Name: Amelia Lindstrom
Hometown: Lostant, IL (it’s a town of 500 people, but technically I live in a cornfield a few minutes away from town)
Graduation Year: 2018
Dorm: Ryan Hall
What are your majors, and how did you choose them?
I study Honors Math… When selecting freshman classes, I was guided by the desire to somehow focus my education on mathematics. I tested into non-Honors Calc II, but someone from the Math Department — probably Jeff Diller, the best math professor I’ve ever had — had sent out a letter to math-inclined students about this hip new thing called Honors Calc I. The course was pitched as a rigorous look at the already familiar material of calculus, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to firm up my math foundations. The class was incredibly difficult because it focused more on proofs than computation, but the collaborative struggle of all of us students contributed to a sort of sense of community. I declared the Honors Math major in part because of this community, and in part because I could see myself becoming a more precise thinker and problem-solver as a result of that first class.
…and Spanish: Coming into college, I was thinking to myself, “I want to gain a very concrete skill after my four years here.” I also didn’t want to waste the four years of high school Spanish I had under my belt, so I decided that by the end of my undergrad years, I should be able to speak Spanish fluently. The best way I could think of to get there was to take a Spanish class every semester. It turns out that the full Spanish major is only two more classes on top of this (for a total of 10 classes), so it was a natural next step to declare the major.
What’s the coolest class you’ve taken at ND?
It was called Jorge Luis Borges and the Ethics of Betrayal, and it was a 40000-level Spanish class. The title turned out to be pretty deceptive because the class wasn’t about Borges — we “killed the author” within the first few weeks — despite the fact that we read many of his poems and short stories. It also didn’t explicitly touch on betrayal, and ethics was only mentioned in passing. In actuality, the class was a journey through certain chunks of theory from the fields of philosophy and psychology, for the purpose of understanding literature in a different way. We read Saussure, Nietzsche, Barthes, and some guy called Deleuze, all of whose works were supremely confusing… until they just clicked with the texts, and the way I perceived the whole world was completely transformed. (To give you an example, we talked about the concept of “becoming,” and I found myself walking out of class and onto campus contemplating the becoming of the South Quad squirrels. It was dizzying.) This class will stay with me for the rest of my life, both because of how it wrecked my preconceived notion of what Spanish classes can be like, and also because the theory we worked with was so compelling. Not coincidentally, the professor is now my senior thesis adviser.
What are you involved with on campus or in South Bend?
Right now, I mostly do stuff related to my job at the Writing Center. I have normal tutoring hours, but I also (co-)lead two community-oriented projects. First, I’m collaborating with a talented coworker to design and teach a writing class for high school students (this is part of the Upward Bound college prep program). We’re planning to teach our students — all of them juniors — how to develop their rhetorical sense, both to be able to see how other people argue and to be able to argue themselves. Our goal is to have them practice applying these skills in timed situations, like the issue essays on the ACT. Second, I lead a project where a few Writing Center tutors hold walk-in hours for South Bend community members at the public library downtown. These are people who don’t usually have access to ND resources: junior high and high school students, other colleges’ students, folks who’ve gone back to school after years of working, people writing resumes and cover letters for jobs, and people who simply want to write creatively, but don’t know where to start or how to get support.
On a smaller scale, I volunteer weekly at La Casa de Amistad for a CBL class I am taking. La Casa is a Latino community organization on the West Side of South Bend that provides a variety of services, most of them educational. I tutor 6th-12th grade students with whatever homework they bring to La Casa’s after-school program.
Favorite Book? One Hundred Years of Solitude (or, the ⅓ of Cien Años de Soledad that I had time to read in Spanish) by Gabriel García Márquez. If you’ve read it, I don’t have to explain why it’s my favorite, and if you haven’t, words cannot convey the sentiment I feel for this book.
Favorite Color? Purple
Favorite Show? Favorite is hard; I can tell you what I’m currently watching: The Mindy Project, which unfailingly makes me feel pumped about life; Transparent, which is in part about transgender identities, in part about Jewish identities, and entirely about family (and also ill-advised hookups); and Rick and Morty, which should be self-explanatory.
Favorite Dining Hall Food? South Dining Hall Christmas Dinner roast; it’s a slab of meat the size of a plate. (For all my vegetarian friends, there’s some really well-seasoned roasted veggies that they serve for that meal, so don’t miss out!)
Best thing you’ve cooked in a dorm kitchen? A copycat of Olive Garden’s chicken and gnocchi soup; it’s the kind of thing that warms the soul, and also has enough different cooking tasks so that it’s a good recipe for bringing other people into the food preparation process.
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