Welcome to my portfolio! I'm a graduate of the Honors program at the University of Washington, where I double-majored in Political Science and Law, Societies and Justice. This site is a record of my studies and adventures at UW and beyond.
Feel free to explore, or start with my introductory reflection below and then click through the arrows at the top and bottom of each page to read about my experiences in the chronological (if not entirely logical) order in which they have unfolded. |
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
-Rainer Maria Rilke
The personal is political. At the University of Washington, I have not only developed a deep interest in studying political science - which I will continue to do in a PhD program next year and, with any luck, as a profession - but also come to appreciate the significance of the nexus between self and society in ways that both inform and transcend this vocation. As an American citizen studying American politics, I am a subject of my own work. This work thus requires both a strong sense of self and a deep understanding of how my identity locks in and exists in tension with others and within a broader societal framework.
My experiences at UW have led me to ask questions about myself as a subject in a number of ways: What does it mean for me, as a college student, as a white person, as a woman, as an American citizen, et cetera, to be doing or saying a particular thing? How does my family background affect my perspective on an issue? Why is a particular topic so exciting, scary, frustrating, or intuitive to me? And how can the perspectives of others with different identities and experiences help me understand the world more richly?
Java programming and reading War and Peace, working for two Washington State Representatives and traveling by train across the Indian subcontinent, volunteering at a homeless shelter on the Ave and rubbing shoulders with the Gates family at a fundraising event for the policy center I worked for - all of these are parts of my UW experience, and while incredibly, almost impossibly diverse, all have helped me start to become the kind of scholar and kind of human I want to be by challenging me to ask these kinds of existential questions about who I am relative to the world and how I want to act on and in it - to live into answers. For example, my time in India helped me to recognize that I wanted to do work in American politics - as a white woman traveling alone and struggling just to get by, I realized that the place I could make the most difference was at home. The next year, my time at the state legislature - and my instinct to put the legislature under a microscope and study it - nudged me towards making this difference as a scholar, helped me to focus my research interests, and set me down the path that has since led to my thesis and my choice of graduate school. This portfolio archives snapshots of these and other discoveries. It is a personal reflection that is perhaps a bit preoccupied with its political implications - but I think it’s a preoccupation worth having.
My experiences at UW have led me to ask questions about myself as a subject in a number of ways: What does it mean for me, as a college student, as a white person, as a woman, as an American citizen, et cetera, to be doing or saying a particular thing? How does my family background affect my perspective on an issue? Why is a particular topic so exciting, scary, frustrating, or intuitive to me? And how can the perspectives of others with different identities and experiences help me understand the world more richly?
Java programming and reading War and Peace, working for two Washington State Representatives and traveling by train across the Indian subcontinent, volunteering at a homeless shelter on the Ave and rubbing shoulders with the Gates family at a fundraising event for the policy center I worked for - all of these are parts of my UW experience, and while incredibly, almost impossibly diverse, all have helped me start to become the kind of scholar and kind of human I want to be by challenging me to ask these kinds of existential questions about who I am relative to the world and how I want to act on and in it - to live into answers. For example, my time in India helped me to recognize that I wanted to do work in American politics - as a white woman traveling alone and struggling just to get by, I realized that the place I could make the most difference was at home. The next year, my time at the state legislature - and my instinct to put the legislature under a microscope and study it - nudged me towards making this difference as a scholar, helped me to focus my research interests, and set me down the path that has since led to my thesis and my choice of graduate school. This portfolio archives snapshots of these and other discoveries. It is a personal reflection that is perhaps a bit preoccupied with its political implications - but I think it’s a preoccupation worth having.