RECORDING 1: introduce yourself

Hey everyone, I’m Annie Segal, I’m American and I’m from High Point, NC (North Carolina), in the southeast of the United States. [0:08] I’m 21 and I graduated in May from college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, or UNC-Chapel Hill, where I studied French and Sustainability. [0:19] I’ve been taking French for about seven and a half years, since my second year of high school, and I studied in Montpellier for one semester, in the spring of 2011. [0:29] I’m an English teaching assistant here this year and I’ll be here until May. [0:34] I have long reddish-brown hair and brown eyes and I’m kind of tall, I’m about 5’7.” [0:40] I like biking and playing soccer and sometimes other sports. [0:44] I also like cooking and baking and just food in general, I like trying French and international dishes and making bread and pies and tarts and other pastries. [0:54] I have a younger brother and a younger sister. [0:57] My brother Richard is 20 and studies accounting and finance at Elon University. [1:02] And my sister Caroline is 18 and just started college at NC State University, where she’s planning to study interior design. [1:11] My dad is an accountant and started his own consulting firm, Robert S. Segal CPA, PA, and my mom grows lavender and is a dietitian. [1:21] I’m kind of thinking about maybe being a teacher or a librarian but so far I haven’t really decided exactly what I want to do after this year. [1:29]

    

RECORDING 3: worst job you’ve ever had

I’ve had a few different jobs, but all of them have been pretty good. [0:04] In high school I volunteered at Piedmont Land Conservancy, which is a non-profit organisation that works to protect land from development, and then I worked there part-time the summer after high school and a little bit over the summers during college. [0:18] I also worked at a store called Dolce Dimora during the summer after high school. [0:23] At both of those jobs I did mostly office work, like making copies, and putting together mailings, and doing research online. [0:32] In my sophomore and junior years of college I worked part-time at Battle Park, a park in the woods next to campus. [0:40] I helped maintain the trails, remove invasive plants, and lead volunteer groups, and I got to spend a lot of time outside, so that was a fun job. [0:50] This past summer I had a part-time job as a research assistant and I also worked in the textbook department of the Student Stores at my college. [0:59] As a research assistant I worked with databases, maps, and GIS for an anthropology professor who studies Burkina Faso. [1:08] That was an interesting job because I had to find ways to use the GIS and the database software to integrate and visualize different datasets and try to analyze them. [1:21] At the Student Stores I filled textbook orders and was a cashier, which was interesting because I got to check out a lot of the books different classes would be studying, and I also saw a lot of friends and people I knew when they came to buy their textbooks. [1:36]


RECORDING 4: person you admire

For someone I admire, I’m not really sure who to choose in terms of famous people, but I guess I admire my friend Eric, he’s super nice and really smart and funny and just a great person. [0:14] I know him from college at UNC and I lived with him and eight other housemates my junior year, there were ten of us total. [0:23] Eric would always volunteer to wash dishes. [0:26] He’s a math major but originally he had been thinking he wanted to be a doctor, so in addition to all his math classes he took a bunch of science classes for pre-med and volunteered at the hospital. [0:39] He also works at a tutoring place called Mathnasium where he helps kids learn math, and this past summer he had an internship at NASA, which is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. [0:53] I guess I admire how he stuck with all the pre-med classes for so long, even though those classes are really hard and he didn’t really like them, but then still dropped pre-med when he realized that wasn’t what he wanted to do after all. [1:06] I also really admire how enthusiastic he is about everything, like math and lots of other things, and how he’s good at talking to anyone and making people laugh. [1:17]


RECORDING 5: best or worst vacation

Last fall I went to the beach one weekend in October with a bunch of friends on a trip planned by an organization that I was part of in college. [0:09] I don’t know if it was the best vacation I’ve ever had, but it was really fun. [0:14] There were a lot of us, we were staying in a house in Ocean Isle Beach for the weekend and planned carpools so everyone would have a ride there and back. [0:24] My car left early Friday afternoon, we stopped at a grocery store in Chapel Hill to get snacks before we left and then started driving down to the beach. [0:33] We stopped on the way for dinner at Bojangles, which is a Southern fast food restaurant that has really good fried chicken and biscuits, and also fries and dirty rice and sweet tea. [0:44] Friday night we hung out on the beach some and played this really funny board game called Quelf. [0:49] On Saturday the weather was really nice so we went swimming in the ocean and played soccer and football and frisbee on the beach for a long time. [0:58] We made chili and I think baked potatoes for dinner and then went and got ice cream at an ice cream place nearby, and then stayed up until like 2 a.m. mostly just hanging out and talking. [1:09] Sunday morning some of us woke up at like 6 a.m. to watch the sunrise and I walked down the beach to the pier and took a lot of pictures. [1:17] Then we had a bunch of coffee and bagels for breakfast and everyone packed up to drive back to campus. [1:23]



RECORDING 15: global cities

I grew up in High Point, NC (North Carolina), which is a city near the center of the state, with a population of 106,586 as of 2012. [0:11] High Point is sometimes called the “Furniture Capital of the World” because of its furniture manufacturers and biannual international furniture market, called the High Point Market. [0:22] My family lives in the suburbs in North High Point, toward the edge of town and sort of out in the country. [0:27] There are some run-down areas and poorer neighborhoods downtown, but there are also some really nice areas near downtown, like Emerywood. [0:36] Some revitalization efforts have raised questions about how to promote economic development, and there are also some concerns about gentrification, especially around High Point University, where a lot of expensive student housing is being built in previously poor neighborhoods. [0:53] In High Point, and in a lot of other American cities, downtown is relatively dense and built-up, with streets forming basically a grid pattern, while the suburbs are more sprawling and tend to spread out from downtown along major transportation routes. [1:10]


I went to college at UNC-Chapel Hill, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which is about an hour and fifteen minutes east of High Point. [0:19] I lived in a dorm on campus my freshman and sophomore years, and junior year I lived with housemates in a house close to campus. [1:28] Senior year I moved to another house with housemates in Carrboro, about a mile and a half from campus. [1:34] Chapel Hill has a population of 57,233, and UNC has about 29,000 students total. [1:44] UNC-Chapel Hill was the first public university in the country and is well-known in the U.S. for both academics and sports. [1:52] Chapel Hill is a college town and much of the town’s economic activity and many of its residents are connected to the university or the UNC hospitals. [2:04] Downtown Chapel Hill is primarily oriented along Franklin Street, which has a lot of restaurants and a few shops and offices. [2:12] Chapel Hill offers free buses and biking and walking are more common there than in much of the U.S., but driving is still the primary mode of transportation, and traffic and parking can be a problem. [2:25] Gentrification is also a concern in Chapel Hill, with some poorer or traditionally African-American neighborhoods being broken up by student housing and new developments. [2:35]