I come from a farming family. All I have ever known is agriculture. Both of my parents are fourth-generation farmers. I was raised to wake up early, check on the cows, then go to school. There was no other order for my morning routine - my life revolved around what times the cows were being milked and there was nothing else to it. I knew no other way than how my life was on Timmerman Farms in the small city of Little Falls in Upstate New York.
Everything changed when my parents divorced. My mother decided she would move to New Hartford, a small suburban town on the outskirts of the greater Utica - about two hours from Ithaca. It was different from where I came from. Houses were close together. There were no barns in sight. There were streets, not dirt roads. Lines were painted in the middle of these streets. Cars drove by frequently. And stores were no longer a thirty-minute drive. All of this was so unfamiliar to me.
The city of Utica was barely a ten-minute drive, but still very distant to me. Utica is known to be the Melting Pot of the Upstate region with nearly 50 nations being represented. However, there appeared to be a barrier of some sorts between the suburb where I went to high school and Utica; possibly due to the school border being one of the most segregated in the U.S. Utica is also a deindustrialized city, which influenced my interpretation of city life, although still from an outsider perspective at this point.
After I graduated high school I moved to the city of Easton, PA. Now, THIS was something foreign to me. My first real experience in a true city element as I live in the downtown area. I work at my family’s newly opened small business, which allows me to integrate myself into the culture of city life through the experiences of its residents. The area is walkable, something unfamiliar to me, but has allowed me to submerge myself into Easton by getting to know the streets and layout better. Eating is also something super important to me - so of course, I have had to fully immerse myself in the region through the variety of ethnic foods that it has to offer.
The historic downtown Easton is undergoing a major revamp, which is quite honestly how I got interested in the URS major. I now look at my city and cities as a whole much differently than I did before living in one and before this academic perspective. Easton is still not a very large city itself, but by having sextupled the population of my original hometown it was quite unknown to me. My view on cities has evolved throughout my lifetime, which I feel is the most influential factor in how I interpret Easton and cities altogether.