Tag: naya samuel

Even though her thesis on Chinese humanitarian aid is keeping her busy these days, Sadichchha Adhikari ’16 finds the time to interview prospective applicants, write for WesStuffed (of which she’s co-editor-in-chief), and maintain her killer eyebrows. Adhikari sat down with The Argus to talk about New England fall, the magic of curry powder, and learning Japanese.

The Argus: Why are you a WesCeleb?

Sadichchha Adhikari: That’s a really hard question to answer. I don’t really know. I think very recently I’ve been exposed to people I hadn’t really met before, and if I had met them, I wasn’t really close with them. As a senior interviewer, I’ve been exposed to so many new people and new things, so my social group has expanded significantly. Maybe that’s one reason. Other than that, I’m also involved in a wide range of activities, I think, and I’ve dabbled in a lot of things over the past three years.

A: What are some of the things you’ve dabbled in?

SA: I used to play ultimate Frisbee here, and I had to stop this year because I’m writing a thesis. I also run WesStuffed with Amanda Roosa [’16], another senior interviewer. I used to do Model UN here, too—I was the president for the past two years, and I gave up the throne this year for my thesis. I’m also in the College of East Asian Studies majors committee. I think, also, having taken a wide range of classes in a liberal arts school…has allowed me to expose myself to different people.

A: What’s this thesis that’s taking up all of your time?

SA: I’m writing about Chinese aid and what that says about the politics of South Asia. I’m originally from Nepal, and I wanted to write about humanitarian aid, specifically in relation to the earthquake on April 25, [2015].

A: How have you changed since coming to Wesleyan?

SA: Tremendously. I went to a very small high school that was very into specialized fields. So it was a high school for math, science, and engineering. It was very rigidly structured. I didn’t have a lot of room in my schedule to take other classes. So I think being comfortable with exposing myself to new things is something that I’ve learned through my time at Wesleyan. Also learning to be more tolerant of people. I would have never thought that I’d be a Government major or study abroad in Japan or anything like that. Learning what it’s like to enjoy the things I’m learning about and writing about in class is something valuable that I’ve learned here.

A: Tell me about something you think is underrated.

SA: I feel like everything I think is correctly rated for most people. I think New England fall is underrated. Most people tend to overlook the beauty of a New England fall because it gets so cold, and it’s an indication that a harsh Wesleyan winter is coming. But I went apple picking a few weeks ago, and it was amazing. I live in New York, where there aren’t a lot of trees and not a lot of fall foliage. And in my time in Japan, I was in one of the places where it has the most beautiful falls, because it’s known for the red maple trees. I’ve come to appreciate it a lot more over the past few years, and if I am to move back to New York after I graduate, I think that’s something I’ll miss.

A: Would you want to be famous? For what?

SA: I don’t think I’d want to be famous. I think I’d want to make a big impact, especially for women in developing countries. I think that’s something I’d want to be known for if I were to ever be known for something, just because I’ve grown up with the privilege of my parents being O.K. with me playing sports, and being O.K. with me not being into things that girls are usually into in my country. But other people don’t have that privilege. I would really want to be a voice for people like that, and who are otherwise disadvantaged.

A: So that’s the field you want to go into after graduation?

SA: I definitely want to go into the nonprofit field. I don’t know if I want to work with women specifically, or for Nepal specifically, but definitely something that’s known to have made an impact, I want to be involved with.

A: What’s a skill or talent you want to get better at?

SA: Definitely cooking. I started cooking my junior year at Wesleyan, just because I had access to my own kitchen, and it was the easiest option available. It’s only been a semester since I’ve been doing it, and it’s definitely something I want to improve on, because it’s such an important skill, just in life.

A: What do you like to cook?

SA: Curry powder is my go-to ingredient. I put that in almost everything. The recipes I’ve written about for WesStuffed so far have all been related to co-op food, because I think that’s something everyone can relate to, like having to throw out co-op food because it goes to waste. So it originally started as a way for me to not waste food, but then I started coming up with my own recipes and posting them on WesStuffed.

A: What do you do to relax?

SA: I used to knit a lot. But that’s when I had access to my parents’ money, and now I can’t afford yarn. It’s really, really expensive. But I think just watching TV and not moving for a few hours is my way of relaxing. I know other people are like, “I go to the gym,” and “I go running,” and things like that, but I’m just like, “No. I like to watch Netflix in bed.”

A: What shows?
SA: Recently I finished watching “Breaking Bad” for the second time, because it is so good and really addicting—I mean, for every other reason that everyone else likes “Breaking Bad.” And I’ve started watching “Last Man on Earth,” which is a new show with January Jones and other people I’ve seen before on TV and don’t know their names. So definitely sitcoms and comedy shows in general are my go-to, I think.

A: When someone was nominating you to be a WesCeleb, this person wrote, “The first thing you’ll notice about Sadichchha is her killer eye-liner and on-point eyebrows.” What’s your secret?

SA: [Laughing] Oh my God, I love that. I’ve been doing makeup since I was 13 years old, so I think practice. As for my eyebrows, I think that’s the thing I’m most conscious of because my mom owns a salon in Manhattan and does eyebrows for a living. And so I guess for that reason I do a good job of maintaining them.

A: Where do you go around here to get them done?

SA: I go to a place in Middletown—I actually took a friend there, Eury German [’16]. It’s called Sangita’s [Threading Parlor]. She’s a really nice person. It’s a quaint store.

A: Where do you see yourself living in five to 10 years?

SA: I don’t really know where I want to live, because I want to be moving around all the time. I don’t think I can stay in one place for more than a few months. So ideally I’d find a job where I get to do a lot of traveling. My ideal job would allow me to live in Japan for a few months, and then back to New York, or somewhere on the East Coast, for the rest of the year.

A: How long have you been speaking Japanese?

SA: It’s funny, actually. When I was a kid—my dad is fluent in Japanese—I would be saying random gibberish things, and he would say, “You’re speaking Japanese! You’re doing it!” And ever since then I’ve thought, “Wow, I really have to learn Japanese.” I took in my freshman year, on a whim, and ended up loving it. So I’ve been taking it for three years and went abroad.

A: What’s your weirdest Wesleyan story?

SA: I feel like I haven’t been adventurous enough to have weird stories…. Okay. I used to be a tour guide for the Office of Admissions, and once I was giving a tour and a bird pooped on one of our guests. She started freaking out and didn’t know what to do, because she also had an interview after that. I didn’t really know how to handle it, because they don’t prepare you for such a specific event. So I was like, “There’s a bathroom—you can go and wash up.” But she was freaking out, her dad was freaking out, and it was a weird situation that I never expected to happen.

Whether you recognize him from his job at the Usdan help desk, as the former President of Psi U and WestCo, or, if you’re a first year, from the We Speak We Stand presentation during orientation, you’ve definitely seen Daniel Wittenberg ’16 around campus. Our first WesCeleb of the 2015-2016 school year, Wittenberg sat down with The Argus to discuss his summer internship at a nonprofit, the power of summer camp, and the future of Psi U.

The Argus: Why do you think you were nominated as a WesCeleb?

Daniel Wittenberg: I think that’s a tough question, but I would say that I’ve been really lucky with the communities I’ve been involved with at Wesleyan, as well as where I’ve just ended up on campus. So I lived in WestCo my freshman year and really loved the community there. I ended up being WestCo president, so that’s kind of a whole community that, although I lived in Psi U my sophomore year, I have always been connected to. And then I work at Usdan, the student center, and I was working at the front desk the past two years. I feel like it’s a pretty visible place and a really easy place to interact with people. Also, I think that my involvement with Psi U and, most recently, WesWell and We Speak We Stand, have just been ways to meet really different faces of campus, and it’s just been really fun.

A: What’s it been like being involved with We Speak We Stand?

DW: I’ve really loved it. I got involved in the spring as a facilitator for bystander intervention. That’s something I actually got involved with through Psi U, because we were working with WesWell to try and get our house safer and keep members educated. So I got involved and got trained as a facilitator and did a few bystander interventions, and then Tanya [Purdy] sent out an email to everyone that was involved in that to ask if we wanted to come early for orientation and do the performance. And it was something that I’d really started to care about a lot, and something that I really enjoyed. I enjoyed the people that I was doing that with, and it was a really rewarding experience.

A: Can you tell me about how you reacted to the recent news about Psi U being closed for the upcoming academic year?

DW: Yeah, it was really devastating. I was president last fall, and throughout the course [of the year], Psi U changed in so many ways, most notably in co-educating in the spring. And after all of this work, to kind of hear at the end of the summer, not even when the incident happened in the spring, that we would no longer be allowed in the house this year—also through emails that were not really clear about what had happened and were kind of just working off assumptions—it was just really sad to see all the work that I and so many others had put in get set back. And I don’t think it’s been erased. It certainly hasn’t, because we’re going to be really active this year—but it’s tough, just because it wasn’t something Psi U was involved with as an organization, and nobody really knows what happened…. I think the administration really jumped to conclusions.

A: You said the organization’s going to be really active this year. Do you all have any specific ideas lined up?

DW: So, we’re still working out exactly how we want to organize this year. I’m no longer directly in a leadership role, but I’m still really involved. We need to work with the University to see exactly what we can do as an organization without a house. Our hope is to still engage with the campus, still host events, still try to get our message as Psi U and where we’re headed out there for the freshmen who might not really know. Especially because we’re not going have a space, we want to make sure we still engage in conversations with the freshmen and see if they’re interested, and really figure out after this year where we’re going to be headed, because we were really in a transitional phase and it’s important to keep that going.

A: What other activities are you involved with on campus?

DW: I was a student manager at Usdan my sophomore and junior year, and this year I’ve actually been hired as a programming and marketing intern, so I’m going to be working with UCAB as well as Usdan staff to organize weekly Thursday and Friday night events in Usdan, and to market those to the campus. There are some really exciting things coming up. I encourage you to come, and everyone else. It’s essentially going to make use of the Usdan facilities to, one, provide a safe and fun engaging social space for students on the weekend if they don’t feel like going out to other places on campus or if there’s nothing else going on, and two, to help show students how they can use Usdan throughout the year, and use those facilities in different ways that they might not know about.

I think coming in as a freshman you might not know everything that Usdan has to offer, there’s actually a lot of stuff there that students can take advantage of. But I don’t think everyone knows that, so I’m really excited about that. I really love working at Usdan. One, the people I work with are really amazing, and it’s a great group of people that really have different perspectives on campus, because I would say that they’re all really interested and into different things. And two, just being in the student center you see so many students and kind of get to see people interacting with one another a lot.

A: How was your summer?

DW: It was great. I was interning at the F.B. Heron Foundation, which is in New York. It’s actually kind of a long story, but I’m going to go into it. They’re engaging in impact investing, rather than operating like a traditional foundation, where they have an endowment. And then they give grants, and those two departments are separate. The endowment invests money and uses the money they make to give money to organizations that work towards their mission. F.B. Heron is fighting poverty, so that’s an example. But what they’ve found a few years ago now, as financial portfolios are becoming more transparent, is that a lot of the money they were investing with their endowment was actually investing in things that kind of run counter to mission, like privatized prisons, which you could say actually are really bad for impoverished communities, and fossil fuels, again which disproportionately affect low income communities. So they’re transitioning to invest their grants and any debt in equity into mission organizations or portfolios. It’s hard to explain without going into some nonprofit or finance lingo, but it’s actually really exciting, and I’m hoping to write my senior essay about that, too.

A: Has it impacted what you want to do after Wes?

DW: Yes, to the extent that it’s shown me that I don’t actually want to go into nonprofits. I really enjoyed working there, but I’m not sure if it’s the environment I want to go into right after college. I might try to get some experience in a more entrepreneurial environment and hopefully move forward from there.

A: How has the CSS major impacted you?

DW: I loved the CSS major. Although a lot of people view it as very restrictive because you’re assigned courses you take every semester, I think the way that it’s taught really lets you form your own ideas about what you’re reading. You write essays about content before discussing that content in class, and I think that’s really cool, because it allows you to kind of take your own approach. And then when you get to class, it gives you the chance to kind of adapt and kind of defend that approach, and your interpretation of what you were reading, and I’ve really enjoyed that. I felt like I had a lot of freedom with what I learned.

A: Do you have any favorite memories at Wesleyan?

DW: I have so many varied Wesleyan memories that it’s kind of hard to really pin down. I would say that many of my best learning experiences have actually been through Psi U and taking a leadership role in an organization where students really take the lead. I was president of WestCo and worked with ResLife a lot, but didn’t ever get that level of decision making and autonomy that I got in Psi U. Going through the process of coeducation when that was announced in the fall when I was president, working with the organization to make that transition, and working with the rest of students on campus to figure out what our role would be on campus after that transition was made was a huge learning process and, although a very difficult memory, a really rewarding one that I learned a lot from.

I’ll try to think of some fun memories. I have so many different ones that it’s really hard to say. I’d say that also—this is another Psi U one—when our first coed class was initiated last spring was absolutely one of my favorite memories, because there had been so much work that went into it and, you know, the way that our house had transformed that year was really inspiring. And seeing that all culminate in a new class of both men and women was really amazing.

A: What’s the meaning behind that ankle tattoo?

DW: Yeah, so this is a really important part of my life, too. I have attended and worked at the same camp for the past 11 summers, and this past summer was actually the first one I didn’t return there. I started when I was 11, and I was a camper for a few years. I did an international exchange program through them and have worked there as a counselor ever since. I would say that that place in terms of shaping me as a person is probably the one place that I’d say has shaped me the most. It’s… in Becket, Massachusetts. It’s in the Berkshires. It’s beautiful. It’s one of the most caring communities I’ve ever been a part of, and I try to make it back every summer even if I’m not working there anymore.

A: Where’d you go internationally?

DW: I went to Chile. It was an amazing experience. So that was actually going into my sophomore year of high school, so it was a while back, but it was a really great experience, good for my Spanish speaking, as well as the first time I had traveled in a group of people my age and had a lot of independence in the people I was interacting with. I would say it was really my first really cultural experience, because traveling before that was really not the same.

This interview has been edited for length.

You might not know Neo Sora ’14, who currently serves as the president of Eclectic, unless you’re a regular there. That’s because Sora, quiet and thoughtful behind wire-framed glasses, doesn’t spread himself too thin. Instead, he commits himself fully to projects about which he is truly passionate. The film and philosophy double major spoke with The Argus about his presidential duties, the Ainu, and a film thesis so complicated it transcends explanation.

The Argus: What stuff are you involved with on campus?

Neo Sora: I guess I’m involved in a lot of film-related things, and I’m in Eclectic. This year, that’s about it.

A: What about in the past years?

NS: In the past years, I was involved in some music stuff, a little bit, and that’s about it.

A: Are you a film major?

NS: Yeah. I’m a film and philosophy major.

A: Cool. How’d you decide on that?

NS: I don’t know. I sort of came into Wesleyan thinking I was going to be an anthro major, and I took a philosophy class and I really, really enjoyed it freshman year. Then, in freshman year, I also took a film class. I did not expect I would be a film major at all, but I loved it, so I decided to be a film major.

A: What film projects did you work on this year?

NS: This year, mostly my thesis.

A: What is your thesis?

NS: It was a black and white 16-millimeter film; it’s hard to describe what it is. I just suggest you come to the screening on May 10. I’m not going to try to explain it to you.

A: What are some film things you’ve worked on in the past?

NS: Last year, I DP-ed [director of photography] other people’s theses. I was the cinematographer. Last year, I worked on four theses. Aside from that, I’ve been doing this very weird 48-hour festival thing every year. We have to make a movie in 48 hours. And what else? This other personal project on the side.

A: What made you want to be in Eclectic?

NS: I don’t know. I didn’t really want to be in Eclectic freshman year, but my friend convinced me to, and I joined it. At first, I didn’t really enjoy it. I sort of was around; I didn’t really get myself involved. But then, after my semester off, I came back, and I lived in Eclectic for a semester, and that changed a lot of things. I got to know a lot of my friends now. It just made me like Eclectic a lot.

A: Were you involved in the music scene at Eclectic?

NS: Not really. It’s hard to say. I’m the president right now, so that’s about it.

A: What does that entail?

NS: Meetings. Dealing with the administration, which is a hassle. It’s really annoying.

A: Do you know what you’re going to do after you graduate?

NS: Kind of. I’m enrolled in a summer course at Columbia. I’m going to Japan for a month right after I graduate. And I’m also going to be an apprentice with a translator, translating from Japanese to English. Hopefully, my future will involve lots of translating jobs, so I can, like, carry my laptop and go anywhere I want and work and feed myself. Nothing’s for sure, but hopefully it all comes together.

A: Do you think you’re going to live in New York after you graduate?

NS: Definitely not. I mean, maybe for a little bit just to orient myself and figure out what I’m going to do. But I was born in New York, so I’m a little bit tired of it.

A: Where do you think you would want to go?

NS: Anywhere, anywhere. I’m planning on being in Japan for the entirety of next year to film a documentary with my friends.

A: What’s the documentary about?

NS: It’s about this indigenous group in Northern Japan called the Ainu, and their culture and art and music, basically everything about them. It’s really fascinating. I’ve also made new friends who are equally fascinated with them, so I guess it will be good.

A: How did you learn about that group of people?

NS: The Ainu? Just listened to their music on CDs and stuff like that. They make music together. It’s really cool. The women just mostly get into groups and do kind of an a cappella thing but more rhythmic, and they add little taps and a hand-clapping beat to it. It’s actually really funky. I got really, really into that. It’s just really interesting.

A: Are you generally interested in Japanese culture?

NS: Yeah, to an extent, since I am Japanese, and I lived in Japan for a few years as well, so I’m definitely interested. I love anime and Japanese art and all that stuff. The Japanese art scene in the past is also really cool.

A: You lived there while you were growing up?

NS: I lived there when I was six to nine, I guess. And I go back every year.

A: How was living in Japan?

NS: It was fun. I went to an international school, so it wasn’t completely Japanese. It was like, half international students, half Japanese kids. I really, really liked it, but after a certain amount of time, my parents got fed up with being in Japan and we moved back to New York.

A: What’s been your best memory at Wesleyan?

NS: Every year, Chana has been very fun.

A: How was this year’s?

NS: Very fun. I had to manage it a little bit more this year since I was organizing it, but still, it was very fun.

A: What’s organizing that like?

NS: A lot of paperwork, a lot of making sure people aren’t doing dumb shit, just a lot of annoying things.

A: How do you feel like you’ve changed over the course of your time at Wesleyan?

NS: I feel like I’ve changed a lot, actually. A lot of the philosophy classes I’ve taken have kind of changed the way I look at things. Especially [those taught by] this one professor named Elise Springer. She teaches ethics and other FGSS-related classes. I’ve taken a class per semester [with her].

A: What class of hers did you like the most?

NS: Most notably, Feminist Philosophy [and Moral Theory] was a big deal. It really changed the way I looked at people around me, society, all those good things. Over the years, I think I’ve become more calm.

A: What advice would you give to your freshman self?

NS: To stop being annoying. I feel like I was a little annoying and really antisocial. I’m still antisocial, actually, but I was very antisocial freshman year and wasn’t willing to meet new people that often. I was just a hermit in my own room in the Butts. Definitely to meet more people, I suppose.

A: Is there certain stuff that you want to do before you graduate?

NS: Not much. Just hang out with my friends while I’m up here. I’m a super-senior, so I should have graduated last year, so all my friends graduated last year. All my friends from 2013 graduated last year and I lost the bulk of my friend group. But now, basically all my friends are in Eclectic and I just want to hang out with them a lot before I graduate.

I found Maeve Russell ’14 sitting on Foss with a group of friends who were blowing bubbles and soaking in the sunshine. Nothing could better capture Russell’s sunny personality. Russell is the student coordinator of Wesleyan’s chapter of Shining Hope For Communities (SHOFCO), a non-profit organization working to combat poverty in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. The Argus chatted with her about her work with SHOFCO, embarrassing friends at WesWings, and the advice she would give to her freshman self.

The Argus: What are you involved with on campus?

Maeve Russell: My main involvement is in SHOFCO; I’m the student coordinator. This is my second year as the student coordinator of SHOFCO through the Office of Community Service [OCS], so that basically just means I have office hours in the OCS, which is on the top floor of Allbritton. And I also lead all of the weekly meetings for SHOFCO, and I do all of the behind-the-scenes stuff. And in the scene, actually, as well. Just a lot.

I’m also a student advisor for the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship. This is my first year for doing that. I work at WesWings. I was on the WSA for, like, a year. I quit that. Let’s see, what other things…?

A: I mean, that’s a lot.

MR: I think everyone here at Wesleyan, though, is involved in a lot of things. That’s why I love Wesleyan. Everyone’s very passionate about a number of issues.

A: Tell me more about your work with SHOFCO. How did you get involved?

MR: Actually, I first applied to Wesleyan thanks to SHOFCO and Kennedy [Odede ’12, co-founder of SHOFCO]. I remember that I got one of those Wesleyan magazines that they start distributing to prefrosh, and it had Kennedy in it and was just talking about his story. I thought it was amazing that a university would then pay for his tuition and have him come here, and then that he would start this amazing organization that’s both Wesleyan-born and Kibera-born. I just really liked that.

Also, the summer before I was a freshman, Jessica Posner [’09, the other co-founder] won MTV’s Do Something Award. So I learned about SHOFCO before I even applied to Wesleyan, and then once I came to Wesleyan, I just started coming to the meetings and got involved. It’s a really easy organization to become involved in. We’re very much about the idea that every drop in the bucket counts, so you just do what you can: come to meetings, table, get more involved, help with events. We try to make it as non-hierarchical as possible and just have everyone join in to do as much or as little as they want to. It’s really great. I went on the Summer Institute the summer before my junior year.

A: And you traveled to Kibera through SHOFCO to work at the Kibera School for Girls?

MR: Yes. The Summer Institute is where, for about a month, you’re in Kibera, living in Nairobi but working in Kibera at the school. It’s basically just a really great opportunity for the teachers, because, obviously, we’re not qualified to teach these girls. The teachers are amazing, and we cannot compare to them. But it’s an opportunity for the teachers to have a break to work on curriculum, and it’s just kind of a summer school session, so you teach them whatever you want. It’s also already a Montessori-based school, so it’s all about growing as an individual and becoming fully developed. These girls are amazing in that they have a lot of pride and confidence in themselves and in their answers. You literally will ask a question to a group of 20 to 30 girls, and every single one of them will have at least five answers for you. Without a doubt. And they just say it with such conviction, and I love it. I’ve worked in classrooms here in the U.S., and it’s not the same.

SHOFCO is [Kibera’s] organization. And that’s what we try to emphasize here at Wesleyan, that we’re just supporting a grassroots local movement that’s happening seven time zones away. They’re doing amazing things, and it’s all created and supported by them. They employ all Kiberans, or at least Kenyans, other than the two American fellows, and they’re slowly getting rid of that as well, which I’m in full support of. Just because it’s very much their organization, and we’re just lucky to have some sort of personal connection to supporting it and learning all about it.

A: Does SHOFCO have any events coming up at Wesleyan?

MR: We’re going to have a photo exhibit up for WesFest, which will be amazing because it’s going to try to help people visualize what SHOFCO and Kibera look like on site and just give people a better picture of the community that’s there, what a day in the life for a girl there is, just trying to help make it more concrete. That’s why the Summer Institute is great, because we’re always sending people from Wesleyan there, to come back and talk about the girls that they met. Every single meeting, we have a girl of the week: we highlight a first-grader or a second-grader, what her name is, what she wants to be when she grows up—because they all want to be these amazing things. You’ll ask them, and they’ll say, “pilot!” “engineer!” “teacher!” “politician!” “doctor!” The “engineer” and “pilot” really get me, because you do not hear that from any little girl. And it’s awesome.

A: Do you know what you’re doing after graduation? I know that’s a terrible question to ask.

MR: I’m still figuring that one out. I applied to a fellowship here, so I might be here another year. But I also applied to the Global Health Forum, so I’m waiting to hear back from that. I’m applying to a lot of other positions. I’m basically just putting out a very wide net and seeing who will take pity upon me and employ me. Hopefully one person out there will. That’s the dream.

A: But you have one particular field in mind?

MR: Nonprofit, social entrepreneurship, for sure. I mean, I do want to have a salary that can support me, and unfortunately sometimes that seems like it’s mutually exclusive, but I want to be part of an organization that’s doing some amount of social change, positive social change, in the world. It might just be a small community—like Kibera—but we live in such an interconnected world that changing one individual’s life means a lot. It’s not even changing it, per se, but empowering them to make the changes that they want to make and to do what they want to do. Actually, yeah, I’m not for going in and telling people how they should live their lives, but I think empowering others to do what they want to do, and giving them the tools to decide how they want live their lives and what they want to do with them, is so important. Because everyone should have those opportunities. In an ideal world, everyone would. I think people at Wesleyan are very good at being culturally and socially sensitive when discussing these things, and I’m just saying that we don’t know what’s best.

A: Shifting gears a bit, what’s your major?

MR: I am majoring in government and environmental studies.

A: So is that what you did your capstone project on?

MR: Yeah. So for environmental studies, if you’re doing the linked major, you have to do either a thesis in your primary major or a senior essay in your primary major, or a capstone research project. So I chose the capstone research project. But I wrote 61 pages for that, so it was still an endeavor, I suppose. I would not put it in the thesis realm, though. I one hundred percent do not compare myself to them; they deserve so much credit for doing what they did. But it still added up to a lot of sleep deprivation and some slightly crazy moments.

A: What was the focus of your research?

MR: I’m really bad at the one-sentence summary that so many thesis people have gotten so good at. But I basically looked at hunger in terms of micronutrient deficiencies instead of calorie deficiency, because a lot of people think of hunger in terms of lack of food supply and lack of calories in one’s diet, instead of lack of vitamin A and iron. The difference between the number of people who are undernourished and the number of people who are malnourished in the world is about 1.5 billion, so it’s a huge population that’s disregarded in policy. So I looked at how that is affecting populations across the world, in both developing and developed nations, and then looked at policies that can affect that, like school lunch programs, breast feedings rates, infection rates, health policies, a myriad of other things. And then I looked at Brazil’s policies, which are really interesting. Brazil is interesting because there’s still a lot of social inequity there, and there are still a lot of issues, but they’ve done some pretty interesting policy work. So you’ve got to hand it to them for at least attempting to make positive change.

A: Now that you’re done with that, how do you see your last month here going?

MR: A lot of Foss. Honestly, a lot of quality bonding time, I think, is quite necessary. I mean, I’m still doing a lot of job applications, so that’s fun. And I still have schoolwork I need to do, but it’s not that much compared to what I was doing junior year. I’m also in transition from my [SHOFCO] student coordinator position, to an amazing sophomore named Marina King. It’s really fun, actually, just to tell her what I’ve experienced and see what ideas she has for the position. So I’m working on that, trying to make a nice, smooth transition. Graduation’s becoming more real, thanks to that, in a way that I don’t know if I like or not. But yeah, a lot of hanging out.

And also, honestly, just making more friends. Because that’s what I love about Wesleyan, is that everyone is so approachable, so friendly, so personable, so wonderful. Cannot get enough of it. So I guess just soaking up everything Wesleyan has to offer. I actually have a huge bucket list.

A: You said you work at WesWings. What’s that like?

MR: I mean, I joined pretty late in the game, compared to other people. I joined my junior year. It’s awesome…My bosses are really great, and everyone I work with is pretty awesome. Also, it’s just nice to have a job on campus. First of all, it gives you structure, because you have to be somewhere for a certain amount of hours on this day and this day. And also—I’ve had this conversation with so many people—I think everyone should work in the service industry at some point, just because it teaches you to be mindful about things.

A: You must get to know a lot of faces through working at WesWings.

MR: You do. It’s a great way to embarrass friends over the microphone, write weird nicknames on their tickets. It’s a good way to meet people, or just see people you don’t always see. Because they have to go somewhere to eat, and you just have to be there.

A: Anything you would want to tell your freshman self?

MR: I think freshmen have a tendency to get involved in too much, and I know I did that as well, and I got involved in things that I wasn’t necessarily as passionate about or interested in. I think it’s just finding those select few things that you really love doing and to do them, and to really enjoy them. And also just not to be afraid to introduce yourself to complete strangers, and to get to know everyone who is sitting by you, and to have conversations with them, because everyone is really open to getting to know people here, and I really love that. And I think I didn’t fully take advantage of that until my sophomore year, when I started to come out of my shell. I think Wesleyan has too much to offer everyone, almost, and people get really bogged down with trying to do everything that’s amazing on this campus, which is honestly impossible.