Hello! My name is Gilad Avrahami (he/him), I'm a junior political science major at Haverford living on-campus this semester. I lived the first 18 years of my life in New York City, specifically on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (Some people ask me to get even more specific. I live on 108th Street and Broadway. I've found someone at Haverford who lives two blocks away from me who I'd never met before.) It's crazy how New York allows that to happen. Personally I'm not sure it's the kind of place I'll want to live my whole life, because you don't know your neighbors and there's so little space and people can be distant and competitive. But growing up in that environment has been enough to make me fascinated with the fact that such a place as NYC is even possible, that so many people live so close together and all the complex overlapping systems that unify it. It's probably the reason I'm so interested in how cities work and how to make them work better, and I'm taking this class finally with those thoughts in mind.
I also can't wait to meet other people in the class and bond over common interests and backgrounds! I would be remiss if I did not mention that I am a big Harry Potter nerd and could never get tired of talking about the series (I would also always be up for HP trivia competitions). I love languages and have a lifelong but somewhat remote dream of becoming a polyglot; however, I have been trying to teach myself Arabic in the past six months and I am already conversational in Spanish, French, and Hebrew, a native language from home. That doesn't stop me from enjoying the English language, for which I delight in crossword puzzles and anything else to do with wordplay or puzzling. I also really like geography and history and academic knowledge in general. In terms of my hobbies, I enjoy playing board games, going for bike rides, soccer, reading, and chatting.