Community has been the defining influence and object of my education. Some of the artifacts in this portfolio will tell you about the most meaningful communities to me in my time at UW. In my classes, everything seemed to come down to community. Politics, economics, identity, human society, and the experience of learning itself all rely on community, and are defined by how we connect and interact with others. My areas of study– Law, Societies, and Justice, Political Science, and Human Rights– rely on analysis at all different levels of community: How does a policy affect the people in your neighborhood? How does one state government impact the people of another state? How do institutions create different experiences for different communities? Such vague questions I pose to demonstrate the roots of how we study people and systems, and how endless communities can be plugged into these questions.

          My communities over the years have been so valuable and shaped my experiences at the University of Washington. From the beginning, I had Terry residents, the MESC, and my classmates alongside whom I navigated the first year of college. I found community in Honors, my study abroad in Sweden, in Peer Educators and our students, in my friends, and in my loved ones. The LSJ community has been the cornerstone in shaping my education. In these classes, the material is only one factor dictating what I learn: my classmates share so much knowledge and help me better understand and engage with the material. Sometimes I feel like I learn more from them than the curriculum. This community fosters reflection and critical thinking as we question the ways we have been taught, and how we understand both historical and modern political struggles.

          I don’t have any plans yet for what I will do with my education. I want to take my time figuring out what success can look like, and what kind of lifestyle will bring me fulfillment. At the very least, my education has changed me, changed the way I think, and shown me the best and worst parts of myself. I look forward to finding out what my education will do for me. I’m excited to enter the post-pandemic world as a more highly educated person. I’m excited to see the ways my degree will inform everything I see around me, and how I choose to act.

          If you’re exploring my portfolio, you must want to go behind the scenes and see the most notable parts of my time at UW. I want to highlight the most meaningful experiences to me and the (often sappy) lessons I learned. I will also let you into some of my harder times and tell you about how I got through them. I want to use my portfolio to keep a reminder of this transformational time in my life. I want to reflect on who I was at the beginning of my education and who I am now, serving as a point of comparison while I continue to learn and grow.