Classmates

She’s Now Getting An Adrenaline Rush From Immigration Issues
By Gunes Atalay

When we talked, it was 10:30 pm and she was just getting home. Janette Lynott, a very pretty Communications Art major at Marymount Manhattan College living in New York City with her four best friends is very busy. She mostly takes night classes because she works fulltime in a law firm, which she loves and finds very exciting.


Janette Lynott

Adrenaline seems like one of her passions. As she talks about adrenaline in her life before her current job, we start laughing. Before moving to New York from Philadelphia, Lynott was acting in independent films. When she was 17 she met a very cute guy, Jon, who was in one of the independent films where she worked, and later they became involved. He was 21 and into street racing.

“One day he picked me up with some of his friends and I saw a pick-up truck and a street bike. I said ‘I wanna ride that,’” Lynott said. And she did, without a helmet. That was her first time and she was very excited. They were going 70 miles an hour and it was “scary as hell.” She loved it. She was wearing flip flops and a skirt and her flip flops melted because of the engine heat.

After that, Lynott began attending street races with her boyfriend. She said the most fun and exciting part was running from cops. Since street racing was illegal and very dangerous, police would constantly raid the street races and everyone would jump into their cars with their friends and drive away as fast as they could. Lynott said she knew it was very dangerous, but that was why it was thrilling. Her boyfriend Jon was seriously injured in an accident when he was 23, burning 40% of his skin, breaking his shoulders and two disks in his back. After the accident, he stopped racing, but that didn't stop him from attending these races. Lynott said another friend was paralyzed from the waist down in an accident. After seeing and hearing about these horrible accidents, she was afraid.

Lynott keeps saying now how “stupid” she was at that age and how “stupid” it was to do this, but she also admits that she would still love to do it if she could. Living in New York and not knowing exactly where to go, Lynott said she has slowed down a bit. When she met some racers in the city for one of her journalism class assignments, she wanted to find out where to go to get back into racing, but she couldn't find anyone to go with her and she didn't want to go alone.

Lynott says nowadays she is satisfying her adrenaline need with her job. “Law is a new kind of energy for me. It is exciting. And immigration law is so big now thanks to our immigration issues,” she says. “I analyze very important issues for the first time in my life, and it keeps me very busy. I also love the people I work with.”