Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

Identity is what makes one person or group stand out from others. One’s identity can either be classified by other people through first impressions or by personality and actions. One’s ethnicity and childhood neighborhood can also be huge in identity classification. All these play a part in identity somehow, but identity is made by oneself and only that person can make or change their identity by learning from their past and looking up to the future. I, Nicholas Escoto, am a freshman college student at the University of Massachusetts, born in Boston and raised in Milton, Massachusetts. I am of Dominican ethnicity, but I am still an American. I have a very big family and all of us are very close. I love to go out and meet new people and dance is my passion. I am currently a Kinesiology major and someday hope to become a personal trainer, teach dance classes, and be able to support my own family that I wish to someday have. All these things did not come from nowhere; there is a reason for everything, which makes my identity. All my life I looked forward to college, and I knew it was going to be some of the best years of my life. I was always looked at as the one to make it my family and get a degree in college. My brother who is now twenty one years old never went to college but after high school he started his own landscaping business, which is still growing, and is now doing very well for himself. This also gave me a lot of motivation to go to college, seeing him with a nice big house and buying so many brand new nice things made me think to myself, “Wow! Anthony is making so much money with just a high school diploma imagine what I can do with a degree from college.” Being Dominican and living in Milton, a town outside of Boston that is predominantly white people, and has the biggest percentage of Irish people in America, definitely played a big role in my identity. Milton has given me a strong Boston accent, which causes me to receive the comment “you talk like a white boy”. When I go to the “hood” and tell them someone that I am Dominican they know right away that I did not grow up in the city, then I say “I grew up in the suburban town of Milton but I’ve been dancing since I was out the womb and I’ll take a plate of rice and beans over McDonalds or anything else any day of the week”. Dancing has helped me maintain my identity through my culture. My first semester at UMass I joined the ballroom dance team, and this semester I am taking my first legitimate dance class ever. During my high school years and childhood I only knew how to dance hip hop and Latin music such as merengue, salsa, bachata, and reggaeton, but then ballroom opened my horizons to many other different styles of dancing and cultures. When I dance the new styles that I have just learned such as the waltz, foxtrot, and quickstep I have to take a break from my Hispanic culture and almost become someone else. This is a problem for me because a Latin beat is always going on in my head always causing me to move my shoulders and hips, and makes me get criticized by my captains who say, “stop moving your shoulders!, that’s not ballroom”. When I dance Latin music such as mambo, or cha cha, people right away know that I am Hispanic from my movement. One time at a Ballroom Competition I was dancing, just fooling around to some salsa music, and a random girl came up to me afterwards and asked me if I was Dominican. I said yes, and asked her how she knew. She then replied “I can tell from your moves”. My aspiration of becoming a successful sports trainer has always been in my mind as a profession for me, but senior year of high school in Ms. Diegoli’s Anatomy and Physiology class made it official. I felt like I needed to pick a major for college and I was thinking of many different things, then Ms. D assigned a project that involved picking a profession that involved Anatomy and Physiology and writing a report on it. I chose the profession of sports medicine. I enjoyed doing the project and when I had completed it, I figured that it would be the right profession for me. Anatomy and Physiology and how the human body works were always interesting to me, and I always was very into sports and fitness. I felt like it would be the only thing that I can be interested in for the rest of my life other than dancing of course. My culture, hobbies, interests, family, hometown, and future aspirations of having a successful job and a beautiful family all play a part in my identity. I do not really know who I am exactly at the moment, but I hope to find this out someday. I feel that this is just a recollection of my thoughts on who I think I am and who I hope to become.