised: November 2025