Hello my name is...

Hello my name is Noah Gray, but if you're reading this, odds are you already knew that. Although it's an impossible task for anyone to describe himself in a couple hundred words, I'll try my best. For starters, I'm from Atlanta, Georgia and have lived in the same house my entire life. My family is relatively small - I have my parents, of course, an older sister, and a dog named Charlie (although he's a little schnauzer, he is quite mean.) As far as interests are concerned, it's pretty simple. I love sports. Sports, sports, sports. I've been playing soccer as long as I can remember and, while it may sound cheesy to say, there's no other feeling quite like being out on the pitch. I played practically everyday in high school either with my school or club team and it's a big part of who I am. In addition to soccer, I've played baseball, football, tennis, and basketball (yes basketball even if I'm only 5'6", although that isn't to say I was particularly good) throughout my life. As far as my rooting interests, I am a diehard New York Yankees and Uconn basketball fan, both of which I get a lot of flak for at Duke. It seems a bit random being from Georgia but my parents and pretty much the rest of my entire family are from Connecticut so it makes sense.

And here's the big kicker...I go to Duke. Again, you already knew that but it's definitely worth mentioning because it has become a huge part of me, even if I've only been here for a few months. Here at Duke, I'm involved with club soccer, the investment club, and some IM sports team. If you missed all the headlines in the newspaper a couple months back, our football team actually won the IM championship so, you know, we're kind of a big deal. All joking aside, I definitely feel at home at Duke and am exited to start a new semester with all of my friends here.

Although I am a potential economics major, I am pretty excited to taking Writing 101. I was the Editor-In-Chief of my high school's newspaper so I do have some experience and interest in writing. However, newspaper writing and academic/creative writing are very different so I'm looking forward to improving these different aspects to my writing and just becoming a better writer in general. Unlike some of my other classmates in Decoding Disney I bet, I don't have some prophetic reason for choosing a writing class about Disney. It's not like I was riding Space Mountain one day, saw an image of Walt Disney's head floating around and immediately thought I must take a writing class devoted to him in college. I wish it was something like that, but really I just watched a lot of disney movies as a kid and, when I saw this class at Duke, I thought it would be interesting. I'm a big fan of the old school Toy Story and Lion King- type movies and some of the more recent ones like Cars and Finding Nemo and have been to Disney World a few times (although it's been a while.) Anyways, it should be a fun semester - oh, and I feel like I should take a moment to thank first registration.