y e a r t w o // cracking
This collage I actually made at the end of my senior year of high school, but appears here because sophomore year of college, I submitted it to Bricolage, the literary and visual arts journal at UW! It was actually really hard to find them online (subtle foreshadowing..?) but after discovering the joys of writing freshman Spring, I decided to put my creative work Out Into The World by submitting my collage, and it ended up being accepted! This is the year of CRACKING because I am hatching out of the construct of myself I had been living within. I am shedding skin and doing things that terrify me, hoping that the layer underneath, in all it's tenderness, is still warm enough to protect me. There is so much foreshadowing within this year of what is to come, and for now this is about trusting the newness.
The last class I needed to take before applying to the LSJ major was LSJ 367: Comparative Courts. This class was less discussion based and more heavy on the political science side, which was not entirely in my comfort zone. Our midterm assignment was to create a research proposal on a country's court. I chose Pakistan and it's Federal Shariat Court. It was incredibly daunting to write, especially with the fat annotated bibliography requirement but I ended up going above and beyond. This was the first LSJ assignment that I was genuinely proud of, and it interested me in taking my LSJ coursework and approaching it from more of a research perspective. Also, this assignment really got me interested in the intricacies of the legal system and how the context of it can shape the cultural fabric of the country. I was beginning to see a bigger picture.
I very convoluted and kind of comical series of events took place near the end of Fall quarter of sophomore year, but it ended with me landing an unpaid internship with the ASUW Office of Inclusive Design. I had absolutely no experience with student government or with inclusive design, so to this day I am kind of gobsmacked as to why they gave me that position. But it was so valuable on so many levels. For one, I got to flex my visual design skills and experiment with color and text to convey our super cool and important information to the student population through Instagram. I had never thought much about the power of pure communication in spreading a message. This experience was pivotal in terms of developing my Canva fluency (more subtle foreshadowing...) and also in terms of seeing the other side of student government (extreme subtle foreshadowing !!). From my perspective, I was able to see how messed up student government was, and how many people were getting paid without doing sufficient work for the student body... I was curious... and when I get stuck on something I do not get unstuck...
This is another paper I wrote that I was proud of at the time (and of course cringe at the grammatical and style errors looking back) but I'm not including it as point of pride, but rather because of how much this class meant to me as an individual. The topic was Women's Rights In Muslim Societies, and as a Muslim Woman, I was like, hey that's me! I was cautious entering because I am aware that representaion in academic spaces often leaves a lot to be desired, but I was blown away. For the first time, I read every reading. actively highlighting pieces and sharing quotes on my social media. This felt personal. I think I learned more than most everyone else in that class, no hate, just the content felt like it was speaking to me directly, in terms of what it means to have agency and to seize it, to crack open and understand myself as an individual and community.
When I was 8 years old, I wrote in my red beaded diary that I wanted to be an actress when I grew up. Then I scribbled it because it was ridiculous because I was like, chronically shy and a hopeless public speaker (as you know from Freshman year). But Spring of sophomore year I saw that the Undergraduate Theater Society was putting on student written + directed plays! And something possessed me and I auditioned, and by a beautiful stroke of luck I was cast!! It is definitely safe to say I was the weakest actor in the cast (I say that with no self-deprication, just self-awareness-- I had no experience and some of the others were like, studying Acting as a major), but it was just exhilarating. Standing on that stage, bringing the writer's words to life... I knew I wanted to chase that feeling for the rest of my life. And more than anything it was fun. Pure fun. And so so so healing to my inner child. I did it! Without crying! This one was for you, 8-year old Asma!
This is an interesting artifact because it symbolizes one of my college experiences I can never let myself forget, but it kind of contradicts itself. It's Spring of my sophomore year, and after kindling my love of writing on purpose last year, I am thinking of potentially double majoring with Creative Writing. I took Beginner Short Story Writing to flex my wings, see how I felt about studying creative writing as a major, and... I'm not sure where to start. With each piece that I wrote for this class, I surprised myself. Not only with the honesty that I was able to spill onto the page, but with my classmates' and professor's reactions. I didn't know I could be a good writer. It feels simultaneously naive and out of touch in a humble brag way, but god, I didn't know! And taking this class felt like being cracked open like an egg, having a space to pour out what had been churning in my mind for years. And I was good at it.
But here's the odd part-- this class made me realize I could never be a Creative Writing major. While I love to write, the structure of the general curriculum and the attitudes of my classmates wasn't something that I felt was worth it. But I had a long talk with my professor at the end of the quarter about never wanting to stop writing after taking this class, and was determined to continue my own creative writing while carrying the beauty of it's nature into my other coursework. (I also ended up having two short stories from this class published in literary magazines about a year later!)
Spring of my sophomore year, I decided to take STAT 221 because it was the last class I needed to apply for Informatics. At this point, I had only taken INFO 200 and 201 and still didn’t know whether or not I wanted to major Informatics or just stick with a minor, but I figured taking this class would help me understand and be the defining factor. This was the first Math class I had taken since Spring of 2020 (which was over zoom)..., so it had been three years, and I was a little scared. But this class was an absolute dream. Doing statistics problems filled me with the same rush I felt when I took PHIL 120 Intro to Logic my freshman year, and I was forced to confront the fact that I love the “hard science” of data analysis just as much as I love the work in my social sciences classes. Doing these methodical operations and seeing the numbers fall intro place was so satisfying. I finished the class with a 4.0 and with an understanding that I absolutely was going to apply for Informatics come Fall, since I thoroughly enjoyed each of the prerequisites.
In January of my sophomore year, I began an internship with the Alliance for Gun Responsibility. It was supposed to last til April, but ended up stretching until March of the following year. The year-and-some I spent there was the most educational experience of my four years of college, period. My second and third legislative sessions were here, and while I had an understanding and foundation from my time at the Washington Bus, I experienced my first in person legislative session here. It was a whirlwind! There were so many late night, early (like, EARLY) mornings, snf long days (one pictured to the left), hours of phone banking and writing one-pagers and canvassing and just so so much learning. Surprisingly, one of my favorite aspects was speaking with the volunteers. I didn't think of myself a people person (and did have some crazy embarrassing phone call mistakes in the beginning), but I grew to love it. Call it a hatching or whatever. Also, one last bit of crazy foreshadowing that I'll spoil for you, my bosses here ended up writing me a letter of recommendation for law school and I cannot help but ponder on the series of events that led me to this internship, then tripled my expected time here, then pushed me to grow as an intern and organizer, then led pretty directly to my acceptance in law school. But I'm jumping way ahead. We still have two years to get through.