Dr. Sarah Walden never planned on being a professor. In fact, she considered a career in the medical field, marketing, or law, before she ultimately landed on academia.
“My parents were both professors and I was just kind of rebellious in the way that I just was not going to do what my parents did,” Walden said. “Eventually, I just had to admit to myself that the classes I liked the best were my English classes.”
Walden has had a unique full-circle experience as a graduate of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core (BIC) and now director of the same program. She describes herself as a BIC-er through and through, as it has continued to shape the way she thinks, teaches, and researches, from her first day of college to now.
“Getting to step into this role at this particular moment when there’s so many changes on the horizon for higher ed, so many challenges, is super exciting,” Walden said. “It’s going to be hard, but it’s going to be really rewarding.”
Growing up in Ohio and rounding out middle school and high school in Kentucky, Walden said her parents were adamant that she would attend school out of state when it came time for her to apply to college. Although her mother is an alumna herself, Walden wasn’t set on the University until she had the opportunity to tour campus.
“They didn’t want me to stay at home and go to college, they wanted me to go somewhere else, be independent, be on my own,” Walden said. “I looked at a couple of schools in Texas, and when I got to Baylor it just felt like home.”
She started as a University Scholar with concentrations in modern foreign languages and English, and was a member of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core (BIC), an honors core curriculum that replaces general education requirements.
As part of only the BIC’s fifth cohort of students, Walden remembers it as the Wild West, filled with uncharted territory that allowed the professors leading the courses and programs to be incredibly innovative in class.
The BIC’s emphasis on curiosity and experiential learning has been a feature of the program since its beginning, as professors within the new program constantly tried new ways of engaging students, Walden said.
“Everybody was constantly excited just to see different ways of teaching classes that we hadn’t thought of before,” Walden said. “This idea that core classes didn’t have to be lectures, but they could be really engaging discussions with students was a huge piece of it. There was a huge emphasis on asking good questions.”
Just as current BIC students continue to take trips to various religious landmarks as they study religious texts, Walden said she took a class trip to a Greek Orthodox church as a student, exploring faiths different from her own.
The BIC also had an emphasis on encouraging students to ask the next right question in order to better understand the world around them, she said. Walden saw this modeled in the fall of her junior year, as the BIC helped students process the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
“The BIC arranged panels of students and professors to help everybody process this big national event that had happened and the aftermath,” Walden said. “We could support one another, but it also tied in the education that we were having and this need to be curious and not always have the answers to very real political and social events that were happening.”
As Walden continued to develop in her undergraduate career and into her graduate education, she continued to find herself struggling to stay within a single lane as an English student. Interdisciplinary studies continued to pique her interest, as she ultimately found her calling in rhetoric and how culture shapes our views, with a particular focus on social media’s impact on that culture.
“I think it was the BIC that was like, ‘What is the next right question?’ and that always allowed me to be adaptable in my research because it kept me asking really interesting questions,” Walden said.
Walden graduated from Baylor in 2003 and attended graduate school at the University of Mississippi. Returning to Baylor wasn’t a possibility Walden had initially considered, but when her husband received an offer to work for the English department in 2010, she moved back to Waco with him and began teaching courses in the BIC and English department as an adjunct professor.
In 2013 she received her tenure-track position and has spent most of her time working with the BIC since then. She served as the director of the University Scholars programs from 2025 to 2026 and was recently appointed as director of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core.
“It feels very lucky because I never thought I would get to teach in the BIC, so the fact that I’m teaching in it and now directing it just feels unreal,” Walden said. “Eighteen-year-old me never saw that coming.”
Dr. Darren Middleton, the former director of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core, remembers meeting Walden in the fall of 2022. He said her vision and dedication to the program impressed him when they met, and continues to impress him to this day.
“Over the years she has helped all of us, not just me, to identify what’s required to ensure the BIC’s flourishing,” Middleton said. “Dr. Walden possesses an agile, highly creative mind, a compassionate heart, and an unclouded sense of the program’s future.”
Middleton recalled an Invitation to Excellence recruitment event where one of Walden’s former students applauded Walden’s generosity of spirit and sense of intellectual adventure. He said there are countless other students that would sing Walden’s praises because of her mentorship and genuine interest in helping her students succeed.
“Her desire to assist Baylor students in succeeding in their work and in life itself is demonstrated by the constant stream of undergraduates who take full advantage of her editorial expertise,” Middleton said. “She inspires a new generation of BIC-ers to consider seriously how their Baylor education can equip them to transform our world.”
Since returning to Baylor, Walden has been amazed by how higher education has continued to grow and change. The honors program hadn’t formed until her final years at the University, and Baylor didn’t have its R1 status yet. The challenges and opportunities posed to students are incredibly different to the ones students faced while she received her undergraduate degree, she said.
The BIC is a program rooted in the idea that students should be able to ask questions without worrying that asking the wrong question could harm their academic standing. With increased stress on GPA, though, she said she hopes to cultivate an environment where students aren’t afraid to continue asking these difficult questions.
“The experience that students have is already going to be different than the experience that I had because the process of even getting into the classroom is so much different than the process I had,” Walden said. “I want to make sure that students know that they’re going to be okay.”
With Baylor becoming a Research 1 institution, Walden is also working with faculty that are navigating new terrain. Walden said while she was a student, the professor’s only role was to teach students, while research currently makes up at least half of BIC faculty members’ workload.
“I have to make sure that all of the innovation and the commitment to the program that was so prevalent in the beginning — with people whose sole purpose was to teach — doesn’t get lost,” Walden said. “We have to be a lot more flexible about how we can allow our research to inform our teaching and vice versa.”
She said she believes BIC faculty have a unique opportunity to incorporate their research into the classroom, something she is already beginning to see current faculty applying in their lectures. An example of this is Dr. Davide Zori, a current BIC professor with research concentrations in the medieval world and viking expansion, who utilizes his knowledge in World Cultures II lectures where students have a unit on viking expansion.
“I think there’s so much more we can do with bringing our research into the classroom,” Walden said.
