Megan Murphy
Hello everyone, my name is Megan Murphy and I was born and raised here in San Diego. Just to start off with the basics, I am a Business Administration major, leaning towards an emphasis in finance. Both of my parents and my dad’s parents as well actually, all graduated from San Diego State and three out of the four of them from the college of business. So, I guess you could say it runs in the family. I have three younger siblings, two brothers who are in 9th and 10th grades and my sister is going to be a freshman at UCSD this fall. More about myself now, one of my most favorite things to do is go skiing. My mother taught me when I was 5 years old and I have loved going to the slopes ever since. It has kind of become our thing, since we are the best at it out of our family members. We try to take a ski trip every year, some of our favorite spots are Mammoth Lakes and Lake Tahoe here in California. But when I am not in the snow, I love exploring San Diego. It is one of the most beautiful and diverse places that I have ever been to, although I do also love to travel and see new places in our world. I am fascinated with the culture differences and different types of beauty found all over our planet.
This leads me to one of the very reasons that I was interested in taking this class. As I said, I am absolutely fascinated by the different cultures and traditions around the world and it is just amazing just how different some places are from what we are used to. Now this is not me saying that I like history, because I would not necessarily make that statement, I guess I like to learn about other places in a more informal way. And this class seemed like that in a way, and also it is a more specified topic that discusses Italians relationships with many different cultures, which seemed to me more of my style than your traditional history class. Another big reason that I was interested in this class opposed to others, was that I am starting to plan my study abroad and for a long time now I have had a desire to go to Italy. It has a beautiful language and beautiful culture that I would love to get the privilege of learning more about and ultimately living in for some amount of time. I am excited to become more familiar with their culture and some of their worldly history and interactions.
I also realized that I do in fact have some experience with migration, after I initially thought that I did not. My aunt by marriage migrated here from Colombia during the 1970s, to Florida first and then she ultimately ended up here in San Diego. But she came over here when she was just a child and went to school and college here in the states and became a United Stated citizen. She has told us about many fears and struggles that come from migrating to a foreign place and what comes with trying to become a citizen. I respect her very much and look up to her in my life, because she is very strong and has a wider worldly perspective, being from a less fortunate country such as Colombia and then going on to make a life for herself here in the United States. In addition to her, I do have several friends who live in Tijuana and come here for school or were born there or have family that came here from there, since we are so close to them. Now that I am reflecting on my interactions with migration and migrants, I am realizing that I do in fact have experience with this sort of thing, and pretty close to me as well. Therefore, I am interested in studying the Italian migrations more in depth in order to gain yet another new perspective on this topic and worldly relations.