I spent four years in Los Angeles — all of them at Occidental College, a small liberal arts school in Eagle Rock that shaped how I think more than any other single institution. I arrived as an eighteen-year-old from Fall City who knew she cared about international affairs but hadn’t yet found the analytical framework to do anything rigorous with that instinct. I left with a senior thesis awarded Distinction, a Phi Beta Kappa key, and a much clearer sense of the questions I wanted to spend my career on.
The Department
Occidental’s Diplomacy and World Affairs programme is housed in Johnson Hall, and I spent a disproportionate amount of my college life in that building. I was deeply involved in the department — not just as a student taking classes but as someone who showed up to office hours, worked as a research assistant, coordinated events, and treated the faculty as intellectual partners rather than just instructors.
The professors in DWA pushed me to think about international relations in ways I wouldn’t have arrived at on my own. Professor Lan Chu helped me explore the intersection of religion and international relations — a connection I would never have thought to pursue without her courses and the one-on-one conversations that followed. That thread runs through everything I’ve done since: my summer research fellowship on right-wing evangelicalism and US refugee policy, my senior thesis on ethnoreligious nationalism, and eventually my MPhil dissertation at Trinity. The intellectual trajectory that defines my work now was shaped in large part by relationships with faculty who took my questions seriously and showed me where they led.
My senior thesis — Pro Deo et Patria: The Rise of Ethnoreligious Nationalism in the 21st Century — was a comparative study of the US and Türkiye, examining how religious identity is mobilised in service of exclusionary political projects. It was one of six theses in the department awarded Distinction that year. The summer before, I’d received the Walter B. Gerken Fellowship for Public Policy to conduct independent research on evangelical influence on US refugee policy under the Bush and Trump administrations, which I presented at the Occidental Undergraduate Summer Research Conference. Alongside my own research, I worked as a research assistant for Professor Chu — editing academic writing, updating syllabi, conducting literature reviews, and building annotated bibliographies for her projects.
The Young Initiative and Student Government
Outside the classroom, two roles defined much of my time at Occidental. As Program Assistant for the Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy, I spent nearly three years coordinating events across the DWA department — including the annual United Nations Week — managing speaker logistics, venue bookings, catering, and technology needs. I spearheaded the production of the biannual newsletter and co-authored the annual report, consolidating data on project funding, event impact, and scholarship distributions for donors and alumni. The work was operational and editorial in equal measure: managing the logistics of getting a panel together and then writing about what was said at it.
On the ASOC Student Senate, I served first as a class senator and then as Director of Academic Affairs — the primary student liaison to faculty and administrative academic committees. Over two years I helped manage a budget exceeding $500,000, collaborated on launching the ASOC Savings Investment Portfolio, co-founded the Final Mile Fund for graduate school applications prioritising first-generation and low-income students, and drove course evaluation response rates from 49% to 62% in a single semester. The work was governance in miniature — budgets, representation, institutional research, competing priorities — and it taught me things about advocacy within institutional structures that I later applied at the UN.
Study Abroad
Occidental is where I was given the opportunities that took me elsewhere. The study abroad programme sent me to Tunisia in the autumn of 2022, where I conducted the independent fieldwork on women’s rights and Political Islam that would reshape my research interests entirely. The Kahane UN Program sent me to New York the following autumn, where I interned with Outright International during General Assembly season. Both experiences grew directly out of Occidental. What matters here is that Occidental was the institution that made them possible — that treated study abroad and experiential learning not as a semester off but as an extension of the analytical work happening on campus.
The City, the People
Los Angeles is a sprawling, improbable city, and Occidental sits in a quiet pocket of it that feels nothing like the LA of popular imagination. My experience of the city was filtered almost entirely through college life — which meant it was intense, compressed, and populated by people I saw every day.
The memories that have stayed are mostly small and specific. Late-night wildflower picking on a whim. Reading poetry in someone’s room. Avocado toast at Verve with my best friend, talking through whatever needed talking through. Shuttling friends around in my car on their various side quests — errands and adventures that weren’t mine but that I showed up for because that’s what you do. Dorm rooms that functioned as living rooms, offices, and confessionals simultaneously.
I held leadership roles I don’t discuss in detail — including a sorority presidency that involved navigating a genuinely difficult institutional situation — and I took on responsibilities that taught me things about organisational politics, accountability, and making hard calls that don’t appear on a transcript.
The friends I made at Occidental are now scattered from Morocco to Nottingham. That dispersal is its own kind of proof that the department and the college attracted a particular kind of person — internationally oriented, restless, serious about the world — and that the bonds formed in that environment survive distance. I still talk to most of them regularly.
What Los Angeles Is
If Dublin is where I produced my best academic work and New York is where I felt closest to my professional future, Los Angeles is where the foundations were built. The analytical instincts, the research interests, the professional relationships, the friendships — all of it started at Occidental. It’s the place that took a general interest in international affairs and turned it into something specific, rigorous, and genuinely mine.
I don’t think of myself as someone from LA in the way I think of myself as someone from Seattle or Dublin. But I think of Occidental constantly — the department, the professors, the people — and the four years I spent there are present in almost everything I do now.