21 Questions with Jordan Wagner

Freshman Jordan Wagner will be the featured survivor speaker at WU's Relay For Life

| Scene Reporter

1. What is your full name?
Jordan Beck Wagner.

2. Where are you from, and where is your favorite place to go when you are there?
Traverse City, Michigan; my favorite place to go is the beach on Lake Michigan.

3. What are you majoring in?
Anthropology and German; with a minor in public health.

4. What’s your favorite German expression?
Niedlich: cute; it’s just a fun word to say.

5. What do you want to do with your life?
I want to work in the social aspect of medicine in Third World countries.

6. What is your favorite activity you have done your freshman year?
Going to Farm Aid, a benefit concert in St. Louis.

7. What is your freshman roommate like?
She is so patient and can put up with my loudness.

8. Describe your floor in fewer than 10 words.
Lots of crazy, unpredictable and free-spirited people.

9. What kind of cancer did you have?
I had rhabdomyosarcoma; it’s a soft-tissue sarcoma. They diagnosed me when I was 6 months old, and it came back when I was a year and a half.

10. What does your scar mean to you?
My scar is a source of pride because it shows that I beat cancer.

11. What does the word cancer mean to you?
It’s an obstacle, not a death sentence; just another obstacle I had to overcome in life.

12. Do a lot of people know you had cancer?
Everyone at home knows, but here most people don’t. It is not brought up, and people don’t look at me and assume I had cancer.

13. What song do you want played at Relay For Life?
Anything by Lady Gaga.

14. What are you most looking forward to at Relay For Life?
Bonding with my floor and the luminaries ceremony.

15. What is something that no one at Wash. U. knows about you?
I lived in Germany for six weeks during a summer in high school. I did a foreign exchange between sophomore and junior year in Mainz. It was an eye-opening experience because I was exposed to such a different way of life.

16. What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken?
Coming to Wash. U., because I knew no one coming into it and I could have easily gone to a state school.

17. If you could meet any famous person, who would it be and why?
Grace Kelly, because she was such a classy lady and her life story is very interesting.

18. What do you miss most about being a kid?
Not having any responsibility.

19. What are your three most-cherished objects?
The Tiffany ring that my sister saved up to buy me for my birthday. A purple blanket I had when I was a little baby. A graduation present my parents designed for me in the shape of a cancer ribbon with my birthstone.

20. What TV character best imitates your life?
Blair Waldorf with a lot less drama and a hell of a lot more class.

21. If you could live inside a novel’s fictional world what would it be?
“The Catcher in the Rye.” I would love to be Holden Caulfield for a day.

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