Stephanie McCoy

COL ’16
Hometown: Shrewsbury, Mass.
Major: Anthropology

What are you involved in here on campus?
I do several things. I do Ultimate Frisbee, and also I’ve just been an active member of the blood drive, like donating blood and just helping out wherever I can across campus. I’m not really a member of anything, I just volunteer when I can — like this morning, I just volunteered with Relay for Life. I’m not part of the club or anything, but just stuff like that. I also volunteer with Breast Cancer Outreach; it’s such a small group but I help out when I can. I’m friends with a lot of people in Georgetown Signs, so I’ve been learning ASL, because last semester, I took a class that was a junction with Gallaudet, and I’m deaf, so it’s like, I was never part of that world, ever, because I would stay in the hearing world. But I just wanted to learn it because, they’re not really my people, but I have some connection to that. So I’ve been learning a bit of ASL here and there.

When you say you’re deaf, are you completely deaf?
I’m completely deaf. I wear cochlear implants, and they literally changed my world. The only reason why I can hear — the best way I can describe cochlear implants is that after all of the therapy and training, now, every day, when I put them on, it’s like a light switch. I go from hearing completely nothing at night, which is awesome, to hearing everything I need to hear during the day.

When did you get them?
I got my first one when I was three and my second one when I was a junior in high school, because I don’t know if you know this, but when you hear with just one ear, you lose localization of sound. You’ll get a full range of sound, and I realized that in high school because when I was in social environments, such as a cafeteria, I was missing 75 percent of the conversation. I got it, and it really has helped me. It literally felt like I was going from 2-D to 3-D hearing, which doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but it gave me just this richness of sound.

Do you think that people treat you different when they find out you’re deaf?
It depends. Definitely when I was growing up, kids would be kids, so they’d see me as an outsider. I definitely struggled with that for my entire life, high school, too. People might see you as smart, as intelligent, as like anybody else, but they still didn’t feel comfortable knowing how to communicate with me, because they weren’t sure, which is understandable, you know? As I’ve grown older, adults are just a little more fascinated, especially Georgetown students. They’re just so interested and want to know more, which makes my day because I’m able to educate them about a little part of the world that’s hidden away. There’s a small community of people like me, and no one really knows them because we’re all so normal, I guess.

When people generalize “Georgetown students,” what encapsulates a Georgetown student? How would you define that?
I can give you a stereotype definition, but there’s also my personal definition. I find that Georgetown is a school full of students that are extremely motivated to find the best of what they can find, and whether that’s a personal experience or an experience to prove to someone else. It’s just interesting to see how people approach their world. I know Georgetown isn’t exactly the most diverse school, but every one of us is so different just because of the way we think; I know with every communication I have, I can never predict how the end’s going to be, just because that’s how we are. That’s where we’re diverse. We’re not diverse in looks or anything — we’re diverse in how we think, which is very interesting to me. We may have people from a bunch of different countries and all that, but we are a predominately white school, which is kind of unfortunate, but that’s the way it is. Even among that, I still find diversity — you just have to look beneath the surface. We just all approach things differently. Yesterday, I was talking to someone, and I was talking about housing, and they approached the whole housing situation different than I did, so it was like, every day we’re all so different.

Interview by Lindsay Lee