My name is Alison Trajlinek. I am a sophomore psychology major with minors in forensics and criminal justice. I come from a small town in upstate New York called Johnstown. I knew every person I graduated high school with. I consider myself to be pretty reserved around new people, but when I become comfortable I bloom. Outside of classes I work at a Dunkin Donuts near campus and at home I work at a supermarket. When I am not in class or at work you can typically find me hanging out with my boyfriend, missing my cat, or streaming movies or shows online.
I am the first person in my immediate family to attend college, so everything about my college experience has been so foreign to me and my parents. I sometimes feel that the odds are against me in comparison to my peers. But I guess I wouldn’t be wrong since first generation students graduation rates are lower than second or third generation college students.
My parents and maternal grandparents have never gotten a divorce. My parents have been married for 23 years and my grandparents have been for 40 years. Even though the divorce rate has gone down in the past decade, I feel like growing up around them makes me a deviant, especially when I was in high school. In high school only two of my friends had parents that either were not divorced or were not in the middle of a divorce. This really shaped a big part of me growing up, I value having my parents together way more than I would have if I did not see how divorce affected my friends.
In the novel Outsiders, Becker defines deviance as “…anything that varies too widely from the average,” (pg 4). I agree with this definition as well. It made me think of my own life because I happen to be left handed and considering that only 10% of the population are left handed, that strays way far from the average. A lot of people do not realize how much of a struggle it is to be left handed. I have to go to classes on the first day much earlier to find the one or two left handed seats that are in the classroom. Sitting at restaurants is always a challenge because I need to be on the end in order to avoid my arm colliding with the person sitting next to me.
When I was younger, my father introduced me to the sci-fi world called “Star Wars“. I then became absolutely obsessed with it, but the other kids at school said that since I was a girl that I shouldn’t like Star Wars because it was more of a boy thing. This annoyed me but I didn’t let it stop me from enjoying it. As Becker says, “…deviance is the failure to obey the rules,” (8) so if liking Star Wars has made me a deviant, I am proud of it.
Majoring in psychology is relatively new to me due to me changing my major recently. I am excited but also nervous about this change. There is kind of a negative connotation around changing my major, at least in my life. But it is normal for college students to change their major considering 80% of college students end up changing their major at some point in their college career. Psychology has proven to be more versatile than I first originally thought. As in The Sociological Imagination, it states “…the social sciences are becoming the common denominator of our cultural period…” (13). Social sciences such as psychology are becoming more accepted in our culture and I think that is great for social science majors ready to go out into the world.
Works Cited
Becker, Howard Saul. Outsiders; Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963.
Alison's Blog 