Jane Seage
“Austin Peay has provided a lot of opportunities for me that I might not have gotten at a bigger school. You get a lot of individual-level learning with your professors. It feels more approachable. I’ve definitely learned more about myself.”
Double Major: Classics, Physics
Hometown: Murfreesboro, Tennessee
Involvement: Conducting research project in Romania in Summer 2019
Austin Peay junior Jane Seage is heading to Transylvania.
The physics and classics double-major will conduct a multifaceted and large research project using ground-penetrating radar at an ancient Roman villa in Romania in June and July 2019.
“I’m going to learn about archaeological and geophysical techniques, the culture and history of the area and the impact the Romans had,” she said. “It’s a really exciting opportunity for me and is going to be a vital learning experience since I’m considering going into archaeology.”
The research opportunity gives Seage a chance to use her odd pairing of majors. Getting an opportunity to study an ancient Roman villa excited her classics side and learning more about ground-penetrating radar techniques piqued her physics side.
“I’d never really considered archaeology as something I wanted to do until I started thinking about combining my classics and my physics together,” she said. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s art or art history and archaeology that’s classics-focused but also make use of my more science-minded skills.”
Adding classics to a science mind
“The classics make a lot of sense to me, it’s like solving a puzzle,” she said. “Taking all the different parts and putting them together makes a lot of sense to me. Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece is so cool. If you were to ask me my favorite person now, I’d say Julius Caesar.”
Seage is considering studying archaeology in graduate school.
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“I’m interested in archaeology because I love classics, it’s a foreign language, the puzzle-solving aspect, but at a certain point, you’re just reading literature, and when you’re reading literature, you write essays about literature, which is not super-exciting for me, so I think archaeology provides a different perspective that is more concrete,” she said. “I’m attracted to the lab aspect of archaeology, but there is a lot of field experience, actually going out to a dig, like what I’ll be doing this summer.”
Seage credits the relationships she’s built at Austin Peay, with professors and with students alike. They’re part of the APSU experience, she said.
“I’ve definitely learned more about myself,” Seage said. “Austin Peay has provided a lot of opportunities for me that I might not have gotten at a bigger school. You get a lot of individual-level learning with your professors.
“It feels more approachable.”
