The Ohio Union Activities Board hosts soccer World Cup champions Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe in the Ohio Union at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, on Monday March 28, 2016. (Andrew Bruening/Ohio State University Office of Student Life)

On March 28, 2016, I went to a talk with two of my personal heroes and decorated athletes Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe. These two have won world cups and Olympic gold medals, and have inspired a generation of girls like me to play soccer, proving to us that we can be just as tough, if not tougher as the boys. They spoke about soccer, but also about gender equality in the game. The women’s team is paid significantly less than the men’s team, although the women’s team has a much better record. The men’s team is actually paid more for losing than the women’s team is for winning. Since these two players also happened to identify with the LGBTQ community, they also spoke about what it was like to be an ‘out’ athlete.

I loved this event because I played soccer for twelve years as a kid and followed the Women’s National Team religiously. If Abby Wambach scored a goal with her head, I would make my parents go in the backyard and kick me balls to practice heading into the goal. I wore their jerseys and wanted to be just like them some day. However, a few concussions later, I was off the soccer track. While I had always been a feminist, it was not until I came to school that I really accepted this identity and understood its meaning. Listening to Abby Wambach and Megan Rapine talk about the inequalities in soccer, I realized that they too were so much more than just athletes. They were not only fighting for female athletes, but for all women. Even though soccer is not as big of a part of my life anymore, I still look up to these women for using their pedestals to call for equal pay and show girls that it is important to be a feminist.

This year I had the honor of meeting President Drake and his wife at a dinner honoring recipients of Undergraduate National Scholarships and Fellowships. The two of them were beyond gracious and friendly and interesting to speak with. I was able to go to this dinner because I was the recipient of a critical language scholarship (CLS) from the U.S. Department of State. The CLS provides a generous stipend for students to study languages deemed critical to national security. I am going to be studying Arabic in Tangier, Morocco for eight weeks this summer.

Receiving this scholarship had been my goal since I started studying Arabic my first semester of college. I had applied for it in November of 2015 and got news in March of 2016, so it required a lot of patience and uncertainty on my part. Traveling without friends or family and living in a Moroccan home for two months will be far outside of my comfort zone, but also hugely beneficial not only to my Arabic abilities and cultural knowledge, but to my personal growth, adaptability and independence.

Please disregard this embarrassing selfie of my wacky bowtie and blazer. This was the only photo evidence that I had from my time as a page in one of the district offices of the Ohio Senate. With a little help from my RA last year, I was hired here over the summer, and have been working here for the past six months. From my interview to my last day this week, walking into the beautiful, old State House down town never failed to send shivers down my spine. My responsibilities in the office were answering emails, organize our constituent database, run errands, and answer the phone in my office.  If I was lucky, I got to help edit floor speeches and press releases. Being a page gave me the opportunity to gain first hand insight into the State Budget passage process, and sit in on Caucus and Committee meetings. It might not seem like much, but being a page was a dream for a poli sci nerd like my self. Thanks to scheduling conflicts in the spring semester, my page career was cut short, but I will look back fondly on the Mondays and Wednesdays of my semester that I spent here. I consider this job my first “real job,” working alongside professionals in an office rather than other teens in a retail store or as an office assistant in my residence hall last year. Being a page was an excellent learning experience and a valuable foot in the door of my burgeoning career in politics.

My second artifact is this picture from Grant Reader, an event put on by The Women’s Fund of Central Ohio. Three of my good friends and I had the opportunity to read grant proposals from nonprofits in the Columbus area trying to fund programming that advances the economic and social status of women and girls in the area. This involved one night of training, and one night of small group discussion of the grants, with two weeks of solo grant review in the middle. This event was special to me because I realized that I had never been in the same room with so many women at one time before. At both of the sessions, I felt a sense of support and sisterhood, and was inspired that we shared the common goal of helping other women. I also gained insight into the process of grant writing and reading, which will be useful to me if I pursue internships and careers in the nonprofit world. Best of all, I made some wonderful networking connections at this event, and have maintained contact with a few women who are Ohio State grads working in careers that are of interest to me. One of the women in particular, has taken me under her wing as a mentor.

Ta-Nehesi Coates speaks at Ohio State 11/10

This picture of one of my favorite writers, Ta-Nehesi Coates. He is a regular contributor the The Atlantic, and wrote “Between the World and Me.” Mr. Coates is one of the leading commentators on race in America. His visit was in the midst of the Black Lives Matter Movement, and right around the time that the events involving ConcernedStudent1950 and the resignation of the university president at Mizzou. Just days before, students at Ohio State protested racism present here on our campus. This event was focused on his book “Between the World and Me,” which is written as a letter to Mr. Coates’ son. He spoke about excerpts from the book, about his time at Howard University, and about police brutality, mass incarceration, and structural racism. A good friend of mine was able to ask him a question, and left with some book suggestions for learning more about the black experience in America. This event opened my eyes to a lot of things, and inspired me to want to read Mr. Coates’ book. Seeing such an esteemed writer and hearing his career path and research inspired me in my own passion for writing, and hearing him speak about things that I had very little knowledge about left me shocked and yearning to learn more. I found a quote from “Between the World and Me,” that summed up what I gleaned from this event:

“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Thank you Mr. Coates for opening my eyes.