Photo Courtesy of Leah DeHaemer 

“I just got back from studying abroad in Greece, so it’s my first time being a part of the student body again and sitting in the Student Center and people-watching. I started being a tour guide – I volunteered freshman year, and I volunteered the entire year – and then sophomore year I got an official job and got a fancy gold nametag. I just wanted to be a tour guide because I like talking to people, and I like meeting new people and convincing them to like the same things that I like, which is Hofstra. The people are really awesome, all of my coworkers [are]. And meeting new people is fun, which is also why I went abroad, because I got to meet new people. [While studying abroad,] I traveled [to] a bunch of places. I went to Rome and Munich. All of my friends studied abroad in different places; there was Florence, Rome, London, Ireland and me, in Greece. And then for Oktoberfest we all met up in Munich and went together, so, you know, Roll Pride, but in Germany. I went to Rome and saw some of my friends from Hofstra there too, and same with London. Even when we were in different countries, we all still hung out together because we became friends at Hofstra. I’m [also] in DEASL, which is the Deaf Education and American Sign Language (ASL) club. We teach basics, and we get to go out into the community – like, the deaf community. We go to Mill Neck Fall Festival, and just, like, observe deaf culture and learn things. And that’s really fun, because there’s not a lot of ASL classes. ASL doesn’t count as a language requirement at Hofstra, because they think that it’s just like English, but [ASL users] have their whole own culture and their own grammar system. So technically it’s a whole different language, but they only teach ASL 1 and ASL 2, and they only count for credit if you have a very specific minor or major, like speech or disability studies. I’m a disability studies minor, specifically because I wanted to take [ASL] for credit. So that’s a whole issue that we’ve been getting the run-arounds about for a very long time, and it should be considered a language. And that’s that on that.”