Tucson's Economy
A business owner, a business manager, and an economy expert at the University of Arizona all talk about how the economic crash in 2007 affected their businesses in the past, what they are seeing right now in the present, and what they expect will come for the future.
Music by Kevin MacLeod, Lithium, (incompetech.com) © 2012; Kevin MacLeod, Eternal Hope, (incompetech.com) © 2007.
I don’t like writing with pens. The idea of using a pen for me is nerve-wracking; it’s too permanent. I don’t like the fact that once something is written down on paper with pen it cannot be erased; you have to scratch it out, and everyone will know that your mistake was made.
I am a senior at the University of Oregon, but this is only my second term at UO. I grew up in Oregon and after high school I decided that enough rain was enough and I moved to Tucson to attend the University of Arizona.
People always asked me why I chose Tucson. You grow tired of saying, “Oh the campus was beautiful,” and, “Well, they have a great program;” those are the answers that grandparents and your uncle’s best friends want to hear – the answers that make it seem like you really looked into the college. So finally, I started telling people the real reason I was moving to the high desert for an education. I chose UA because for all four years of my high school career, for some reason, I wore a University of Arizona sweatshirt every year on Senior Sweatshirt Day. As a freshman, sophomore, junior and senior, all the teachers who did not know who I was would walk up to me and ask “Are you going to the University of Arizona in the fall?” I would politely laugh, notice my sweatshirt and the coincidence of the spirit day it was and say, “No, I just like this sweatshirt.” Finally my senior year, it dawned on me that maybe all those times I had worn that sweatshirt in the past were signs, and maybe I should accept my acceptance to the UA. So I did.
After two and a half years of double majoring in French and Journalism, I realized that I had made a mistake. I adore the rain, and maybe my wearing that Arizona sweatshirt really was a coincidence, not a sign.
Twelve hours before my flight back to Tucson during winter break of my junior year, I broke down and begged my parents to let me not go back. Two minutes later I was a college drop out hoping I wasn’t too late or not qualified enough to attend the University of Oregon in the spring. But I was qualified enough. And even though at first I believed that staying in Arizona was a mistake – a mistake that everyone would see and hear about scratched out in thick black ink, how I was total failure at trying to make it on my own, that I was weak and only homesick, that I had wasted all that money on an education I could have received at a cheaper Resident price – it was a lovely mistake. I needed to leave Oregon and go to a place completely unfamiliar where I was alone to find out who I really was. The teachers and courses at UA were great, helpful and motivating, but the Tucson culture was just not for me. However, I needed to see and live in a culture that was completely different from Oregon’s; I needed to open my eyes from the bubble that my small hometown is in; and I needed to attend UO at the time I did, not being a freshman.
As Leonardo DiCaprio says as Jack Dawson in James Cameron’s Titanic, “and now here I am on the grandest ship in the world having champagne with you fine people.”
According to a quiz I found on StumbleUpon, I’m supposed to be 37. So I guess being 21, you could say that my mind is stuck in 1996.
, Newberg, OR 97132
