she/her/hers
Geography and Community, Environment, and Planning
Double majoring in Geography and CEP allows me to understand the intersections to the questions that keep me up at night and formulate more pointed and effective responses. Although my ideas of career paths and interests have changed many times (for a while I wanted to be a ballerina, then a chef!) my questions have been the same: How do physical spaces inform how we interact with each other and vice versa? How can relational models of thinking and acting promote a desire-centered framework for community engagement? How does mapping promote certain political agendas, leaving many lived experiences out of the conversation? What role to cultural institutions play in increasing sense of belonging and civic engagement in cities? Learning and working should not be a siloed experience, nor should it be contained in the classroom; it should flow to the outside world and vice versa. With this double major I will be better equipped to take on leadership and professional roles that ask the hard questions facing our communities.
Minor in Urban Design & Planning
I wanted to minor in Urban Design & Planning to take courses grounded in the technical language of the planning field. Tackling issues of human settlement, social justice, and urban development requires that I understand the systems and technical structures that both inspire progress or hold communities back. Urban design and planning is a complex and ever changing field that integrates the social, behavioral, and cultural relationships between people and the quality of their built and natural environment, and I am excited to take what I learn in this minor and my double major and apply it to projects that I'm really passionate about.
Formative Urban Planning Courses
Race, Gender, and Social Justice Seminar
Introduction To Geographic Information Systems
This course explores concepts of race, gender, racism, class, social justice, and make explicit their connections between design, planning, policy, and cities. It does so to build our understanding about how, and the degree to which, these disciplines have historically addressed (or contributed to) these topics, and where they stand currently. Our discussions in this course taught me more about how I myself can perpetuate harmful power structures without even knowing it, but it also showed me that having honest and critical conversations about the systems we are part of it an essential step towards dismantling them; we can't fix something we don't know is a problem in the first place. We have specifically meaningful conversations about the power of education and how access to antiracist education is a vital building block for even being able to have these conversations in the first place.
This course provides students with introductory practical knowledge of Geographical Information Systems and Science for current and future coursework in urban planning. This course satisfies an URBDP prefix requirement for the URBDP minor, but as a Geography major on the GIS track, I intentionally took this course to get more comfortable with using GIS software in an urban planning context. I have linked two of my favorite labs below.