Ryan Greene

COL ’16
Age: 20
Hometown: Armonk, N.Y.
Major: Biology (pre-med)

What drew you to neurobiology?
I had an interest in biology from loving animals and being an animal nerd or buff when I was younger. In high school, I did really well in biology and had a high school teacher who taught a lot about animal systems. He taught it in a very pre-med way. My favorite part of that was brain science, so when I came here, and I knew I wanted to be a doctor and follow biology, they let you specialize, so I thought that I’d specialize in neurobiology.

Pre-med is, across the country, a really competitive track. How do you think the Georgetown atmosphere has been in terms of competition between students? 
I think it’s really cooperative. Like in orgo, everyone seems to be on the same page, and even though it’s totally on a curve. I know they like to say that you’re competing against yourself and not each other, but you’re totally pitted against other people too. Like on one of the orgo tests, I improved very much compared to me, but everyone else improved even more, so I got the same grade again. So when you really boil it down, you are competing against each other, but it doesn’t really impact the way we cooperate with each other, especially the people that you’re in biology classes with and also orgo classes with. I feel really close to them because it’s been six classes now with them. We even sit in the same spots everywhere. It’s weird — it’s a huge lecture, but everyone sits in the exact same spot. and it’s always in Reiss 103, and there’s an understanding that we’ve got each other’s backs if we need anything. Another big part for me was I lived on a freshman floor in Darnall with 10 other pre-med people, which was really weird. We all walked to class together in the morning and we had a “no man left behind” thing on test days — if someone was going to oversleep the class, we’d go wake him up. There’s a lot of cooperation. I really like it.

Kind of going along with that, can you talk a bit about living in Darnall?
Darnall was amazing. I have no idea what to attribute it to — maybe the central place of the common room in the floor layout? It just attracts people to hang out in there. I feel like there were just really fun weekends in the first couple of months where we hung out there, and then it just kind of carried over to doing all your work in there and napping in there and making food together in there, and it became like our family kitchen by the end of the year. It was really cool and strange how much time we’d spend in there. You’d be working in there with two or three other people all night, and the janitor would come to work at like 5 in the morning, and you’d all just be like, “Oh no.” It was really communal, and I’m living with all these guys next year in Brown House. It was hilarious that we got that because everybody thinks, “Oh, who’s living in Brown House?” like which group is going to live there, and I feel like we’re just eight regular people who happen to be really good friends, and we just won the housing lottery, weirdly.

What pick number were you? How did you get the Brown House draw?
We were pick number 45, which is really late for Brown House. I think the main problem was that [other groups] didn’t have four people to pull in, because you need eight people, and a lot of guys didn’t know immediately which four to bring in, and you only get a minute to pick. That made a lot of groups pick a different townhouse. Also, there are townhouses with more square foot per guy, so each guy gets a bigger chunk of the house to himself, but really, we’d be fools if we didn’t pick it.

Are you worried about having to carry on the Brown House legacy?
I don’t think so. I think we’ll manage it well. We don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do. It’s legally our house, so I’m not worried about that. Things will definitely going to be under control.

Can you talk to me a little bit about your experience working for the Voice and what your progression has been up to this point?
I came to Georgetown, and I had no interest in joining a newspaper. I ended up in a Voice party, and I was like: “Alright, I got to do this now. This is fun.” And I joined, and it was really lax to join — we pride ourselves on not having an application, so we let whoever wants to join, join. The first few weeks were hard with that because the group ends up being really big because a lot of people will show up to the first meeting, so it’s hard to speak up. But if you stick with it, after a few weeks, after some people stop showing up and you’re one of the people who stuck around, you get to write a lot and your role shapes up really quickly. I joined Vox [the Voice’s blog] a few weeks into my freshman year, and it was a lot of fun because the editors tend to be really personality-people types. I was just doing a post or two a week, and it was just the thing that I was really good at, and I used Vox to branch out into other sections like news, writing about music and leisure. So, Vox was a great way to get started in the Voice — it has shorter posts, more playful — and now, after two full years, I’m the editor, so that’ll be fun.

What’s your favorite thing that you’ve worked on for the Voice?
Covering ricin was really fun in news because it felt like being in the newsroom, almost, that night because his name came out on Wednesday and we print on Thursday, which was really lucky for us. Well, it was lucky and unlucky: It was lucky that we had the chance to break the name in print and unlucky that we had to throw it together that night. Also, luckily, the Voice had a couple people living on McCarthy 6, and it really helped to get people to comment. That was a really fun story.
My other favorite thing writing on the Voice is not news-related at all — it’s writing about music, which is my favorite thing of all time. I love doing album reviews, and I write a column, which is a challenge in a way, because I just want to write about rock and my sliver of alt-rock, but in the column, I try to take my ethic and my music-listening ethic and take it into talking about acceptable topics like Beyoncé’s phantom album drop and stuff like that.

What is the hardest thing about journalism?
I guess it depends on who you’re talking to. Some people are really hard to talk to. I know the common sort of woe for the Voice and The Hoya is getting some administrators to comment because some of them are just really bad about it. Especially when you need to get them on something, they’ll just not answer you; they’ll just not care. When you’re trying to do a serious piece like that, some people are really bad about going on the record about stuff. There are the people who don’t respond, intentionally, and then there are the people who just forget to respond. The persistence that’s required is very demanding, sometimes. Having to stick with a story and keeping all of the little mental tabs of story ideas in your head is very challenging. Also, I guess organizing the Voice is difficult — like all the people involved and getting them all to show up and work together. There’s a whole chain of people, and the work needs to go from the writer to the top of line, and if one person fails in any way, it slows the whole train down.

How has it been managing your peers in the Georgetown setting?
It’s weird. I’m kind of starting that now — I haven’t had an editorship myself until running Vox now, but as I’ve spent more time in the Voice, some of my closest friends had those jobs, and I got to see what it was like for them. It’s weird because these people are best friends, and we hang out with them so much, but you need to give them orders — not orders, but you’re the boss in some capacity. On the Voice, we think of it very informally, but you still have to assign people tasks and make people do things that they might not want to do. The job needs to get done.

Is there anything that you’d like to add?
I think Georgetown, in a lot of ways, is everyone’s number-one second choice school for a lot of people. I think what’s cool is that it works out in so many different ways for people, because they wanted to go to that Ivy or they wanted to go to MIT or Stanford and they couldn’t, and when they come here, it ends up being way better than they thought it would be. I don’t know what to attribute that to. Maybe it’s just that this place has such a unique student club atmosphere, where people get so involved in extracurriculars, or it might be the something about the Jesuit atmosphere of openness and accepting diversity that makes it so people from different backgrounds get along really well. I’m not sure, but something about this place makes everyone realize that it should have been their number one all along in many ways.

Interview by Lindsay Lee