Invasion of privacy: Hannah Myers
Photo courtesy of Hannah Myers
Hannah Myers is an English literature major here at SUNY Geneseo who is finishing out her final semester here before graduation. She has also served as the news editor for The Lamron for the past year. As a final homage, and as our way to show her how much her fellow editorial staff has appreciated her dedication and endless searching for coverage, I sat down with her to conduct a final “debrief” of her time at The Lamron and SUNY Geneseo at large.
Myers’s career in academia has taken many different paths over the past three-and-a-half years, with her having declared four different majors in total. Originally, Hannah was an attendant of University at Albany to study human biology on the pre-med track, but after completing a semester, she discovered her passions in science dealt more with how the brain interacts in medicine. This inspired her to not only change her major to neuroscience but also for her transfer schools to find a school that offered the program she was looking for that fit her academic needs. Thus, her journey at Geneseo began.
Myers remarks that she found maintaining her passion for academia became very difficult during this time as it was the peak of the pandemic and she was very isolated at the time. During this, she lost a lot of her love for the sciences and cites that at some points she even considered dropping out entirely. While she sees how going through a global medical catastrophe might have strengthened that scientific spark for others, after a semester as a neuroscience major, she decided continuing on that academic path was simply not feasible for her. She then had a short, and largely unremarkable stint as a business major, but in a desire to rediscover that reverence for learning she had as a high school student, she decided to declare a major to follow her life-long hobby and staunch decompression field: English.
She cites this change, and specifically her experiences in Native American Literature with Professor Caroline Woidat, as the exact movement she needed to regain steam in her educational career and ride it through. Even with all this change, Myers still is accomplishing the feat of being able to graduate a semester early.
Being adaptable and willing to change seems to be a staple of Hannah Myers’s life, with her humble origins as a member of a military family. Throughout her life, Myers has moved many times, living in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, and New York at one point or another. There even was a span of about two years where her family lived between houses and she lived with a childhood friend for six months, and then with her dad at his good friend's house, sleeping on their couch for around a year and a half, all while finishing out her high school career.
She remarks on how this unique experience left her feeling very alone socially in a way she has found commonality in now that she is in college: “Everyone at college is homesick in some way,” she proclaims, and this mutual understanding is something she has used to feel connected to her collegiate community. She also appreciates the fact that Geneseo is a smaller school: “Moving around so much I really got to see a lot [and] go to both big and small schools.” Myers reflected on her former self’s hopes of being somewhere where there is always somebody whose name you know in the room, and she feels she has found that here at Geneseo.
As Myers embarks on the next stage of her life, she will be attending Finger Lakes Community College to earn her Associates in Graphic Design. After her utilization of programs like Adobe InDesign through The Lamron and her Gandy Dancer class, she has found a new passion in the visual components of publication work that she wishes to further pursue. The fellow Lamron executive board staff send Hannah off with warm and bittersweet well-wishes and will miss having her electric energy and humor fill up The Lamron’s office.