Introductions: About me

I was pretty much born and raised in a little town called Beaver, Pennsylvania. It's a little north of Pittsburgh, so I just usually say that I'm from Pittsburgh. It's a lot easier than trying to say and describe exactly where I'm from. Beaver's a really pretty place; it's flanked by two rivers, the Beaver River and the Ohio River and it's full of trees (the town, not the rivers). It's a pretty quaint place--we have a main street and all that entails. A few years ago, there was a streetscape project in which all of the utility lines were placed underground so to provide a better, more unobscured view of the town. We had the same mayor for 50 years, I think--it's in the Guiness Book of World Records. He lived down the street from me in some condos. Beaver's just a place where everyone knows everyone else. The area of Pennsylvania that I live in places high value on ethnicity and celebrating one's ethnic heritage, which is a tradition I grew up with. A number of people from my grandparents' (on my father's side) Italian villiage all moved to the same town about 20 minutes from where I grew up and they still celebrate some of the same traditions, including their villiage's patron saint. My mother's family celebrates their Serbian and Croatian hertiages. I grew up surrounded by this.

My freshman year, I took a year of Italian. At that point in time, I really wanted to minor in Italian. I stayed with it the first year because I really like my Italian professor. She had just moved here from Rome, where she had been attending university, and she was really young and laid back. She taught the entire class in Italian after the first week, so it was really a sink-or-swim experience for us. I've realized that my listening skills are probably a lot better than my speaking ones, because we had to interpret what she was saying. Alessandra didn't say much in English, so you had to figure out what she was saying for yourself or ask in Italian with hand signals.

Outside of the US, I have been to Canada, and that's about it. Not too interesting, really. But for awhile, I wanted to live in Italy (hence the Italian minor). That changed when I added a human rights minor and really looked at what I wanted to do with my life. Now I think that I would like to live in another country, but maybe not permanently as the continent that I would like to live in is Africa and I really think my parents would not be too happy with that. I would love to do non-profit public relations work in some international health sector and if that took me to live in Africa, I would be really excited. I've always wanted to go to Africa, and I think experiencing Africa would be amazing. Going to a European country, while different from the United States, still bears similarities to American culture. But African culture is so different that I think it would be amazing to be emersed in it for a long period of time. I think that's the only way that I could truly understand the people in whatever country I would live in--you have to live with the people to understand them.

I hope to gain insight into how to communite interculturally from this course, as I do plan on working internationally some day. I want to work for a non-profit that deals with global health issues, so learning about interacting with another culture will be really helpful for me.