Showing 38 “Personal Growth” posts
On the first day of WRIT 1165: Writing the Human Experience, Professor Rudd walked into our classroom and said something I never expected to hear at Georgetown: “Everyone in this room starts with an A!”.
During my second semester of university, I was faced with the very important decision of picking which first history class I would take. Reading that sentence probably makes it sound like I’m being dramatic, but let me explain.
When I left Rwanda for Qatar, I recall it with so much excitement, but also a kind of fear I didn’t want to acknowledge. How will I do for the first time away from my family? A new place, new people, new life, leaving everything behind. I kept wondering, How will I make friends? Will I just blend into the background?
Emotions flared and tensions were high. Only 48 hours remained before complete environmental destruction. The FSO Safer, an oil tanker was leaking in the Red Sea and the greater the delay to extract the oil and fix the leak, the closer the world came to loss of marine biodiversity and disruption of an essential trade route. This hypothetical scenario was my introduction to Georgetown’s International Negotiation and Crisis Simulation.
“How should we reinvent the city?” This is the type of question that Georgetown students like me are being trained to answer on the daily. We talk about a plethora of things–from the stock market to the politics of conserving energy. Here, discourse that questions, provokes, and stretches you is normal. So when I landed in Buenos Aires in Argentina for the Doha Debates Town Hall, it felt like the most natural extension of what we already do in the classroom.
In Spring 2025, I boarded my first-ever flight to the “West,” bound for Washington, D.C. I was one of only a few students from GU-Q studying abroad that semester. Most of my classmates had already gone in the fall, and I had initially planned the same. But when I sat down to map out my independent Certificate in South Asian Studies, everything shifted.
Sometimes the most courageous step you can take is to clench your fists, whisper an affirmation of hope, and press ‘submit’ on that Google form. It was 11:00PM, less than an hour to the deadline as I sat staring at the application for the Georgetown Moot Court team. I couldn’t help but wonder whether I would be good enough, right up until the moment I clicked submit. That single click became the spark that set the stage for an unimaginable intercontinental journey to North America.
On my 20th birthday this year, I left Turkmenistan, with excitement, nerves, and the pressure of walking into uncertainty. After a gap year following my FLEX exchange in Texas (Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) is a competitive, merit-based scholarship program funded by the United States government), I was finally traveling abroad, alone this time. In the U.S., I had always had a safety net: a host family waiting with warm meals, a host father who drove me to school, a host mother who answered every question I had – and yes, even the ones that probably made her question her life choices. This time was different.
As part of Georgetown University in Qatar's Community Engagement Program, I traveled to Indonesia expecting to make a difference. Instead, the community made a difference in me. Our journey began with three days in Jakarta, conversations at Georgetown Asia Pacific with Scott Guggenheim and Yuhki Tajima, walks through old Batavia exploring the remnants of five different colonizations, and visits to the Istiqlal Mosque and Jakarta Cathedral. But it was the four days that followed in a fishing village that truly transformed my understanding of what it means to engage with a community.
If there’s one thing people eventually learn about me, it’s that I have a thing for languages. I currently speak seven, and am always on the lookout for new ways to use them, or sneak an eighth onto the list. That’s why Georgetown Qatar feels like such a perfect fit for me. Every hallway, you hear sounds like an orchestra of accents and dialects; Arabic, Urdu, French, Tagalog, Somali, Russian, you name it. Every conversation feels like a mini language exchange, and for someone like me, that’s basically heaven.
