Reflection essay

Formal Retrospective

I am a master communicator, dedicated learner, and passionate advocate who seeks to uplift the people around me through working in the cross-sections of my passions for world languages and social justice. As an emerging professional, I am in the pursuit of justice for all, which I aim to achieve through a career in criminal, environmental or immigration law as a trilingual attorney. Honors at IU Indianapolis prepared me to succeed in the field of law through its rigorous coursework, high standards, and ample opportunities for growth through engagement with its student organizations, workshops, and programming.

In H200, I was unsure of where my IU Indianapolis journey would take me. While I knew that I wanted to work with the community in pursuit of justice, I felt that my passion would be most worthwhile through sustainability and environmental justice work. While a passion of mine, it left me wondering what careers existed to employ multilingualism with environmental justice, and it left me largely without a clear answer. Through my subsequent time in the Honors College, I studied abroad in Costa Rica and Québec, Canada and saw exactly how environmental justice was fulfilled in vastly different communities multilingually while also transpiring language. 

I then took SPEA-E476 Environmental Law & Regulation for Honors credit, where I was engrossed in the learning of environmental statutes like CERCLA and RCRA, memo writing with IRAC structure, and the professional perspective of my professor, who is an attorney in environmental law with the state. I wrote an Honors essay examining the restrictions of several statutes in a case study of the New Palestine Train Derailment Disaster that took my research skills to the next level as I used advanced techniques to narrow database results and learned an entirely new style guide that lent itself best to the clarity of my paper. 

Then, I volunteered at Indy Mock Hundred to get my Honors volunteer hours, where I sat in on 12 hours of Mock Trial and consequently mastered the rules of evidence through their repeated utilization by some of the best Mock Trial teams in the state. I was completely captivated by the experience and felt like a juror, weighing their performances to decide whose side I might be inclined to believe and what questions might have been left unanswered. This experience allowed me to understand trial proceedings, especially in terms of the importance of telling a story to the jury. However, if not for the Honors college volunteer hours requirement, I would never have been present at that competition to fall in love with the courtroom. 

I then began my internship with the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office as an Interpreting Intern for Honors credit. I always thought of interpreters as an invisible presence that served only as a third party to a conversation between an attorney and a client, but at MCPO, in-house interpreters are victim advocates as much as they are translators. We connect victims to resources and converse with them AND the attorney, rather than being solely the indifferent force that allows the attorney and the victim to understand each other. As an intern, I did not work in one specific court; I worked in everything from misdemeanors to high felony and murder. This allowed me to get a holistic view of how varying classifications of cases work at each step of the way. I also mastered legal writing through translating legal documents and transcribing interviews and taped statements. In depositions, I learned the importance of having more than one interpreter present; oftentimes, the primary interpreter will make mistakes as humans do, and it’s up to the secondary interpreter to correct them. If not, the mistakes run the risk of being brought up in trial as the victim’s testimony, and the victim will be puzzled, knowing that they didn’t say what they’re being accused of saying. 

If not for the Honors College, I would not have taken up this internship. It was unpaid, and I would have preferred to work at my well-paid yet uninspiring restaurant job for the sake of getting by. However, the Honors College incentivized this experience, not only through allowing it to count for Honors credit, but also through the confidence that my previous Honors experiences gave me to take it on. For example, knowing that I had to do an Honors contract for Honors credit my freshman year, I did a written translation of The String by Guy Maupassant from French to English and wrote a reflection essay breaking down my process and what I would change in the future to translate with more accuracy and flow. This experience was my introduction to translating and taught me the intricate balance between staying true to the original text and making the text make sense in the cultural and linguistic context of English. 

If not for this experience, I would have hesitated to go on to intern at the Hoosier Environmental Council my sophomore year, where I translated fact sheets to Spanish and English. All of the experience that I have in translation only came about because the Honors college incentivized taking my learning to the next level, and so I did, despite my fears of making mistakes or not being good enough. My personal and professional growth throughout my undergraduate experience can be traced back to the skills that the Honors college encouraged in me.

My showcase Artifacts demonstrate my employability and skillfulness as a knowledge-hungry, justice-oriented, and hard-working student. My growth is well-catalogued as I fight unyieldingly for my education in the dwindling world language program at IU Indianapolis. Despite doing away with the French major during my sophomore year, I fought to get the credits to graduate with French BA. I had to think out of the box; most French majors might go to France, but I couldn’t afford it, so I worked hard to apply to scholarships and found a program that could take me to Québec for a reduced price. Then, I came back and gave up my restaurant job to start working as an ambassador for that program to help students like me get the opportunities they deserve – even though it meant taking a huge pay cut that had me struggling to get by. 

To me, this fight is an extension of how I fight for social justice. During the summer after my junior year of high school in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement’s emergence into the mainstream and the COVID-19 pandemic, I took a class at Barnard College titled “To Boldly Go: Women of Color in Speculative Literature.” In this class, I learned about writers such as Octavia Butler through her short story “Bloodchild" and Sam Chanse through "Lydia's Funeral Video." Fascinated by the intersections of race, gender and the human experience that we read about in class, I then got to know the work of Toni Morrison. As Morrison says, “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.” Not only do I fight tooth and nail for my education, but I fight even harder for the education of my peers and all of the brilliant students that will come after us. I hope to always use any success that comes my way to uplift those around me, which I believe is best done by connecting with community. 

I am the PR/social media board member of the Indiana Undocumented Youth Association, where we unite to fight for the rights of all undocumented people, but especially undocumented youth. I also stand by the fight for a free Palestine and supported the IU Indianapolis encampment by cooking them meals throughout the summer to sustain their peaceful protest, which was characterized by lots of laughter, art, reading, praying, caring, and love. Through these experiences, I got to know community. In high school, I created the Fishers High School Democrat Club and volunteered for a grassroots congressional campaign out of Ypsilanti, Michigan. I watched as the fear around the COVID-19 pandemic was weaponized to drive traffic to the candidate’s website for the promise of “COVID-19 resources” that didn’t exist. This disillusioned the game of politics for me and made me realize that living and working in community, intellectualism and love is the very root of change. 

As bell hooks once said, “To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.” It is hard work building community; it requires love, empathy, patience, selflessness, perseverance, atonement of wrongs, and forgiveness. Being human together means being imperfect, messy, unsure of what to do, and insufferable together. But it also means being loving, caring, gentle, and beautiful together. As we work together towards the common goal of equity and justice, I strive to follow the teachings of bell hooks to stay vigilantly aware of the work that must be done and the ways in which we are conditioned against it in the name of submission.

The Artifacts demonstrate my growth in alignment with the learning goals that the Honors College prioritizes through global learning, community contributions, research, and problem solving. In Artifact 2, I grew into a skillful researcher as encouraged by the Honors college by learning the AMA style guide and employing new research techniques as I narrowed search results in databases. In Artifact 3, I reflected on three Engaged Learning experiences, all of which reflecting global learning through my presidency of the Francophone Student Association, my study abroad in Québec, and my internship in Interpreting/Latino Services in the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office. 

Throughout these experiences, I illustrate my growth through the first experience inspiring and informing the second, and the second experience inspiring and informing the third. I would never have been an interpreter if I didn’t go to Québec and learn how hard it was to get around when you don’t speak the language as your first language, and I would never have gone to Québec if I didn’t get involved with FSA and search for ways to take my French and knowledge of Francophone cultures to the next level. In Artifact 1, I illustrate my growth from H200 to H496, which is directly informed by my experiences in Artifact 2 and Artifact 3. 

These experiences reveal my conclusions as I searched for how I thought I could contribute to justice throughout my undergraduate career. As a high schooler, I saw justice as best achieved through politics; as a freshman in college, I saw it as best achieved through on-the-ground community work; and as a senior in college, I see it as working concurrently with community and local government in order to make changes at home that cater to needs of our communities – our neighbors. Just as my perspective as evolved rapidly through my undergraduate years as I soaked up all of the experiences that I could, I anticipate it to continue evolving throughout law school and my professional career as I seek to put myself in unfamiliar experiences to learn what justice looks like across diverse terrains. I have a growth mindset and am mature in my philosophy as I anticipate the development of the ideas that I hold dear now and roll with the punches that experience will surely pose to my beliefs.

This learning has set me up for success after graduation by introducing me to the field of law and inspiring me to attend law school following my graduation. I will be taking a gap year to apply for law school, and in this time, I intend to work at the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office, which I only was introduced to because of the Honors College encouraging us to step outside of our comfort zone. That internship for Honors credit has evolved into a full-time paid position, which will enrich my law school application and ensure that I am set up to get into a school that challenges me and sets me up for success.