Have You Met…Mifi Purvis?

Have you met Mifi, Communications Strategist for the Office of Advancement? Spend the next few minutes getting to know her a little better.

Where is your favourite place on campus?

The lawn in front of Corbett Hall. It’s expansive and really makes you feel like you’ve arrived somewhere substantial. Plus, it’s well-used by skateboarders, sunbathers, and other creatures. I once saw an epic psych-out between a rabbit and three magpies there.

Tablet or paper?

Tablet. I just love the feel of the iron chisel as it sinks into a good sandstone.

Name one thing you’ve brought to work from home.

A sweater. Two sweaters. Enterprise Square is drafty.

What is the one thing you can’t live without?

The CP Style Guide. I have been looking up the same dozen or so things, over and over, for years.

If you won airfare to anywhere in the world, where would you go?

How about if the ticket I won were an around-the-world, multi-stop ticket with an open-ended date? It’d start in Cambodia because I’ve always wanted to see Angkor Wat.

You can invite anyone — alive or dead, real or fictional — to dinner. Who would it be?

Ezra Klein because he has these amazing, rambling conversations with the guests on his eponymous podcast. I can’t imagine he’d ever run out of things to say or questions to ask. I might bring Malcolm Gladwell along to sum up the conversation at the end of the dinner in one of his grand unifying statements.

If you could switch jobs with someone else on campus for a week, what would you do?

I have the best job already, so it’s hard to say. But if I could also switch brains at the same time, I might choose to change places with a prof teaching high-level physics or math.

What does “uplifting the whole people” mean to you?

It means educating people with the expectation that they will make their communities a little better, or at least try.

If you could solve any problem in the world, what would it be?

I’d set the task to a group of business and economic whizzes to create a sustainable business model whereby we could support a vast and deep independent media that people can trust, even as they disagree with each other. This is a fractious age in which the content and quality of our conversations have been affected by the tools with which we share and consume information. We don’t even realize what we have lost.