2023- 2024 Year In Review

At the very beginning of my Gateway to Honors class, my definition of a global citizen scholar was someone who’s willing to engage in broad ideas and discussions and has experience in a wide variety of subjects from many different disciplines and cultures. I have found that definition to have stayed very accurate to my experience, and it has been a very good guide in my first year at the University of Cincinnati. It helped guide me through a lot of my choices in class, extracurriculars, and work. 

As it is my first year I joined a lot of different things to try and find where I fit in. I joined Black Women in Pre-Law Club, Pre-Law Club, BookCats, and the Curl Collective to try and find I club that I really enjoyed being a part of. I found that the clubs that I wanted to continue experiencing were the ones that had a lot of diversity and differences in perspectives. This was guided somewhat by my own ideals, but my definition of a Global Citizen Scholar has definitely helped me make my definition clear and made my path a little bit easier to walk.

When it comes to work, my definition heavily influenced my decision to work at the Cincinnati Ethics Center. I had been part of the Ethics Bowl at my high school and when I had the opportunity to work with the center, I decided that the benefits from the experience outweighed the cost of making my already busy schedule even more crowded. Part of my process was thinking about how much I could learn about my community and the wider world. I take the “Global” part in Global Citizen Scholar very literally and I like to learn as much about the world as I can. It is very important to me to understand people's culture and values, and a huge part of that is ethics.

And classwise, I tried to make my class load very diverse. I chose classes I would not normally pick as well as classes that focused on people and ideals. And as it turned out, those classes that I was apprehensive about turned out to be some of my favorites. Forcing myself to be diverse in my classes instead of staying in my comfort zone taught me that working outside of the box is, as often said, actually a good idea. My definition also lead me pretty directly to my first college study abroad experience. I chose to go to Italy because when I defined a Global Citizen Scholar, studying abroad was one of the steps to get there. And that experience, which I reflected on in my experiences tab, was truly life-changing.