Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

fl ew me out there
and Providence, Rhode Island, 
you know, it was beautiful, loved the campus, loved the 
team. So, it, if it hadn’t, I just, if it hadn’t been for track 

---

Impr
ov
e Y
our Englis
h: Englis
h in Ev
er
yda
y Life
60
and doing well in track, I, why would they care, you know, 
about this little girl in Middle of Nowhere, Minnesota?
INTERVIEWER:
But it 
opened a lot of doors
and gave you 
opportunities?
WOMAN:
Exactly, because then it, there I was at this, you 
know, Ivy League school, and, you know, just trem—, I 
was a history 
major
and focused on American history, 
and, you know, I have as my advisor, Gordon Wood, the 
authority on the American Revolutionary War, you know. 
It was amazing. It was like, you don’t get that. I couldn’t 
have dreamt that. And then you’re around these brilliant 
people—I don’t know who I fooled to get in there—but, 
you know, your friends are just amazing and everyone 
has, comes from these just fascinating backgrounds . . . 
3. A 
LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION
Well, at the-the, at the university level, one diff erence is 
that, um, in Spain, we don’t have the concept of a lib-
eral arts education. So, uh, when you, by the time you’re 
eighteen and you decide to go to college, you have to 
know what you wanna do, so you want to be a doctor or a 
lawyer, whatever, you have to know. And you go straight 
into that fi eld. And it’s actually, for some fi elds, it’s actu-
ally quite competitive, so, uh, for example, if you want to 
go into