2021-22
Sophomore year was still haunted by COVID, but I had more involvement with the UW community. I was accepted into the Economics major and focused more classwork on its basic requirements.
This was my first in-person band year and the year I took up positions as an Honors peer tutor and community ambassador. I also started a job in Suzzallo's backrooms, which I held for just over a year.
CSE 142/390 Intro to Programming
This was a reflective class that mostly talked about the ethics of computer science, algorithms, and the bias that comes out of a model when you feed it data that is biased. This is the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ principle. This class was my first major interaction with computer science, and the introductory Java programming in the main class (142) was mostly learning to work with code generally. We weren’t working with data in the introductory course. However, pairing this with my first college computer science course, one of the assignments of which is attached, created a constant thread of looking for where data will be biased in its method of collection of the basic kind of data it is. We looked at the book at right critically, without taking its narratives of tech and data at face value. These ideas appeared in each other computer science course I took at UW, but having this as such an early introduction meant I could draw on experience and brought additional texts into discussions for my data science minor and upper-division data analysis courses. As a hopeful professional data analyst, taking a day or even a few minutes to look up a data’s source and collection method can allow me to be more critical and hopefully pause the cycle of garbage in, garbage out.
This class was entirely focused on historiography: the study of the study of history, largely through which sources get written or preserved and the power dynamics behind that. This class focused on the Spanish conquest of the Mexica and the written and visual sources that were produced around that time. The attached essay is a research proposal about art and architecture, neither of which I knew anything about going into the course and neither of which would have been my first historical sources. Usually I prefer modern history and writing, but going back forced me to reckon with the interpretation of art and what we can take from a source that was clearly biased by Christianity’s imposition. Knowing the bias and still trying to find some truth is a relatively new analytical skill for me, as often sources too biased are automatically dismissed, but when these are the only sources, the work it takes to get something out of them that is true is an act of respect to actual history.
HSTRY 388/Honors 231 How to Write the History of the Aztecs
Honors 394 Feminisms in the Borderlands
This is a picture of ofrenda I made on the topic of reproductive justice that was presented at a symposium about plurifeminism. Creating it with my group was an exercise in alternative ways of knowing. This wasn’t a history class, but it relied a lot on oral history and skills passed down through generations to talk about Chicana life. I might have dismissed these kinds of interviews with modern ordinary people before or not accepted a native connection with land and place without all of the interdisciplinary elements of the course. It wasn’t a feminism course, or a history course, or a modern media course. It was all of those and more at once. As a history major, there are some sources that seem better than others as more academic or better sourced, but personal accounts, and songs, and oral history should absolutely have a place in a discussion of historical tradition. This is a physical representation of that interdisciplinary aspect and the creation of something with meaning to a culture that is not my own.
Honors Community Ambassador
I got more involved in the Honors community this year, which makes a degree of sense as I lived in Honors dorm housing meaningfully for the first time. I had two parallel paths into this: my role as an Honors Community Ambassador, and my role as a peer advisor. Attached is a link to the bio I had up for years as an Honors student leader (link now defunct, unfortunately). I had my email attached to this, and meant that I led a couple students through the Honors program officially as their peer advisor but also got emails from people interested in the program about my experience. This artifact represents a more public-facing element of my experience, with an effort to give back. I didn’t quite know what I was going to do moving forward with Honors, but I could definitely be a sounding board for others and pass on what wisdom I had. Prior to this my education had largely been focused on me; I could come and go from extracurriculars as I pleased, and briefly attended a wide variety of RSOs. This was more direct and engaged with a larger community than people I shared classes with, which was both scary and kind of thrilling. I felt like I was actually doing something, and people kept asking questions.
