Ida Hoequist ’14

Hello! I am Ida. (Properly pronounced /ida/, though most English speakers reduce the last vowel to a schwa in casual speech. You should look up the International Phonetic Alphabet if you're very confused right now.) What you see here is my Oberlin. I came to it by way of a town on the coast of Alabama, and before that, Denmark, and before that, North Carolina. Besides explaining to people why I don’t have a drawl, I like to make music, nerd out about linguistics, learn how the world works, and teach my body how to do strange and wonderful things like dancing and tumbling and parkour and running forever and ever amen. I'm also a great fan of getting educated about different cultures, partly because I was raised in a crossroads of a few of them (my first language was German; I spent a good chunk of my childhood running around the Danish countryside; I have a lot of French family; etc.).

Oberlin and I chose each other without my ever having visited, but it has been a generous home to me since my arrival. I have here a richer support system and at the same time a far more demanding environment than I could have foreseen, and every time I stop to check, I find a new, clearer permutation of me standing where the old one was. It is hard. And exciting! This kind of learning, where you have no choice but to come away from it changed, seems to be in the water here; everything you touch will refine you, not just this one professor or that one class. It is a quality I find invaluable.