By Alexis Stakem MA '28
Some people see the liberal arts and STEM fields as being in constant conflict. However, Bryan Serinese ‘91 BA is a Villanova University alum who embodies the melding of these two broad fields.
Last spring, Serinese reached out to Villanova’s English department to gift us a poetry phone. The poetry phone is an old rotary phone that has been rewired to play the dialer/listener/caller one of 333 poems upon dialing any three-digit number – a clear physical representation of intermingling between technology, poetry, and performance art.
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| Serinese with the Poetry Phone in Villanova's English Department office |
Serinese’s father worked for Bell Labs, now AT&T, and they built their first computer together in 1976. While at Villanova, Serinese also minored in computer science, which at the time was a relatively small department, housed in the basement of Mendel Hall. Self-effacingly, he says to have chosen, or “downgraded,” to computer science he “couldn’t hack [it in] electrical engineering.”
Now a Project Manager at Agilent Technologies, a company responsible for developing biology research supplies, Serinese helps individuals communicate their ideas to a broad array of audiences, all with various levels of technical and background knowledge.
As he explains, “Someone [will have] an idea, and they don’t know how to express it because they’re so focused on the idea and they have such a specific background… I can help them explain it and document it for someone who has zero background in that.”
Being able to articulate another person’s feelings, ideas, or worldviews are what Serinese consider to be the greatest benefit of studying literature.
“[Poetry] is about what’s not being said and the intentional interpretation you have to bring to it… It’s always about the words. My interpretation or the connotation I bring to a word may be different from the poet or may be different from you. So, I think that’s the beauty of it. Everyone brings something different.”
Beyond the poetry phone itself, Serinese has continued to interact with art throughout different periods of his life, whether that be in an experiential role or as the creator. He has written a zombie musical for his children titled, Carl’s School for the Apocalypse. Carl’s School lives on through the poetry phone, in fact – dial 888 to hear “Zombie Love” and 666 to hear “I Found My Purpose in the Apocalypse,” both of which are songs written and produced for the musical. Serinese has also attended Burning Man several times over, and in one instance was led out of a whiteout by means of a hardcore rock and roll band’s continued playing.
“This guy’s playing rock and roll in the whiteout and just not stopping. They were our beacon. He's jamming out on heavy metal guitar, and… we come up and [now] we’re like 5 feet in front of them. [When] we finally saw them, we were like ‘Thank you, thank you.’”
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| The cover for Carl's School for Zombie Self-Defense |
Serinese’s creative, communicative, and technological life has given him a great perspective on a liberal arts education, and he advises current students that, “You certainly didn’t waste your time because you will continue using these skills in your personal life... Keep that faith in [a liberal arts degree], just keep telling yourself that. Other people will tell you too, and those are the ones you want to listen to.”
