How I got here
I started where a lot of first-gen students start — at a community college, not totally sure the door I was knocking on would open. It did. From Montgomery College I transferred to Hood College, studied Global Studies and Conflict Resolution, graduated with Honors and Highest Distinction, and figured out that the questions I couldn't stop asking — about violence, memory, and who actually gets to be heard — had a whole field standing behind them.
Somewhere in there I found public interest communications: the art of using storytelling to move people toward something better. Through the Frank Karel Fellowship and a stint at Families USA, I learned to build a narrative, draft testimony, and put a human face on a policy fight. Then I took it into the field — running communications and fundraising for the International Center for Religion & Diplomacy, then media and events at Freedom House, turning dense human rights research into stories newsrooms actually ran.
But the research kept tapping me on the shoulder. I wanted to be the one asking the questions, not just the one framing the answers. So now I'm doing my MS in Genocide & Mass Atrocity Prevention at Binghamton as an Auschwitz Institute Fellow — bringing a communicator's instincts to a scholar's questions, and stubbornly refusing to believe those are two different jobs.
People sometimes ask how communications, fundraising, design, and atrocity research fit on one resume. The honest answer is that they were never really separate. Each one is the same act in a different outfit: take something true and important, and make sure it actually reaches the person who needs it. Being first-gen is why that matters so much to me — why I care about keeping doors open behind me, and why "freedom" isn't an abstraction in my work. It's the point.
