Personal Narrative

Interdisciplinary studies appealed to me as a major because I naturally have interdisciplinary traits. I have reliability in that I am always there for my wife, friends, teammates, classmates and co-workers. My rugby coach was giving out awards at the end of the season and gave me an award for reliability, saying I was always at practices, games and fundraisers, was right there for the plays, that I was there for the team. I am resilient because when faced with obstacles I have worked to overcome them. When I did not finish college in the timeframe my parents wanted and would fund, I dropped out for a year to get my finances in order. I got a job and worked with my advisor, financial aid and wife to work on how to finish college and finance it. I love diversity. I enjoy meeting new people and learning new things. Being one of the few white children in my elementary school in Washington, DC, I learned to respect and admire everyone’s differences and understand that they make us better people. I enjoy being in new social roles, especially ones that let me flex my initiative and be assertive. I was Virginia Tech’s LGBTA president for a year and part of the Executive Board for a few years before that and was able to be part of the launch team for the Safe Watch program and to help revamp the Safe Zone program. I have a broad education from being raised in Southeast DC, going to twelve years of Catholic school (was baptized Methodist but am a self declared agnostic), spending time in the Corps of Cadets, having two and a half years of Animal and Poultry Sciences and almost two years of art classes on top of my minors and major of Interdisciplinary Studies, as well as being newly married. That also means my interests are all over the place. I have had twelve years of soccer and eight years of band. Five year of rugby, countless art classes and sketch books, all my college year, and that is six and counting, of LGBTA support group. I have CD’s of Enya and Yanni right next to my Melissa Etheridge collection. I have Women, Creativity and the Arts next to Social Stratification and Inequality. However, of all these interdisciplinarian traits the one that started my path to interdisciplinary studies is my dissatisfaction with monodisciplinary constraints.

Since I was seven, I wanted to be a veterinarian, I could not even spell that until I was, well twenty. I wanted to work with animals and have a farm, then I got to college. Through my education I have found that is was hard for me to stay on one topic, one interest. I wanted to know everything and in college I found that I wanted to take some English classes on top of my Animal and Poultry Sciences classes, I actually enjoyed freshman English. So I took Topics of Literature by Women and Modern British Literature (loved Virginia Woolf but hated James Joyce). It was my Women’s Literature class that really got my attention, I was taught by a professor that also was part of the Women’s Studies department and was forever changed. She brought this whole different perspective to literature that my British Lit teacher did not. Reading the books not just for the topics, settings and characters but also for the slight shift in emphasis, Jane Eyre became so much more than a story about a governess and man but about the struggles of a woman in that era, of a strong-headed woman. I was hooked on readjusting my view of the world and ready to face society as a feminist.

Now to face society with my new view point I needed to understand society more. I needed to understand how people become what they are. So I decided to take a baby step and took gender relations, which went quite well with my feminist mindset. Sociology brought home a lot of my experiences and help me understand more about the interactions in society that I saw. It gave me the perspective of minority groups that I am not a part of but also a look into how roles in our society bring about and oppress these minorities. Sociology also helped me better understand things I wanted to do with my future and goals.

Taking juvenile delinquency and criminology along with all my classes focusing on inequality and minority relations helped bring me to the understand that I want to work either in a social worker or counselor role, hopefully focusing on youth and more personal to me, LGBTQ youth or HIV/AIDS cases. I have years of listening to friends and acquaintances work through their problems from romantic to coming out to figuring out how to pay the bills. So I feel that I can eventually fulfill the role as a counselor there to listen and help work through problems with juveniles and for some I will be able to relate. There is also my passion of HIV/ AIDS. I have been in charge of Virginia Tech’s LGBTA’s AIDS Awareness Week and helped expand it to dealing with not just education about protection but also about ways to help other countries like Africa and India with their epidemics, which brings in my minors of sociology and women’s studies. These countries have areas still set in the traditional gender roles that help spread the virus.

I feel that really I am supposed to be an interdisciplinarian. I have nothing but hungry for learning new ideas and perspective.