MAJOR: SPEECH LANGUAGE AND HEARING SCIENCES
WHAT ARE YOU INVOLVED IN ON CAMPUS?
“I am part of the Spectrum Players who are having their opening night of their fall show tonight [Friday November 21, 2014] which is The Pillowman. I am also in the Hofstra chapter of The National Students Speech Language and Hearing Association for which I just became one of the fundraising chairs.”
WHAT IS YOUR ROLE IN THE PILLOWMAN AND WHAT IS THE PLAY ABOUT?
“The Pillowman is the story of a writer who has written a series—quite a long series—of graphic short stories, which depict the brutal deaths and murders of young children. When the play starts he is being interrogated by two police officers because in the town in which he lives there has been a series of murders of children that directly correlate to a few select stories that he has written. The play deals with his involvement in the murders or if there is an involvement on his part and why someone would choose to act out these horrible stories in real life and who chose to. My part is the younger kid version of the writer’s older brother. I come on the stage on a couple of scenes that are flashbacks… My character really helps shed light on why the present version of the writer’s brother is the way that he is.”
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PART OF BEING INVOLVED WITH THE SPECTRUM PLAYERS?
“My favorite part is meeting a new cast and going through this journey with them from the beginning to where we all just have scripts and an idea to the production to when it has all come together. We all just work together; we were this group of people that had no idea who the other one was, and now we are all a team to make something really outstanding.”
WHAT IS THE MOST EMBARASSING THING THAT HAS HAPPENED TO YOU ON STAGE?
“I don’t know; I have said some line flubs; I have laughed a lot where I shouldn’t have. One thing that was really embarrassing was I was in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and one of the characters slaps me across the face, and we didn’t do stage slaps. They were all real slaps. I was wearing glasses at the time and she slapped me and it caught me really off guard, so I turned my head and I realized that my glasses were no longer on my face. For the rest of that scene I was trying to remember what the rest of my lines were while I was searching for my glasses because they were my actual glasses, and I really needed them.”
WHAT DO YOU DO FOR THE NATIONAL STUDENTS SPEECH LANGUAGE AND HEARING ASSOCIATION?
“The National Student Speech Language and Hearing Association is a national student branch of the professional organization, The American Speech and Hearing Association, which you can apply to be a part of when you are a licensed speech pathologist or audiologist. What we do is a lot of fundraising for ourselves. We donate to different organizations in the community. One thing that we are really adamant about is giving money to the Saltzman Center on the south side of campus, which houses the speech and hearing clinic. We have a lot of community service opportunities and some of those have included going to the Mill Neck School for the Deaf.”
WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN TEN YEARS?
“In ten years, my goal by then is to have attained my bachelors, my masters degree in speech pathology as well as my PhD. I really hope to be living somewhere in the city if I can afford to. Probably doing speech pathology work at a hospital.”