My years in Los Angeles took the form of my undergraduate years 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 program 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. Professor Anthony Chase inspired me to look more critically at the relationship between gender and nationalism, a conversation from our office hours about my senior thesis that became the driving force behind my MPhil dissertation. 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 ethnic and religious identity are mobilised in the 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 compiling 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, alumni, and other partners. 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, 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. One of the largest takeaways from this work was how to think strategically about my advocacy. I learned a great deal, very quickly, about what it meant to operate within an institution dealing with resource constraints, competing priorities, and bureaucratic processes. I learned the power of data reports and student momentum. I also learned, on a more frustrating note, how easy it can be for the general population to be quick to criticise, but slow to act in concrete support of advocacy efforts. I learned that not all hard work is going to be recognised, sometimes by design, as I regularly underreported my working hours to payroll due to the sheer number of committees I sat on, hours I spent in the ASOC office working on policy changes and data reports, and meetings with my own committee to strategise how we were going to navigate institutional bureaucracy. Student government can seem quite juvenile at first glance, but the skills I developed in those two years rival those of many jobs and internships, and I was doing this alongside working additional jobs and maintaining a full course load, making the Dean’s List every semester.
Study Abroad
Occidental gave me multiple opportunities to learn and grow 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 have their own pages on this site. Occidental made those experiences possible; they treat such opportunities not as a departure from campus, but as an extension of the learning happening there.
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. Spontaneous nighttime trips out to the beach because it was easy to get out to Santa Monica at 10 pm when Los Angeles traffic had died down. Shuttling friends around in my Toyota Sienna 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 an extremely 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 Los Angeles to Nottingham and beyond. 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.