Hi, Classmates -
This is just a temporary arrangement until my computer geek husband shows me how to do better. In the meantime, I'm just testing the waters...
Anyhow, some updates in my life. After leaving Amherst in 1998, I returned to my native Los Angeles, where I worked as a liver transplantation research assistant at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. In 1999, I moved to the greater Chicagoland area to begin medical school at Finch University of Health Sciences/Chicago Medical School.
I did that for two years, then decided I needed to switch gears. So in 2001, I moved to Rochester, New York, to study deaf education at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, one of several colleges comprising Rochester Institute of Technology. I graduated from RIT/NTID in May 2003 with a Master of Science in the Secondary Education of Students who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
A week later, I wed Richard Rizzo, a Penfield, NY, native working as a software support specialist at NTID, whom I'd met as a first-year grad student in a faculty-staff American Sign Language course. (I hadn't been able to squeeze a credit-bearing ASL class into my schedule, and thank goodness!) Anyhow, shortly after we married in a beautiful ceremony at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, we moved to Chicago for me to resume med school. Well, that lasted another 4 rotations and 3 months, until I decided to call it quits for good.
Between fall 2003 and summer 2005, I had a variety of part-time jobs, including summer intern involved in language research for the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, arts and crafts facilitator for kids undergoing cancer treatment at Loyola University Medical Center, and after-school tutor for at-risk teens.
Rick and I also decided to become SIGN with your BABY presenters (see website and blog below).
In 2005, I decided to take my first full-time teaching assignment and taught high school deaf ed (Literature, US History, Physical Science, Biology) at Thornton Fractional High School in Lansing, Illinois. I did that for a year, by which point the 30+ mile commute in either direction (not to mention my teaching duties!) had really gotten to me.
This past year, I worked as a project manager/proofreader and sometime French translator for a small language translation company in the Chicago loop called Burg Translations. I enjoyed that but decided while working there to apply for graduate school for fall 2007. Well, in late winter, I learned I'd been accepted to for doctoral study in the Linguistics department of the University of Chicago! However, weeks before, my husband and I had also learned that we were pregnant with our first child (due date: September, 2007), so I've actually deferred my start of the program until winter.
In the meantime, it may not yet be June, but I'm already enjoying summer. We kicked off with a surprise 60th birthday party for my mom in Los Angeles, followed by a 5-day cruise from LA to Vancouver, BC, late last month. What's more, my mom, eager to become a first-time grandma, has just closed on a piece of property less than a mile from our home, and will be moving to be near us within the month.
Otherwise, we're busy with home improvements - namely, fixing up the back, front and side yards so they're no longer an embarrassment to us and transforming our office into a nursery. I also hope to find time to study a language and maybe even volunteer somewhere this summer.
So, that's me in a nutshell. I promise to make my homepage more exciting in the future. Thanks for reading!
Susan (Post) Rizzo