Senior Profile | Audrey Rosevear
Leaping to Topology, Theater, and Transitioning Audrey Rosevear has spent her time at Amherst devoted to her passions of mathematics and theater, all while embarking on a personal journey to come out as trans. —Alex Brandfonbrener ’23 Audrey Rosevear ’22 has moved through life by taking leaps instead of steps. She has been an active member in the math and theater communities at Amherst, all while undergoing significant personal change in discovering her gender identity and transitioning. She attributes her many accomplishments to the leaps of faith she has taken, starting long before her time in college.
What Kind of Child Are You? “From a very young age, I had these hyperfixations on different things that would last from months to years,” said Rosevear. Her parents tell stories about her love of submarines and matchbox cars. But the earliest fixation that she can recall is Legos, with both problem-solving and artistic aspects that seem to reflect her current intellectual interests. She also noted that her parents pushed her to explore her interests at a young age. “[My mom would] try to get me excited about math sometimes, and she’d sit me down and I would eagerly listen to her tell me how binary worked or how to multiply big numbers on paper.” At the same time, she learned from witnessing her dad’s “strong dramatic interests,” including his work as a journalist for the auto industry, and his love of cars, electric guitars, and craft cocktails. Her twin brother Ian also shaped how she thought of herself, a “self-reinforcing dynamic” of
mutually exclusive traits between them: “We were both deeply envious of each other, but for different things. I was always the outgoing child, the child who was good with adults, the child who would talk to the cashier when we went shopping, the one who all the teachers loved, and who had more academic success,” Rosevear recalled. “Conversely, Ian was always the popular one. I don’t really consider myself as having friends before I was 12 or 13, because I mostly just tagged along with Ian’s friends, and he always had plenty.” Rosevear also remembers that she was talented at sports and games, beating their grandfather at chess when she was six. These identities extended to how she was perceived at school, in a negative way. “They called me ‘professor’ in third grade. It was not conducive to making friends.” But by seventh grade, her social circle opened up, and she found herself with friends who were not just her brother’s. She grew close to the other kids in her neighborhood, particularly because of the unique nature of Mosaic Commons, the cohousing community where she grew up: “You buy a joint plot of land that everyone has their houses on. It’s a little bit like a college campus but for adults.” The other people who lived there shaped her. “We have queers, we have Jews, pagans, polyamorous couples, people who work in tech, people who go to Renaissance fairs. Very, very crunchy
16 | The Amherst Student | May 27, 2022
… These were my parents’ friends, this was the environment which I was born into, which didn’t help me fitting in at public school…” Indeed, Rosevear struggled to set down roots at school, particularly in her Technology and Engineering class. “Basically, I had the worst teacher of all time,” Rosevear reflected. “He gave us multiple choice questions as homework, but to answer them, we had to hand copy the entire question and all four answers, and then answer it because it’s better for memorization. So I patently refused to do that.” Looking back now, Rosevear sees at least one victory in the experience: “This professor also later turned out to be an anti-vaxxer and a Trump supporter, and I felt very validated.” Fed up, she decided to take the leap and transfer from public school to Sudbury Valley School, the private school where many of her neighborhood friends went. Much like her cohousing community, Sudbury Valley School, or SVS, embraced an atypical structure: “It has no classes, no grades, no teachers. It’s in this old, beautiful, converted mansion, and the kids just hang out there and do whatever they want all day.” She spent her time playing piano and teaching herself Algebra II and French. “That turned out to be very hard to do,” she noted, “because self-teaching is extremely difficult, especially when all of your friends are saying, ‘Come play board games with us.’”
Photo courtesy of Cayla Weiss ’23
Rosevear has cultivated a deep interest in differential geometry, leading to her thesis about topology and 4D manifolds. Still, being at SVS was an invaluable experience for her. “Instead of doing anything academic, I spent all of my time hanging out with my friends, which in some ways was very good for me. It was a great way for me to learn a lot of social skills very fast, in a somewhat kind of brutal process. So I learned a lot that year, just not much of it was academic.”
What Is a Limit? Eventually, Rosevear’s academic yearnings caught up with her, and she decided to leave SVS before eleventh grade, an equally daunting leap as leaving public school in the first place. In preparation, she took a pre-calculus course at a local community college. Soon, she was back in the classroom, staring at logarithms and trigonometry for Calculus II. She recalls a week in that class vividly. The teacher told the class that they would be reviewing pre-calculus. “And I [said], ‘I just learned this, this is boring.’ So I [went] home, and I [went] on
Khan Academy. And I watched the video about ‘what is a limit.’” “It is hard to overstate how much that one decision changed my life,” Rosevear said. “This was my first time having my mind blown by math. It changed everything.I was like, ‘This is the reason I came back to public school, because I wanted to be introduced to topics that I would not be able to find on my own.’” She binge-watched more and more videos about calculus and fostered a fixation-like interest in math during the remainder of high school, while also enjoying her French and history classes. Soon, she was already applying to colleges. From the start, she was drawn to top schools because she says she wanted to be around “a bunch of other people who’d spent their entire life being called the smart one, because then they wouldn’t think of me as the smart one.” One particular liberal arts college in Western Massachusetts stood out to her: “I fell absolutely
