y e a r t h r e e // creating
I made this collage in the fall of my junior year when I was deeply stressed, not about my classes or internships or the future or anything, but about the nature of time and memories. I felt as if everything around me was reminding me of something else, and I could not figure out how to balance treasuring and learning from the past without it weighing me down. This collage represents this puzzling dilemma-- how to stay awake and present while letting memories keep me warm. This theme of push and pull through time was present throughout the year, but the word I've chosen is CREATING because that is what pulled me out and showed me the answer of how to honor the past while swimming to the future. I had full control over my agency this year and took every opportunity create and share with the world what had cracked and crawled to the surface inside of me, in an academic and personal sense.
After completing my internship with ASUW OID my sophomore year, I decided to apply for a paid position with the gender equity commission as assistant director. I was so pumped to realize I had been chosen for the position, but quickly felt overwhelmed. Truthfully, my main motivation for applying was securing a stable-ish job for the whole school year with flexible hours. I hadn't participated in student government in high school, and being assistant director was a completely different world from being an intern last year. It took me a while to get into the swing of things, due to my own uncertainty and the many structural issues within ASUW, but eventually I hired my own interns, and even put on an event or 2. I didn’t end up accomplishing as much as I wanted to, but a slow start was still a start for GEC, which was itself slowly coming out of hibernation. It was a whirlwind of a year and showed me a side of leadership I had never touched before or imagined myself inhabiting. Most importantly, I knew that despite the struggles of productivity I faced within ASUW, I was not about to leave this space without leaving it better than I found it.
Remember the foreshadowing of how Bricolage was difficult to find online when I was trying to submit + how I was sharpening my Canva skills and understanding of visual design through ASUW OID Internship + how I was trying to stay connected to creative communities despite not being a Creative Writing major? In Fall, I became the first ever Bricolage Social Media Coordinator! This was a seemingly small position in an RSO, nothing crazy exciting on the surface, but to me it represented as the perfect solution to staying deeply connected to a creative community and making an impact in it. I am writing this at the end of my senior year and the Bricolage team has become one of my most treasured communities at UW and I cannot imagine my time here without them. I was able to take on a leadership role and advertise our events creatively, reach out to the greater student body, and help with the annual journal launch! (While also having one of my short stories published in Issue 42 my junior year). While it's not directly relevant to either of my majors, Bricolage as an extracurricular has been an integral part of my experience at UW.
Amid all my worries and stress about the passage of time hanging from my neck like an albatross, imagine my surprise and joy to see that the Winter time schedule advertised an Honors class centered around "What is Time?" It felt like fate. My favorite aspect was the final project, which required us to create anything on something related to the topic of Time. I chose to write a personal essay on the connection between photography and time. This was a very unique assignment because I put so much personal reflection of myself and my family into it. Creating something that was so personal in an academic context was a very new feeling, but the final product is something so unique and I am so proud of the way I was able to make my very personal feelings on time shine through in this final project while still connecting it to academic themes and ideas. This is what I'm going to miss the most about the Honors program, or maybe what I'm going to do my best to never forget... how to simultaneously hold the fact and the feeling together without the existence of one diminishing the impact of the other.
Part of the reason it was important to me to learn how to create with both the fact and the feeling was because of how the institutions around me chose to respond to neither with regard to the genocide in Palestine. This was the year I lost all optimism and hope for the University of Washington as a larger system. The intense apathy and disregard for Palestinian life that the UW administration has shown by refusing to divest from Boeing is something that I will never forget. I am disgusted by UW's co--opting and pride of "palatable" activism and total disregard for movements trying to create meaningful change. I struggled to find meaning and hope in my own activism after attending protests week after week and nothing changing. But what brings me joy is the fact that this year was the first time I felt like I could talk about Palestine openly in my classes and feel supported by my classmates who were not afraid or trying to tip-toe around the genocide. If there is a silver lining to the situation, it is the fact that I, who have been advocating for Palestinan freedom for years, have never seen so much love and support for Palestine in public before this year. It is awful that it took a tragedy of this scale to bring Palestine to the front of people's minds, but I hope that we as a larger society do not forget.
Spring of junior year I took an LSJ class titled Women And The Law. I wasn't sure what I was expecting, but this class covered the experiences of women in the legal system starting from the 1800s all the way up to the present day. Majority of our readings in this course were excerpts from court rulings & dissents. This is the class that made me absolutely certain I wanted to be a lawyer. It combined my disciplines in an unexpected way. Obviosuly LSJ with the way we examined the social context in which these rulings were made and the judicial / cultural impact they had, but also Informatics in the way it reminded me of my database classes with the way it utilized logic-- how there was a situation, a rule was applied, and then it was analyzed in scrutiny from every angle. I had so much fun with the final paper where we had to write a mock ruling and dissent of a fake court case.
That Winter, my short story writing instructor from sophomore year connected me with someone who invited me to be the featured reader at a BIPOC focused open mic in a cute bookshop in Seattle. I had never shared my writing with anyone outside of a classroom, and it had always carried with it the formality and distance of work done for a grade. This opportunity was different, intentional. The day came (February 29 (leap day!)) and I read my 10-minute piece in front of the stuffed room. I had invited my sisters and some friends, but was terrified that the vulnerability laced through my words would make me cry (which has happened on occasion before), but I got through it and I felt so, so full afterwards. This was a pivotal moment for me. Realizing that my words and stories had a weight that could stand on their own outside of a classroom was so new to me, and after this event, I began to share more of my writing online through my social media. Reading my piece out loud evoked the same feeling that being in that play sophomore year did, where I felt as if I was bringing something to life, just my voice whispering through a room full of hungry and curious people. (Click the picture to read my piece.)
This year I participated in a year long course where my classmates and I worked with a local non-profit, La resistencia to communicate with immigrants detained at the Northwest Detention Center to co-create their authentic stories of resistance and humanity, contradicting the common tropes of good immigrant / bad immigrant. The sheer number of aspects of this class that burned me is insane. 1) This class epitomized the importance of creating, as a tool of resistance and reflection and community. There are no words to describe how this course transformed me, I think our collection speaks for itself (click picture to read). 2) Our professor introduced us to the idea of sentipensante - holding the feeling with the fact and embracing the weight of both as we enter this issue space. 3) I've never connected with classmates the way I did with these 17 strangers, it lingers still a year after the class ended. I float by these people in the quad and feel a secret alliance with as we exchange our quick waves. Even as I wrote that sentence, I smiled because of how unfamiliarly delicate and special this community feels to me. Dedicating so much time to the same mission makes it difficult to not feel in community with these people who are passionate about the same things and in broad strokes, understand your perspective without you needing to articulate it fully. (Also, I was given the chance to create a sticker for our class, which ended up being on the cover of the final collection we created for our class!)
I'm not super proud of my INFO 360 final project just because I had a lot of other things going on during this quarter, but this class was so enjoyable and the professor was absolutely incredible. Design Methods focused on understanding how to start in an issue space and work efficiently and systematically to create a solution that would benefit stakeholders. The problem space our class had was "the natural world" and for some reason our group decided to focus on windows. While that topic wasn't interesting to me, I was totally hypnotized by the systems and procedures we went through in the class and I could not stop thinking about applying this kind of analytical thinking and solution driven perspective centering those affected to the world of public policy and law. This is another class that made me appreciate the interdisciplinarity of the Informatics major and had me understand what it means to be a person who is interested in making the world a better place and helping populations who are often marginalized or overlooked, even if in this case it meant birds.
