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May-June 2007
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Seniors of Note |
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Photograph by Stu Rosner |
Fluent in four languages, Leroy Terrelonge III plans further study of Persian culture in Iran next year. |
“My little brother and I always tried to communicate with one another without our parents knowing,” recalls Leroy Terrelonge. Private languages and secret codes were his obsession as a child, but after teaching himself French and then taking Spanish in school, he chose to pursue languages he could share with others. At Harvard, he has studied American Sign Language, Arabic, Chinese, Persian, and Russian. “It gets easier,” says the Near Eastern languages and civilizations concentrator. “A lot of things are similar between languages—just small concepts are different.”
Terrelonge practices any way he can, often addressing strangers on the street who are speaking a foreign language. “People usually do a double-take and sometimes proceed to speak to me in English, assuming that I have memorized a rote phrase,” he explains. “But then they realize I can actually hold a conversation and they get really excited and tell me all about themselves.” His favorite story is of sitting in a coffee shop and hearing “some people speaking Persian in what I thought was a weird accent. It turns out that one of the guys was Afghan and the other was a Swiss professor who had done relief work in Afghanistan. I sat down with them, and we had a half-hour conversation in Persian.”
“I just like talking with people,” he says. And as social chair of the Bisexual Gay Lesbian Transgender Supporters Alliance, a member of the University Choir, and a tenor with the a cappella group Din & Tonics, Terrelonge has plenty of opportunities to socialize. Fluent in four languages and proficient in four others, he thought for a long time of becoming a translator, but now favors direct policy or diplomatic work for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “It’s definitely a dream job, where I could have access to all the cultures and countries that I’m interested in,” he explains, “where I could travel a lot and meet lots of different people.”
His deepest cultural interest has been Iran, which has led him to fluency in Persian, leadership in the Harvard Persian Society, and a thesis on the influence of messianic prophesies on American and Iranian foreign policy. “Most Americans will never get to see much of Iran. It’s a very private place,” he asserts, but that fact is part of its allure. “I really like Persian, the rich literary tradition, the idiosyncrasies in the Iranian culture.” He plans to spend next year traveling there, before returning to the United States to pursue a graduate degree in Middle Eastern studies.
~Casey Cep
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Photograph by Stu Rosner |
At Adams House, Katherine Wong finds relief from the academic rigors of College life. |
Walking along Bow Street as a freshman, Katherine Wong was idly looking through the basement windows of Adams House—until she came to the corner of Arrow Street. “I don’t even remember why I was there,” she says, “but when I saw the prints on the wall, I did a double take. I looked again and saw the press equipment, then knocked on the window.”
Three years later, the neurobiology concentrator manages the Bow & Arrow Press, a small student-run printing facility. Some nights she opens it up to the entire Harvard community. “I love seeing the satisfaction in their faces as they pull their first print,” she says. Of helping her peers to set personal stationery, cards, poetry, and posters, Wong says, “I love making things and working with my hands….It is so important for me to have this creative and physical outlet. It also helps people forget about the pressures of schoolwork and do something that is creative, without deadlines, and that is not judged by anyone but themselves.”
At Harvard, she has expanded her creative interests on other fronts: taking photographs in Visual and Environmental Studies classes and planning ’90s dances, “Family Feuds,” and Harvard-Yale tailgates as a cochair of the Pforzheimer House Committee. She still regards letterpresses as a passion. But medicine, she says, is her calling: she spent last summer and the fall doing research at the Massachusetts General Hospital Alzheimer’s Disease Laboratory, using mice models to test antibody treatments for the disease.
“Alzheimer’s affects the essence of the mind, the very essence of someone as a person. I’m interested in helping people cope with the disease,” Wong says. She hopes in time to use medicine creatively to comfort as well as to heal, so medical school is definitely in her future. But first she’s planning a post-graduation trip to Buenos Aires, to bone up on her Spanish and do a year-long apprenticeship at a cutting-edge press, Papelera Palermo, where she will learn book-binding, paper-making, and silk screening, and further her letterpress skills.
~C.C.
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