Year in Review

Sophomore Year:

This year, I did something that I never thought I would do and picked up a second major. At the beginning of the year, I was dead-set on being a Psychology major and Spanish minor, but then I took my first Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies course in the Fall and knew that it was something I wanted to continue to study. Initially, I thought about adding WGSS as a second major, but after careful consideration, I decided to drop my Spanish minor and pick up the WGSS major.

One of the biggest reasons why I want to study WGSS is because of how much I’ve grown in Global Awareness. Through theories like intersectionality, I’ve learned that every person has unique experiences of the world. Our intersecting identities are what make us who we are, but they are also the key to understanding and combatting personal and systematic oppressions. We experience all different parts of our identities, such as race, sexual identity, gender, simultaneously – which means that oppressions such as racism, sexism, and homophobia are inherently inseparable and must be viewed as parts of a larger, complex system.

Within WGGS, but also using my Psychology major, I am working on a plan to research the impact of gender-based violence on a community (like Ohio State) for my Honors Thesis. I have personal experience with sexual violence, but I want my research to reflect the systematic impact of gender-based violence.

In general, I have tried to choose GE courses that are far different from my majors. I’ve always had a fascination with the Bible, so I decided to take one course on the history of Jesus and another course on the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). These courses were challenging for me, but I learned a lot and I met awesome professors that I otherwise wouldn’t have interacted with.

This year a launched a student organization called OneVOICE at Ohio State. It was a chapter of the international organization OneVOICE, which is an organization dedicated to ending sexual violence. Ultimately, I had to deactivate the student organization due to personal reasons, but I learned a lot about leadership in founding and running a student organization, and I am just as committed to advocacy work surrounding sexual violence. Additionally, I am a volunteer with Crisis Text Line, which not only allows me to help strangers, but it also has given me the skills to be able to help the people I encounter in my life on a daily basis should they ever be in crisis.

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