On student/faculty relationship

Picture yourself in another university where you're going to be taking an intro class or any class from 30 to 100 students. The professor is probably not going to know you, and he is not going to dedicate his time to helping you because chances are, he has other classes to teach. Students who come here can actually take advantage of the student-faculty relationship because classes are usually pretty small and you have an advisor set up for you. I think there's the idea that the professors are here for you, and that's definitely a plus at Marlboro.

On changing direction

Before Tom Means was hired I was really disappointed by the college's decision to bring linguistics onto campus. I didn't feel like that would bring a structured language program into Marlboro. I remember my first meeting with him was actually pretty positive, and it changed my perspective.

What Tom does is applied linguistics. Basically, you are studying how language should be taught in a classroom and it can also be applied to other environments like the streets or a job in a different country. That really attracted me to the field because one of the things that I was really having trouble with was that in more mainstream schools, if you were to graduate with a degree in Spanish, your focus would primarily be in Spanish literature. I wasn't too interested in literature to begin with, so last year I was pretty stuck with what I was going to do with Spanish and French.

Before Tom came here I really took the term linguistics for granted because I didn't seem to notice other fields in it. Now, since I'm taking Spanish and French I want to tie them into applied linguistics and see how, say, if I become a language teacher, I could teach those languages effectively to students.

On discovering language in Ecuador

I went to Ecuador for a month and worked in an orphanage. Going abroad and utilizing Spanish and working with the people in the orphanages as a volunteer really helped me to realize that this is what I want to do.

It was a street children's project and basically as a volunteer I helped these kids stay off the streets. There was one girl there, she was about 18 years old and she was enrolling in one of the nearby universities. She lives in the orphanage and through the orphanage she was able to go there through funding. It was just really nice to see someone who doesn't have a lot of privilege do something like that.

On campus life

I like how campus life is close-knit. I think for the most part people are generally respectful and willing to get to know other people, and people are really friendly. That's not something I'm used to, I grew up in New York where you don't say "hi" to everyone you walk by, you're not trying to get to know everyone. There are definitely social groups at Marlboro, but not cliques like most other places. People are willing to branch out and it's not a big deal. I think when it gets down to it, people just want to get to know people and share interests and learn about different personality types.

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