"I am made and remade continually" (Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931)
 
Woolf was referencing the idea of "different people drawing different words" from oneself, but I'd like to take it a bit further if you don't mind, Virginia, and propose that not just people, but the places and ideas I have been lucky enough to drown myself in have had me making and remaking myself every minute for the last four years.
 
I entered UW convinced that success meant staying on a clear, linear path. I thought I had to choose between being analytical or creative, technical or expressive, political or personal. I thought learning was about producing the “right” answers and procuring that hot and juicy 4.0. But the next few months surprised me as I took a fat L on my first college paper, sat in logic and statistics lectures that sparked joy and scratched my brain in the most perfect way, created a poem that cracked something open in me, and wrote lines of code in R that made me understand what exactly it meant to take part in an unravelling. Slowly, the boundaries I had drawn between my identities began to dissolve. What emerged was something far thicker, interwoven, and terrifying.
​
This portfolio is a map of that transformation. It's subtly built around storytelling as a way of knowing, a way of connecting, a way of resisting. In these artifacts you will find evidence of what I have been consuming as well as creating. You’ll find evidence of my interdisciplinary education, my evolving sense of voice, and my commitment to using that voice for public good. Everything I’ve done is grounded in the belief that people, including me, deserve to be more than data points or case studies, or one-dimensional caricatures of students of a single discipline. We as people deserve to be known, to each other and to ourselves.
​
The tenets of the Honors Program (interdisciplinarity, reflection, and experiential learning) have been the backbone of the cyclical growth of my wave. I’ve pursued two degrees in fields that don’t often speak to each other (Law, Societies & Justice and Informatics), and I’ve found meaning in the overlap: how data can tell stories, how laws shape lives, how technology can both include and exclude. That kind of interdisciplinary thinking shaped my Informatics capstone project, where my group and I blended coding, archival design, and community storytelling to create a platform for preserving cultural memory. As for experiential learning, some of my most formative lessons came not in classrooms, but in the community: interviewing people inside detention centers, taking political action on campus, advocating for change through 4 legislative sessions, and standing in front of a room to read something I wrote from the heart. These experiences challenged me, stretched me, and showed me what learning looks like when it’s rooted in real people and real stakes.
​
In the rest of my portfolio, I expand on these tenets not just by documenting what I’ve done, but by continuing to ask: what does it mean to learn deeply, with care, and across difference? How can I carry these practices with me beyond UW? And most importantly, what do I with all this passion, this love? Where does it sit in my wave? The answer, for me, lies in storytelling. It is the tool I return to over and over, whether I’m advocating for someone, building technology with empathy, or simply trying to understand myself. It is how I return to shore. Every question I was faced with led me into the cathartic crashing found in creative writing spaces, public interest tech classes, policy work, and immersive storytelling projects. They taught me that being “interdisciplinary” isn’t just a buzzword, but it is instead a necessity when working across identities, systems, and lived realities.
​
In the future, as I head to law school, I will carry these values forward. I want to study public interest law, not to speak for others, but to make space for them to speak fully. My approach to law will be rooted in narrative not just in terms of legal precedent, but in terms of lived experience. My learning didn’t begin at UW and it certainly won’t end here. I leave with the confidence that my perspective with all of it's seemingly contradictory dimensions, is valuable, and like a wave, I will crawl-create-crack-crash into something bigger than myself, always learning, always becoming.