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Hi, I’m Quinn and I’m a junior! I’m studying math and statistics, computer science, and educational studies. I’m hoping to teach math for a few years and then see if I am enjoying that or if I want to go to grad school to do education research, statistical consulting, curriculum development, or be an administrator- lots of options! Outside of classes I also play field hockey and run track, am co-president of Kehilah: Swarthmore’s Jewish Community, am on the Math/Stat Student Advisory Council, am in the chorus during the spring semesters, and have been a Pirate for a few. I also did research this summer with Ann Renninger and am continuing with that!

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I definitely do have an accent with some words. I’ve grown up right outside Philly so I apparently say some vowel sounds differently than my friends here but I like the way I talk. Some things like “on,” “orange,” and “water” (if I’m speaking quickly especially) are different than how most people pronounce them. Since my dad is from New York I think some of his tendencies have been passed down to me too. I also write the exact same way I speak, so things tend to come across informally and to trying to make my writing sound “good” it takes a lot longer. I also blame this partly on being a math person - not English.

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In my own schools, I have never experienced being a language minority. I took Spanish classes all through middle and high school, and just Spanish 008 at Swarthmore. I used to be very comfortable speaking in Spanish but I haven’t used it in so long that I’m a little scared I’m losing it -- something to get back to. Our ESL program in my high school was in the middle of the building which I think helped kind of integrate the two groups, and I made a bunch of friends in that class that spoke only Spanish. During my class periods when I was supposed to be taking an online asynchronous class, I spent tons of time just talking to these friends. I learned a lot of Spanish just by conversing with them, and it was really cool when they would find whatever I said funny or awkward and really nicely correct me, and be excited when it improved.

I also had a lot of experiences using my Spanish at the pool I worked at since none of the other lifeguards could speak Spanish and some of the families there didn’t speak English. These experiences have been outside of school, and I’ve found that it is way easier to use Spanish if the person I am talking to doesn’t speak English. Even if I don’t know all of the words I can at least talk around what I am trying to say and get my point across, while I would panic and switch back to English if I know the other person speaks English too.

I don’t know if this really counts but I can read Hebrew characters too, but I don’t know what they are saying, from my synagogue and Jewish experiences.

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Hi, I’m Quinn and I’m a junior! My linguistic autobiography isn’t super interesting especially since my mom’s side of the family has been here since the revolutionary war, but my dad’s family immigrated in the early 1900s from Russia. They came through Ellis Island where their last name became Basewitz, and they lived in New York speaking Russian and Yiddish. I asked my grandmother a lot about her family before she died but she was losing her memory so I didn’t get all of the bits and pieces. I think living in New York they were surrounded by a lot of immigrants and languages, but also in a populated area where English was around them a lot. All of my family that I’ve met spoke English, but my dad’s family uses Yiddish phrases all the time. This is pretty common in the Ashkenazi Jewish community, so has some sense of cultural identity. I don’t know a lot of what they mean exactly, but I’ve definitely found some of them in my vocabulary.