My name is Cathy Yancey. I'm a senior and I am majoring in chemistry with a minor in education. It is my plan to be a high school chemistry teacher. Teaching is the only thing that I really have ever felt that I would enjoy doing. My main goal in life is to help other people and hopefully teaching will allow me to do that. I love chemistry because I want to understand how everything around me works and chemistry really does explain how everything in the world functions.
I haven't taken many english classes, but the ones I have were good experiences. It's nice to look at things from a different perspective than I would in a science classroom. In chemistry, we read things to get the content. We don't really care how the content is delivered as long as it makes sense. However, when I read for an english class I have to force myself to analyze how things are written. This sometimes allows me to actually get more of the content because I have to think about what is important to the author. The more I do this the more I enjoy it.
I guess what I'm looking for the most from this class, is looking at race from a different perspective. I grew up in an area that wasn't very diverse so it is sometimes difficult for me to fully appreciate how different people feel about the issue. I have read some books by African American authors, but most of them centered around the Vietnam War or the Great Depression. I'm really interested in looking at books and stories from different time periods.
I have a really hard time labelling myself. I don't really feel like I fit into a "label". My family does not have a very recent immigrant background (my entire family had immigrated here by the mid-1850's), but I suppose that if you had to give me a "hyphen" it would be German-American. This did have some influence on my upbringing because many of the people in my hometown had similar backgrounds. We all had very similar traditions that could be tied back to the German influence.
I grew up on a small dairy farm in a very rural area of Northern New York. This had a huge influence on my life because as a kid had to work and help out on the farm. This built up my sense of responsibility. Also it gave me huge amounts of respect for people who choose (or are forced into) jobs that have very little glory, but make life possible for all of us. I greatly dislike people who look down on the working class. However, I sometimes have a hard time going home and hanging out with the people that I grew up with. Many of them have already entered the working class because they didn't go to college. I guess being away at college for three and a half years has changed me too.