Hello, my name is Megan Hill and I am an aspiring biological anthropologist who has found herself enrolled in this one of a kind course at the best university in the South (Roll Tide). Two major parts of my childhood are the prime influences for the topic of this post today. The first one is that while I was growing up, my mom and I would stay up late watching true crime shows such as forensic files, snapped, and cold case files. These shows had a major impact on how I saw the world and ended up shaping the kind of person that I would be. No I don’t mean that I’m a psycho who’s obsessed with death or anything like that. I mean that I wasn’t easily scared or grossed out by blood or the mere idea of death. I saw the field of forensics and homicide investigation as incredibly necessary and deeply fascinating. I knew from a relatively young age that I wanted to go into the criminal justice field. I later refined my dream job down to that of forensic science, then later to the idea of a career in forensic anthropology. I absolutely love the human body and the process to determining what happened to it that resulted in the death of that particular person.
The second major part of my childhood that influenced this post is that my grandmother taught me how to knit when I was 8 years-old. I grew up knitting scarves, pot holders, blankets, and sweaters. This is a skill not most teenagers that I knew possessed. Despite all of the time my friends spent playfully tease me about my “old lady” hobby, I’m glad that I learned how to knit when I did. I learned how to knit because my dad expressed a strong desire for me to learn. His nagging elicited action from my grandmother to reach out to me and offer to teach me. I like to think that this hobby does help me to survive. I am able to use it to make clothes to keep myself and my close friends and family warm throughout the cold winter months. Funny story, almost 2 years ago, I began working on a sweater for my 6’6″ boyfriend who lives in Boston. I still have not finished this sweater because it has required a lot of work from me and as a college student I have not had the time to devote to finishing this sweater. When I was 8 and I first learned how to knit, I was awful at it. There were holes all throughout the project and there were different yarn tensions from where I didn’t know how to hold the yarn as I was knitting it. However, as I got older and I kept practicing, the holes got smaller until there were no more holes in my work. I also learned how to keep consistent tension on the yarn throughout the entire project. Eventually all of my projects looked about the same to one another, I mean other than one looks like a scarf and one looks like a sweater but I’m sure you know what I mean.
