Personal Introduction:
My name is Alison Donovan. I am a Senior Marketing major with a management minor. I have mixed feelings about graduating in a few months. I am excited for the future and what is to come, but I also am sad to leave my second home for the past four years. Outside of school, I am a social media intern for the Siena College Research Institute. I am hoping to work at a marketing agency or run a company’s social media accounts when I graduate. In my free time I am usually hanging out with my friends or boyfriend, or watching reality tv. Some of my favorites include Real Housewives of New Jersey, Temptation Island, and Vanderpump Rules.
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Family Background:
I come from a family of four humans and two dogs. The average household in 2019 in the United States is 2.52, but compared to other families I definitely come from a smalller household. I have one sibling, an older sibling that now lives in New Jersey. My whole life strangers have told me how much me and my sister look alike, and we often get mistaken for twins, but I don’t think we look that much alike. I am very close with my grandparent’s on my mom’s side, they are my biggest supporters and my best friends. I don’t think I would have accomplished what I have if they have not been by my side cheering for me. I recently got my DNA tested through Ancestry DNA. I found out I was 50% English, 43% Irish, 4% Swedish, and 3% Baltics. I was not surprised getting these results, but I did think I would be more Irish than I am. My grandfather on my mom’s side is 100% Irish, although he was not born there. My grandma is 58% Irish and 42% English. My grandma on my dad’s side is 85% English and 12% Irish. I have always celebrated being Irish and have grown up learning the culture, but I look forward to learning more about the other countries I come from, and hopefully I can visit them all someday.
Hometown:
I grew up in Troy, NY for 18 years of my life and the summer before my senior year, I moved to Cropseyville, NY which is about 15 minutes from my hometown. Not much changed, I still got to attend the same high school and I kept the same friends, I just lived farther away from everything. My high school, Troy High does not have the best reputation locally. Many people were shocked when I first told them that is where I attended school. I think it is a wonderful school, and if I did not attend that school I would not have graduated high school with over 30 college credits. Troy High was placed in the top 20% for the most diverse schools in New York State. It consists of 48% white students, 33% black, 14% Hispanic, and 1% Asian. We moved because my dad finally got to build his dream house in the countryside. Troy has a population of around 50,000 people, with about 69.8% white. I live about 35 minutes from Siena, but I still live on campus. I definitely wanted to live on campus where ever I ended up, but Siena was my first option.
My Deviance:
Becker states that “deviance is created by the responses of people to particular kinds of behavior” (p. 18). One characteristic of me that would be considered deviant is being left handed. Becker states, “The simplest view of deviance is essentially statistical, defining as deviant anything that varies widely from the average” (pg. 4). Only 10% of Americans are left-handed, which means we are definitely not in the average. Although I cannot control what hand I write with, the way others respond the left handers makes it deviant. For example, when I go to a new classroom on my first day of classes, there will only be one left handed desk in a class full of 30 desks. That means I have to get there early and fight for the one desk and have to sit wherever the desk is, or I have to be uncomfortable for the whole rest of the semester. Also, when I go to the post office and pick up a package, they always hand me the device to sign for it as if am right handed. This causes me to have to awkwardly grab it so I can properly sign for the package with my left hand. The hardest struggle of being left-handed is eating dinner with others. If not planned out, it’s very difficult because the person next to me and I keep bumping arms when we are eating. This causes people to not want to sit next to me when we go out because it interrupts their meal. Although it is challenging to be left handed, it is something I have lived with my whole life and I have learned to adapt.
A true defiant behavior that I have just started to get into, and I would consider myself a beginner, is skateboarding. My boyfriend loves skateboarding, and one day I decided I want him to teach me. Although, I don’t see myself doing any tricks in the near future, I do enjoy skating around with him. In the skater subculture, they value creativity, risk, and freedom. There are no rules or penalties to skateboarding, and it can be done essentially anywhere. People outside this subculture could view skating as dangerous for the self and others. The act is deviant in itself, but also because of the fact that only 23.9% of females are skateboarders. When skateboarding first was invented, the participants would definitely be considered pure deviant. According to Becker, pure deviant is “that which both disobeys the rule and is perceived as doing so” (pg.20). Skateboarding was even banned in Norway for 11 years because of the perceived dangers of the sport. Skateboarding is definitely more widely accepted, as you can buy a board basically anywhere now, including Walmart. Still today if you look around public areas there are no skateboarding signs, which for some skaters make them want to skate there more. This act is deviant, because the skaters are aware of the signs and are choosing to ignore them, and because the perception that people not in the skating subculture have on skaters.
References:
Becker, Howard Saul. Outsiders; Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963.
Alison Donovan 