In the Jungle; Katia Arians

Thank you for joining us for In The Jungle, where you stay connected to the current students at Pittsburgh State University. Now, here's your host, Howard Smith. Welcome to In The Jungle, where we meet the grillers of Pittsburgh State University. I'm your host, Howard Smith, and today we are joined by Katia Arons. Is that right? Mm-hmm. Wow. That's a beautiful name. Tell me a little bit about the name. Well, it's Russian, and it's actually technically pronounced Katia, but my parents didn't think anyone would pronounce it like that in America, so that I'd just go back to Katia. And when I was about to be born, my mom saw this Russian figure skater, his name was Katia, and she thought it was really pretty, so she decided to go with that. Oh, cool. I need to have some of that behind you, and it's not like Smith, so it's a little unique. So you've got your busy person. If I understand correctly, you're majoring in psychology, friends, and communication. Yeah. Wow. How did you get into all three of those things? Well, I came to school wanting to be a psychology major. I've always really like, helping people, and that's always kind of in my path.

And then I went to a French immersion school growing up, and so I was fluent in French coming in, so I had enough knowledge to skip the basic French classes. And by that point, I was about halfway to a French major, so I was like, sure, I'll just tack that on. And then I'm really into theater, and my calm teachers kept going, oh, when are you going to add calm? When are you going to add calm? And so eventually I did. So they kind of just stacked upon each other. Now, a French emerging school. Where was that, and what was all of that? It's in Kansas City, and it is a school. It's kindergarten to eighth grade, and all day, every day, we spoke in French after the first grade, our teachers didn't speak to us in English. All of our classes, math, social study, science, they were all taught in French. And so it would just be like any other elementary school, except for we were learning everything in French instead of English. Why? It was a really awesome opportunity. That's fantastic. So you ended up at Pitt State, a white pit. Well, I really didn't want to stay in the area when I was a senior.

I just, I was, I'm from Kansas, I've lived here my whole life. I just wanted to get out. And then I ended up joining AmeriCorps between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college. What is AmeriCorps? It's a national service program similar to Peace Corps, but it's within the states. So it's a domestic type of Peace Corps? Yeah, kind of. And I was stationed out of California, so I was on the west coast for nine months. And it was really hard for me to be away from my family. So I decided I wanted to go to school closer to home. And my older brother went to Pitt and it just seemed kind of like a good fit. What were some of the things you did in AmeriCorps? We worked with nonprofit organizations. We worked at a Girl Scout camp for a month getting it ready for the campers. We worked in Bend, Oregon, helping them with their energy goals because they were a part of a national competition to lower their energy. And so we helped go door to door and like hand out fires and stuff for that. We helped build houses. We did a lot of different projects. You were very busy then.

Yeah, it was amazing. So when you came back and you've been at Pitt, now you're in the, now it makes sense to me. You're in the French club. Yes. What, what do you guys do in the French club? We set up different opportunities and meetings to talk about French, to learn French language, learn the culture behind it and just to get a good sense of France. And we have a lot of exchange students from France. And so it's a good opportunity for them to educate students in French about their country and to try to persuade people to travel more. So AlphaSci Omega is, now what's that group? That's the theater honor society. Okay. And you're involved in that? Yeah. I'm the president of that this year. Okay. I would say that's involved. Yes. So what are some of the things you're doing? Basically everything we do is to help facilitate the PSU theater organization. We do fundraising events. We do little improv shows, which are usually for fundraising. We sometimes go on trips this past fall. We, or past December, we went to Kansas City to see a show at the Unicorn Theater.

And it was a really cool experience and we all got to have that experience together. Last year we went to the dinner theater and it's just cool to see people working in the profession that a lot of us went to get into. Well, that's outstanding. It's a big news kind of nice to have on hand for that, isn't it? Oh, yeah. The big news is amazing. You know, one of the things that was interesting in our talking a little bit earlier, too, was you've actually stayed involved with dorm activities. Now, you don't live in the dorm now. No. But why? They're just fun. Last semester, our friend and I went to a trivia night that they had put on and we went to the gorilla get down thing and they're not necessarily specific dorm activities, but they're, I'd say, geared towards students in the dorms. But I have a lot of friends who are a little bit younger and they can't really go to the bars or anything. So sometimes we just like doing stuff like that. So you've got lots of opportunities to be involved in? Yeah, definitely. So with this psychology, French communication background, what are your career aspirations?

I'd really like to go back to the school that I went to growing up and be a school counselor there. And that's the French emerging school? Yes. Okay. That's a great goal. To have that. What are some courses today? I mean, you've got three areas. Something's had to have challenged you a little bit, I guess. What would be a course that maybe gave you a challenge? Probably one of my most challenging courses would be my French phonetics course that I took last year. You don't think about how you say words and how the way that you move your mouth or the way that your tongue hits your teeth in different words. And that's what that course was about. And so I'd been learning French since I was five years old, but I've been saying certain words wrong my whole life, not really realizing that they were wrong. So it was a very challenging course to try to go back and fix certain words that probably were taught to me correctly, but through my brain and experience, I've totally changed and now I have to go and change it going forward. It was a challenging course for me.

Wow. I hadn't thought about French phonetics, but that certainly makes sense. Has there been anything that surprised you about going to college here at Pitt? I'd say a lot of things surprised me. Like I said earlier, I didn't, Pitt was not one of my top choices. I didn't want to stay in Kansas. And so when I came here, I didn't really think I'd like it. My older brother went here. I didn't want to go to a school that my older brother went to. And all sorts of things that I just really didn't want to come here. But honestly, like, it has been the best decision I could have ever made. So if you were talking to a student right now that was considering Pitt, what would you tell him? What would you tell him as to why they ought to consider this? Well, the biggest thing that I think people kind of overlook is the fact that our hours aren't counted per credit, like our tuition, I'm taking 25 hours right now and I'm paying the same amount as someone who's taking 12 hours. That's the good news part of that. So right, the 25 hours is a little hard, but I'm not paying a million dollars to do that.

Whereas at other schools that you look at, it can be per credit hour and they don't even offer that many hours. So I'm really getting the better bang out of my buck at this school and to be able to graduate in the amount of time that I want to graduate in without breaking my bank. Hey, that proves why you belong at Pittsburgh State University. Thank you for joining us in the jungle, Katia, you've been a great guest. Thanks for being with us. Thank you. I'm your host, Howard Smith. Have a good day. Join us for in the jungle, Wednesday afternoons at 350 and Friday mornings at 850 here on KRPS.