If I could sum it all up... adding together Amnesty, Jewell, Amsterdam

This past fall I was nominated to apply for USA Today's All-Academic Team. Though I did not win the award, the application process was incredibly valuable. It challenged me and enabled me to focus and reflect on the experiences that have shaped me the most throughout my college career. Last semester was a very difficult challenge for me both academically and personally. Through this application process, I humbly stumbled upon a number of personal realizations that helped me pull everything together.

I wanted to share my essay with you all because I feel proud of what it says and how it concisely portrays my passion, my experiences, and my vision. So this is my gift to you!

As my mind weaves through all I have committed myself to in the past four years, I am struck by a definite and unmistakable thread that links them all together. Each stems from a common passion and strength I have discovered within myself that pulls human rights and women’s human rights into the forefront.

Through human rights advocacy, I have been able to pour my passion into an academically rigorous self-designed major combining research and hands-on service opportunities with self-discovery. This has contributed to a highly interdisciplinary and personalized college experience rooted in raw reality. Through a combination of internships, one with the Amnesty International USA headquarters’ in New York City and the other with The Salvation Army’s International Task Force on Sexual Trafficking in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, I was able to experience how the dance of theory and reality supply an arresting case to take a stand for change.

Stepping into the headquarters of Amnesty International USA pushed me in directions that contrasted and complimented the activism I had done at the grass roots level. As one of only two select undergraduate interns, I joined the professional research team that forms the backbone of Amnesty. Together we composed in-depth reports that influence legislation and reform surrounding domestic violence against Native American women, public housing for domestic violence victims, police brutality against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons, detainee abuse issues regarding Private Military Contractors in Iraq, as well as sexual abuse in prisons. I also volunteered weekly with the homeless in New York City, learning of their personalized struggles with many elements of American society our research was working to clarify. Through this combination of work, I cultivated the aptitude and experience necessary to pursue other urgent international human rights issues. It was when I studied abroad in Amsterdam, The Netherlands that I coupled this new-found power with my passion for women’s human rights at an international scale.

Sex trafficking is a brutal and secretive form of modern slavery that embodies some of the most atrocious human rights violations against women. Though it invisibly infiltrates into every major city in the world, most ordinary people are unfamiliar with it. Through The Salvation Army’s International Task Force on Sexual Trafficking, I had the privilege of individually designing and orchestrating a research project exposing this underground network in Europe. It will be used to form crucial international policy which targets organized crime networks and government corruption while urging measurable enforcement of internationally recognized human rights standards. Because sex trafficking is often masked behind the perceived choice to work in prostitution, I interacted weekly with legal and illegal prostitutes in Amsterdam, building relationships with them and learning about their personal journeys through the industry.

These experiences build upon each other, one forming foundations of learning and questions for another. They cannot be separated. They are part of a vision with a present and a future that beg others to do what they can to create and sustain change. We must understand each other’s stories in order to decode injustice and prevent humanity from being stripped from the most vulnerable of people. With my experiences in human rights advocacy through research and field work, I can hope that I am motivating others to take a stand while forming new resources that will keep some of these stories from resurfacing with different names and faces.

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