MAYOWA AINA
My community...
What makes my Husky experience unique, is the incredible diversity of the relationships that I have been able to foster during my time at the UW. Over the past 4 years I have been able to tend to and nuture every aspect of my life by participating in various activities and meet new people. These relationships have allowed me to establish and create a community for myself that has led me to accomplish amazing things during my time at the UW. Here, I highlight just a few that have had a significant impact on me and provided me with lessons that I intend to carry with me as I move foward.
Black Student Union
The BSU, and by extension the Ethnic Cultural Center, has been the definition of community for me. Attending a predominantly white institution, it can be very isolating to feel at home when you can go an entire day without seeing a single person that looks like you. BSU taught me that representation matters. As current President of the BSU, I have been able to take what the organization has given me and work towards providing that for other Black students on campus through programming, mentorship across disciplines, professions, and other communities, relationship building, and leadership development. BSU has taught me many great lessons about what it means to be a good community member, effective leader, and an advocate. Beyond the Black community, from BSU I gained the skills to be an advocate and push for equity in other areas of my life including in my academic departments as well as at the University as a whole. I have been committed to the Black community for the past 4 years and see that continuing into the future.
The Arts of Politics
During Summer 2015 I was extremely excited and fortunate to have been able to travel to Peru with the Comparative History of Ideas department. While the food was amazing and the parties were fun, what I really took away from the trip was the need for engagement and collaboration within a community. We worked with various artists, community leaders, and scholars to try to understand how a post-conflict nation deals with collective trauma. While my artistic contribution was limited, I felt so completely immersed and engaged in the community and the initiatives taking place on the ground that I came to learn that it was about what I could do, but what I could learn from the artists and incorporate into my own daily life. Going away really inspired me to continue to include a creative and artistic slant to my political work and to remain in touch with the local Peruvian artists as a reminder of that amazing period of time that we shared.
First Year Programs
I generally consider First Year Programs to be ground zero in terms of where my involvment with the University began. As a freshman I applied to be an Orientation Leader thinking that I had neither the skillset nor the experience to be able to usher incoming students through their first real encounter with the UW. Yet, I was hired and joined an amazing team of students for an entire summer engaging advisors, staff, student organizations, and peers to create this amazing intial experience for these new students. Following that I worked as a First Year Interest Group Leader and was able to work with a community of students over the course their first quarter at the UW and illustrate to them just how much they had grown in such a short time. Since becoming involved with FYP a number of other opportunities have been made available to me including being selected as the 2015 UW Homecoming Queen and becoming involved with the Husky Leadership Initiative in a variety of their programs. Starting at FYP sealed my commitment to the University of Washington community at large and has allowed me to operate with that larger community in mind.
