Some reflections on my college experience, from October 2018 to June 2022
Experiential Learning
Unite UW Professional Development Project Workshop Lead
My sophomore year, I volunteered as a Workshop Lead for the Unite UW Professional Development Project, which I heard about through my previous involvement with Unite UW. As a Workshop Lead, I co-hosted a series of professional development themed workshops. For example, we led workshops themed around perfecting a LinkedIn profile, mental health and professional development, and offered one-on-one resume and cover letter reviews. I really enjoyed this role because I got to meet many different people at the workshops, and we received a lot of good feedback around how participatory we made our presentations. I think initially I was intimidated by the public speaking aspect of the workshop lead role, and it's something that, a few years later, still is not something that I enjoy all that much. Still, being a Workshop Lead definitely helped me gain confidence in my event-planning abilities, accommodating a wide variety of levels of prior experience with the topic, and making events entertaining and welcoming. I think that my time as a Workshop Lead has also aided me in other International Studies and French classes which have a public speaking component. The following image is a screenshot of the cover slide for a presentation of our LinkedIn workshop.
JSIS Honors Research: LGBT Rights in Poland
For my Jackson School Honors senior thesis, I chose to research LGBT rights backslides in Poland. I investigated how EU budgetary intervention impacted LGBT rights in "LGBT-free" zones throughout the southeast of Poland. I found that the interventions initially had a slightly negative impact on human rights on the ground, due to scapegoating and other performative gestures on behalf of municipalities intended to continue to secure EU funding. This project was particularly impactful for myself, as a member of the LGBT community, because I was able to see very concrete examples of how rights are regressing in many places and how far we as a global community have to go in order to be a safe place for queer people. What was rewarding about the project was learning how to create and stick to a very long-term timeline. Attached is my project abstract, as well as documentation of my research and planning process.