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Coming out of high school I had a very large passion for musical theatre
and I imagine that that was what I wanted to do with my life and so
I saw a couple of different routes that I could take. One being a very
acting heavy training
in order to get me ready for the acting aspect of a role
on broadway or I could go for, you know, a musical theatre program
or somewhere where I was going to get very intense vocal training and
the way I viewed it at that point, I thought that I could use the most work
in the vocal areas of performance and so
I decided to major in vocal performance which led me to look at different
music schools.
Hofstra popped up right away because of its proximity to New York City,
all the opportunities that are available because you know Broadway is right
around the corner,
and so I ended up here and then
in my freshman year I was taking a class for the Honors College
called Culture & Expression with Professor Steven Smith
from the Comparative Literature and Languages Department and he...
I had taken Latin and Greek in high school
and I had a passion for the classics, and he really revived
that passion in me and convinced me my
first semester freshman year that I needed to be a classics major and
three years later now I couldn't be happier that I made that switch and I'm
planning to pursue it as a career.
I think the classics are so exciting for me because
they're really the seat of western civilization. All that we, as you know,
modern-day Americans know
and love or hate has come to us from
you know the Greeks first and then the Roman Empire
and these texts that we have from those times are
not only incredibly compelling as are any works of literature
but also very, very beautiful.
Even when we're talking about orations that were given in the Roman
Forum
for very political motives and that
had very explicit agendas to them that would seem
very dry to us, the literature, the wording,
the poetry in that prose is just
painstakingly beautiful. I find that a lot of the topics covered in the
classics are
incredibly relevant today only because they're matters of human experience
rather than matters of
the ancient world. My favorite author
of all time happens to be a Roman poet by the name of Ovid and
one of his primary focuses is in his work
is love and thats a theme that is not only relevant to the ancient world but
inherently relevant to human experience because it's something that we all go
through
at one time or another throughout the entirety of our lives
and something that is just really, very compelling on a basic human level.
The faculty
in the classics program at Hofstra University are absolutely phenomenal
Alloria Mark-Hayes who is our resident Latinist and Stephen Smith who was are
Hellinist
are really wonderful resources not only are they
brilliant classicists who do great work in the fields that they study
they're also wonderfully brilliant educators
and they really know how to, like I said for me, inspire that passion
for what we are studying and to really relate to students
on almost an equal level when it comes to academics. So my classes here haven't
been
you know pedantic lectures, they've been roundtable seminars where not only are
we translating, which is so critical for an undergraduate student in classics,
we're also analyzing these texts and we're
doing philological analysis and we're doing work that is typically reserved for the
graduate level of studies in classics
which is invaluable to an undergraduate student.
I
am graduating in May with two degrees one in music and one in classics.
I hope to pursue classics at the graduate level
or in a master's and a doctorate and eventually become a professor of
classics just like
two of my idols Gloria Marchese and Stephen Smith.