The Lamron

Issue date: 2/4/10 Section: Knights' Life

Media Credit: Keith Walters Junior Kerisha Hawthorne is here for four years from Jamaica and has definitely left her mark as a contributor to the communty and students.

Originally from Montego Bay, Jamaica, energetic and cheery junior Kerisha Hawthorne fills Geneseo's frigid climate with a little warmth from home everyday.

For this English and psychology double major, the stars were not always aligned for Hawthorne to attend Geneseo. After completing her last two years of high school in a boarding school on Long Island, a college counselor encouraged her to apply to Geneseo with a warning that the weather may be less than ideal.

Hawthorne said she will never get used to the cold and snow here. When the weather is especially poor, she said she questions why she is here and she can never understand her friends who are excited to look out the window and see snow.

Hawthorne has made her footprint known on Geneseo soil. This is her second year as a resident assistant, and she is also the vice president of Rotaract Club and a member of The Ghana Project.

"The people in ResLife are really nice and amazing people," Hawthorne said. "The only downfall to being an RA is the amount in the workload, but it comes with the job."

Without a doubt, Hawthorne said she revels in the generosity of the professors in both the English and psychology departments as her absolute favorite aspect of Geneseo. "I feel like I have that one-on-one connection with them where it's not like 'oh it's my professor and I don't have any other contact with them,'" she said.

Hawthorne cited a few of her favorites in the English department: Beth McCoy, Richard Finklestein and Kenneth Asher as her absolute most-liked professor. "I love that man so much. He's so chill, no pressure, I just love him," Hawthorne said.

After graduation, Hawthorne said she plans to attend law school or graduate school for social work. "Ultimately, my long term goal is to practice law involving social justice," she said. Ideally, Hawthorne would like to reside in the Northeastern part of the United States until she's about 40, when she plans to return home to Jamaica and revamp the government.

"In our governmental system we don't have a good social agency system to help people in poverty, so I want to go back to implement a system. And then I'll retire there, somewhere on the beachside."

Continued...

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