I learn best through writing. There is something about having to get words out of my head and on to the page that helps me to process information and connect ideas. In my college coursework, I have spent a lot of time exploring topics and applying concepts through many different papers. I have written papers that I now see differently than when I first drafted them. I have revisited topics from new angles. I have also realized that the most meaningful writing often comes from a willingness to be vulnerable—to acknowledge what I do not know and to engage in the discomfort of growth. Moving forward, I hope to continue using writing as a tool for communication, a way to think critically, and reflect deeply. Below are some of my papers with descriptions of what I took away.
Artistic Expression, Liberation, and Cultural Memory: African American Quilting Through the Lens of Collage
This paper was for a Spring 2024 English class. The assignment was to write a research paper considering the social, cultural, technological, and historical context around the artistic medium we had chosen for a previous assignment (I had made a collage). I decided to write about the legacy and art of African American quilting, and I am so glad that I did. So often, women's textile art is overlooked and deemed "unserious". African American quilting proves that dead wrong. It is an example of the relentless power of community, connection, and preservation of cultural memory led by Black women. In this paper, I try to shed light on the serious artistic value to quilting by breaking it down by its parts and considering it through the lens of collage. I love this paper because I felt so invested in the research and walked away from it feeling like I better understood cultural memory, community resilience, and writing respectfully about communities where I am an outsider.
Visual Analysis: Body Beautiful or Beauty Knows No Pain
My ENGL 298 was also only seven people, and four people who consistently showed up. This meant that I had ample opportunity to receive feedback from my classmates and professors. As I got to know everyone in this small class I found myself wanting to engage more and produce thoughtful work because it felt like we were a team, striving to make each other better. This was different from my large classes, where I could skate by without getting to know a single person. The success of the Visual Analysis assignment in particular hinged on feedback from peers, friends, and my professors.
The Visual Analysis assignment for ENGL 298 was to describe an image detailed enough so that someone could draw it just by reading your writing while also placing it in its historical, political, and cultural context. This assignment felt like a rare opportunity in my coursework to be creative in a way that required stretching my skills. I had a lot of fun writing this because it required my language to be absolutely precise. It was important for me to consider the reader's uptake of the structure and word choices to guide how they imagined the image. As you read this paper, I encourage you to wait to look at the image until after you finish reading.
A Photo Speaks 1000 Words: Unfolding Layers of Translational Relationships in Photography
One of my goals throughout my education has been to remain interdisciplinary in my skill set and thinking. To this aim, I decided to pursue a writing minor with the hope of refining my communication and writing abilities. English 382, Special Topics in Multimodal Composition, was my first advanced writing course at UW. This course provided me with key terms and a framework for analyzing writing and other communication through the lens of genre, in part by expanding my definitions of translation, agency, and uptake.
In particular, I was interested in the idea of translation being more than simply translating words across languages. Rather several pieces of the coursework argued that translation is a multimodal process in which one makes choices to best convey meaning. For me, this added a writing studies perspective to what I learned in a previous linguistics course I took with in the honors program: Ways of Feeling. Specifically building on the idea that not all words are translatable into other languages and direct translations do not always carry the same meaning because of cultural contexts. In this English course, this idea of cross-cultural translation was negotiated beyond language translation to include translation of meaning across genres. Where one has to negotiate to best convey meaning within the constraints of a genre.
Five weeks of the course was dedicated to a group qualitative research project which, for me, included artifact analysis, journal entries, and interviews. In this project, my group members and I expanded the presented notions of translation further by analyzing photography using writing studies methods. In our research, we examined photography as a communicative process of translation between photographer, photo, and viewer, taking a specific interest in the agency of each actor.
This project not only allowed me to put what I learned about writing studies into practice, but was an opportunity for me to go through the process of qualitative research. For the first time in my college career, I was asked to contribute to a conversation rather than make an argument using existing knowledge. This process required me to think critically about research ethics and methods for qualitative studies.
Climate Change – An International Perspective: Science, Art, and Activism
This class presented climate science within its social and political context. Course content included discussions of international collaboration efforts, climate change denial, national litigation, and the role of art and activism in climate change action. Through this class, I gained skills to better weigh climate adaptation and mitigation strategies, and an understanding of the stakeholders in global conversations around climate change.
For me, the most impactful piece of the course was the importance of incorporating Indigenous voices and science into climate change conversations. Indigenous communities are a prime example of how those who have contributed the least to climate change have the most to lose. Essays “Sacred Resistance” by Tara Houska and “Indigenous Prophecy and Mother Earth” by Sherri Mitchell underscored that to truly address climate change, we must rethink our western habits of extraction and move towards a collaborative relationship with our ecosystems. We must invoke a cultural shift that recognizes that humans are just one component of the world's system. These essays and others inspired me to read Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science by Jessica Hernandez, Ph.D. which displayed the validity, importance, and necessity of Indigenous Science, especially related to climate change. Hernandez also reflects on her background and communities, highlighting that climate change puts Indigenous identity at risk.
Although I am continuing to learn about Indigenous perspectives and the climate crisis, this information has changed how I look at climate change impacts and brought the limitations of western science to the forefront of my mind. It is this new awareness that drove me to write my final paper for Honors 391 on permafrost loss and its impacts on Arctic Indigenous peoples. I chose to attach the paper here because it is one of the research papers that I most enjoyed writing as it required me to explore this perspective by applying it to a specific issue.
Cycles of Gender Enforcement
One honors class that I took my freshman year but think of often was “Ways of Feeling. Through learning about different expressions of emotions across languages and cultures, my perspective on cultural conext fundamentally changed. I now have an understanding of how deep cultural influences affect individuals and realize how much I will never understand about other’s experiences. For me, this cemented the importance of centering community-insider voices in public health work. For my final paper, I explored how gender roles are enforced in early childhood in the US.
Writing this paper challenged me to think critically about the ways gender roles are subtly and explicitly enforced from an early age. I have always been aware that children absorb social norms, but this project deepened my understanding of how early—and how pervasively—gender expectations are embedded in parenting, education, and everyday interactions. Through researching studies on emotional language, praise, and play, I saw how gender norms are not just learned but actively taught, even by adults who believe they are raising children in a gender-equitable way. Writing this paper also provided insight into how difficult it is to break these gender cycles. Gender norms are so ingrained in our interactions that they persist even among well-intentioned parents and educators. Yet, I found hope in research showing that conscious effort can disrupt these patterns.
Yellow Fever and its Connections to the Panama Canal
The honors class, Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases, overviewed the immune response, modes of transmission, and the basic biology and epidemiology of infectious diseases through select examples. The professor also led discussions on the public health impacts of outbreaks and the social factors that can contribute to the emergence and re-emergence of disease. Examples included, but were not limited to, COVID-19, HIV/AIDS, influenza, lyme disease, MRSA, TB, and cholera.
This course provided a strong biological and historical foundation for my PH-GH learning before I was admitted to the major. The information was approachable yet highly in depth. It provided an opportunity to learn about highly referenced public health history, such as the cholera outbreak in London, lyme disease on the east coast, and HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and then Africa. I had previously taken physiology and biostatistics and felt like this course put the biological science and statistics in conversation with the social impact, which is what I love about public health.
In my final paper for this course, “Yellow Fever and its Connections to the Panama Canal”, I researched the social, environmental, and economic impacts of yellow fever during the construction of the Panama Canal. This was probably my first time in college putting disease biology, colonialism, economics, and social hierarchy all in conversation together in one assignment. I remember it being a mental lift but feeling proud of what I had learned and communicated. To me, considering many forces at play with a critical eye is a core skill in public health practice that I want to center in my career. This course, and paper, was my first step.
Exposure Characterization - Diesel Exhaust
Writing this paper on diesel exhaust exposure and its public health impacts was a learning experience in both content and form. It required me to adopt a scientific writing style that was more rigid and data-driven than I was used to, which I struggled with more than I expected. Unlike other papers I have written, this one required a high level of objectivity and explicit reliance on existing research rather than personal analysis. I had to focus on synthesizing complex studies, clearly communicating risk factors, and structuring my writing in a way that prioritized clarity over argument.
Through this process, I gained a deeper understanding of how public health research is conducted and communicated. I explored landmark studies that linked diesel exhaust exposure to lung cancer and other health outcomes, while also considering gaps in the research—particularly the underrepresentation of women in exposure studies. This project challenged me to think critically about the ways research informs policy and how existing data often leaves certain populations out of the conversation.
Despite the challenges of shifting to a more scientific writing style, I found this paper rewarding because it reinforced my ability to analyze research and communicate public health risks. It also deepened my awareness of the intersection between occupational health and environmental justice. I now feel more confident in my ability to engage with technical public health literature and advocate for more inclusive research moving forward.
“Hound Dog”: A Case Study of the Erasure of Black Women’s Influence on American Music
An honors class that I particularly enjoyed was AFRAM 404: Black Sound and the Archive. One of my favorite parts of being in the honors program is the opportunity and encouragement to take classes that I may not have otherwise encountered. At first I thought this course would be about Black music, which it certainly was, but I was most interested in how it expanded my knowledge on an archive and introduced me to the field of sound studies.
This class required the students to think deeply about the definition, physical space, and politics of archives. We examined how archives and archival materials have been curated to erase certain histories, specifically the experiences and lives of Black Americans. Together, we discussed what archives serve to do and what they have left out. We also grappled with the definition of an archive more abstractly. To this aim, we considered music and sound as an archive and explored the history that was saved through readings, videos, and songs.
My lifelong takeaway from this course, however, was a new love for Black music. I am someone who can get stuck in the same few playlists, rarely searching for new music. This class shattered that habit, introducing me to modern and classic blues, soul, and more. Since this class, I have spent much more time searching for new music and discovering new artists. I would say my music taste has changed for the better.
Illness Narrative: Distrust, Disengagement, and Good Doctors
In Spring 2022, I took GEOG 280: Geography of Health and Healthcare. This class helped me learn to look at health outcomes spatially and consider health in the context of community. I appreciated this class because it is one of the few classes I had that explicitly focused on chronic disease rather than communicable disease. Chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and stroke are the leading causes of illness and death in the United States. In my career, I hope to work to prevent and lessen the burden of chronic disease. The main assignment of this class was the Illness Narrative, where we were asked to interview someone about their experience with a chronic illness. I interviewed my roommate, Kate. The final product was a narrative of her experience with an illness with connections to course content about the social determinants of health and the societal context of disease. I enjoyed connecting course concepts to someone in my life and writing in-depth about a person’s experience. For me, this assignment was a challenging, satisfying, mix of applying my learning and making crafting a narrative.
