Anthony (Tony) McCosham

My name is Anthony McCosham and I graduated from the HAB program in 2005 with a second major in English. My HAB Capstone Thesis was title "The Not Ready for Dionysia Players: The Aristophanic Tradition of Saturday Night Live."

I went on to receive a Master's in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University. My thesis, "'This is Generally Followed by a Blackout': Power, Resistance, and Carnivalesque in Television Sketch Comedy," was an offshoot of the work I had begun in the HAB program. It received the BGSU Graduate College's Distinguished Thesis award in 2007.

For the last six years I have been working in proposal development for a health care staffing agency, and currently serve as Lead Proposal Coordinator. I live in Montgomery, OH with my wife (Sarah Wasserman, also a Xavier graduate) and three kids. While the HAB program has certainly shaped me as a writer and thinker in my career, it also fostered a love of learning that I hope to share with my kids. In fact, my two-year old daughter frequently asks me to read my Classical Greek pocket dictionary to her, so we might have a future HAB student in the works.

Overall, I am very happy with the education I received in the HAB program. I feel that the critical and analytical skills that the HAB program helped me develop have definitely contributed to my success in graduate school and in my career. For instance, a large part of my career has involved close readings of Government contracts and proposal drafts, both of which use language specific to my field. Everyday as I complete these tasks, I am reminded of the close-reading skills and attention to detail required to successfully translate Latin and Greek. Because of this, I feel that some of my career success is directly attributable to the skills I honed while studying in the HAB program.