Stony Brook University
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Stony Brook University

The Stony Brook Moment is different for everyone. Here's how Fatima Daoud found hers. "My name is Fatima Daoud. I am a senior at Stony Brook University and I'm majoring in both Linguistics and Biology. What I like the most about Linguistics what also got me interested in Linguistics was that English was not my first language as a child, and I realized that when I was young I learned English very quickly. I've always been really interested in why that was, why I learned it so quickly. So when I came to Stony Brook, there where classes on language acquisition. You have to take foreign language as a requirement for linguistics and you learn more about how languages work, and how words are formulated. It's a lot like a science, with problems you solve like in science. The whole world is kind of your laboratory and you're collecting data from the people that you hear. And it's all raw data, nothing's staged. It's a lot like science; you're just collecting data and figuring out what it means. When Stony Brook first started it's marching band when I was a senior in high school, I knew that was something I wanted to look more into. It's been a great experience for me and what I really liked about it, was that it was the first sense of community. You're performing with a group of your friends, you don't really see them as your colleagues or anything like that, you see them as your friends. When I first started EMS I was just volunteering at my local ambulance company exchange ambulance. And when I got really interested in it, I liked it. I wasn't thinking of healthcare as a profession, but as I got more and more into it, I realized that I really, really liked it. I liked helping people, and I enjoyed healthcare and science in general so I decided to add biology as a major. The reason I did that was because I was interested in becoming a physician and applying to medical school, so I though the Biology would really help in getting a strong science background when applying to schools. So I did that, and I'm going to medical school in the fall."