User:Suau87

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(Social Biography for SYG 2000, Fall 2005)

My name is Megan Suau and I was born on March 1, 1987 in Sarasota, Florida.

My ethnicity is primarily Western European, including Italian, Irish, and German ancestry. My maternal grandparents were children of Italian and Irish immigrants. My Italian ancestors (maternal great-grandfather) came to the United States after dodging the Mussolini’s draft in post-World War I Italy. Unable to attain a legal pardon from the draft, my great-grandfather tricked the drunken mayor of his village to sign his deportation papers; he was on a ship to the US the following morning. He settled in Chicago in the 1920s because the mafia offered a social network, jobs, and protection for Italian immigrants in the city. My family never discussed my great-grandfather’s ties with the mafia openly, but it is known that he paid for his house in less than five years and that he was probably a runner/messager for the mob bosses.

My Irish ancestry comes from my maternal grandfather, whose mother and father (both of the name Kennedy) emigrated from Ireland in the 1920s. Due to financial instability within the family, he and his siblings were placed in an orphanage run by nuns. Spending his early childhood in a convent influenced my grandfather to pursue the priesthood, at least until he met my grandmother. They settled in the Chicago suburb of Romeoville and raised five daughters, the eldest of which was my mother.

My father’s ethnicity is a bit more complex as his ancestors immigrated in more sporadic patterns. My paternal grandmother has English and German ancestry that is hard to track because they immigrated to the US over three generations ago. My paternal grandfather passed on the name Suau to my family. Although the name is French in its origin and is now found in the Basque Country, we are neither French nor Spanish: my grandfather’s step-father, who carried the name Suau, adopted him after marrying my great-grandmother. Our biological name might have been Bravo, which is Italian in origin. My grandfather’s ancestors moved from Italy to Guatemala during World War I. Many Italians and Germans immigrated to Latin America during and after the First World War to escape from retribution for impregnating a wealthy woman and also to seek a fortune in the undeveloped countries. My family moved to Guatemala and established a large and profitable ranch, which is still in use and family-run today. However, my great-grandmother moved to Brooklyn where she raised my grandfather and his half-sisters. Other family members have subsequently moved from Guatemala to New York to seek greater fortune. After serving in the military in post-World War II Occupied Japan, he went to Bradley University in Peoria where he wanted to study architecture on the GI Bill. It was in Peoria that he met my grandmother where they also raised five children, the eldest of whom is my father.

My Italian, Irish, and quasi-Hispanic background has influenced my religious preference and practically ensured that I would be raised as a Catholic. Both of my parents were raised Catholic and they met through their church choir at the University of Illinois. When choosing my preschool, my parents placed me in Epiphany Cathedral School, where I stayed through elementary school. Having a family that was Catholic in ethnicity and practice in addition to a religious school environment sheltered me from other denominations and faiths. I remember being asked by a public school friend when I was nine if I was a Catholic-Christian or just Christian; I had no idea there was a difference between the two. It was not until I attended a public school and took European History that I learned about the Protestant Reformation and that not everyone honored the Pope in Rome. In my junior year, when I decided to personally accept my faith as true, rather than as an absolute I learned as a child, I was exposed to other denominations for the first time and learned about the limitations of the Catholic Church. In my home in Sarasota, I still practice the Catholic Mass because I view Epiphany Cathedral as a type of home; however, in Gainesville I have been practicing a more liberal and open type of worship at a student-run Episcopal church that is open to all denominations and will not refuse Communion to those of different ones.

My Catholic background has, however, provided the basis for my faith today. I believe that going to a Catholic elementary school and learning the parables of Jesus shaped my ideas of moral absolutes. However, my Catholic education did little to emphasize a personal relationship with God, a life modeled after that of Christ, or individual study of the Bible, all of which are more evangelical in practice. In the fall of 2003, my junior year in high school, I attended a Baptist youth group on a whim, not knowing that Baptists were on the opposite spectrum of the worship scale from Catholics. I was uncomfortable with their freer style, but intrigued by the difference in energy from my own congregation. I quickly joined their youth group, perhaps jumping at the chance to rebel against my traditional background and exerting a bit of teenage independence, as I had gotten my own car less than three months previously.

My parents, besides being both Catholic, were raised in middle class families. My father’s father was an engineer, while my mother’s father owned a cleaning company and was, at one point, the mayor of their town. Both of my grandmothers were housewives, busy taking care of five children each. Both my parents attained a college degree at the University of Illinois and my father continued onward an received a Master’s degree at Bradley University. They moved to Florida shortly after marriage for my dad’s career as he wanted to pursue stormwater engineering and found the Florida floodplains as ample ground for work. He now works for Kimley Horn and Associates in Sarasota. My mother worked at an accounting firm, then in retail, and now works as a business manager to an upscale salon. My father’s income has been our main resource for the last few years, allowing my mother to work part-time to take care of the household and volunteer at my school. We are an upper-middle class family with enough disposable income to not have to live from paycheck to paycheck.

In addition to my upper-middle class status, another influence on my worldview has been that I am an only child. Without siblings or younger relatives who live in Florida, I could only interact with my parents inside of our home; I believe that this has taught me to converse easily with adults. Being an only child as allowed me to remain uninhibited when talking with teachers or authority figures; I have therefore been able to build relationships and a solid reputation with the adults at school, my church, and other social organizations. This has provided me with many opportunities to take on leadership roles in my youth group and community service organizations. Working with adults and taking an integral role in my different social groups has influenced me prefer to work alone: I have a tendency to want to lead more than follow and have a difficult time working in groups.

My parents’ educational backgrounds helped to shape my own: since I was five, I knew that someday I would go to college. Because both of my parents went to college and stressed the importance of education, I was unaware that there were people who did not go to college until middle school. Noticing my exertion of independence and valuing my education, my parents placed me in a magnet school, Pine View School for the Gifted, in my sixth grade year. I remained at Pine View, which housed second through twelfth graders, until I graduated high school. The advanced curriculum and 100% college acceptance rate of their graduating classes perpetuated my already existing sensibilities of college, education, and independent credibility. While I truly loved my time at Pine View, it did create an intellectual, and somewhat snobbish, bubble around its students. This was an idea that I bought into and subsequently loaded up on honors and AP courses. My goal of attending college now extrapolated into attending a small, private, out-of-state, prestigious university that seemed to embody my only child, traditional, upper-middle class upbringing.

Choosing to attend the University of Florida, a public, in-state, large (fourth-largest in the nation) university, would therefore seem somewhat out of character with what I have presented thus far. However, my dad’s self-made reputation as a prominent engineer and consultant in my hometown has greatly influenced my college and career decisions. He is extremely well-connected with engineers, architects, urban planners, and government officials in Sarasota. Sarasota, a relatively wealthy and well-educated community, has a large liberal community concerned with preserving the arts as well as the environment. Sarasota therefore provides perfect ground for designers and community planner who want to test new sustainable practices. Through my father, I have been exposed to such up-and-coming projects in the county, such as the creation of a New Urbanism community along the Fruitville Road I-75 corridor. The idea of finding my own niche in an urban planning firm and the opportunity of working with a number of proficient minds of other disciples greatly appealed to me. I decided to pursue an architecture degree at the University of Florida because it would provide a broad range of designing skills that could be later refined in graduate school.

My interest in sustainability and New Urbanism springs from my idealistic worldview. My parents, both products of the middle class, higher education, and self-made careers, have taught me that I follow the rules and work hard, I will accomplish my goals. And while these values have been instilled in me since childhood, I have yet to have them proven wrong. Therefore, I maintain my optimistic and idealistic worldview in that I believe I can positively impact the world around me. Sustainable practices allow for humanity to positively effect and coexist with the surrounding environment, while New Urbanism designs allow for a more synthesized community environment. In the future, I hope to maintain this worldview and use it to bring a positive change to my environment. I would like to eventually bring the sustainable practices, such as affordable housing, localized food production, or effective water use (such as converting rain water into utilities) to those countries which are not yet developed. I would like to teach developing nations how to learn from the developmental mistakes of First world nations: for example, how to prevent pollution and global warming as it is affected by development; how to effectively use the energy resources of the region; and how to maintain the cultural integrity of the developing region. After learning the technical applications of these principles in college, I would like to learn their practical applications by volunteering with the Peace Corps in Eastern Africa or Latin America. I know that all of this sounds a bit too much or a little unorganized, but I’m still working out the particulars – that’s why I’m in college. At this point, I know what I would like to do, but having no real exposure to a world outside of Florida, I do not know if any of these plans will unfold like I have described. However, I do know that I would like to travel, volunteer, and go to grad school after I finish college, but that’s about all that’s certain. Oh, and I want to be a mom and wife, too, but that’s another story…