"Down the Line"- José González

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I have been incredibly fortunate to travel through UW Study Abroad to Italy and India, with my high school’s Expedition Club community service initiative in Thailand, through my mom’s desire to introduce my sister and me to a world outside our own with the generosity of family, friends, and connections along the way. These encounters have tested my intuition, heightened my awareness, raised respect for advocating for my physical and mental needs, and taught me the meaningful connection between discomfort, complexity, and unpredictability. I am creatively inquisitive, an avid learner, and enthusiastically adaptive. But those skills came from learning comfort in chaos. A summer spent researching nutrient cycling and oxygen-iron dynamics within the beaver-impacted floodplains of the Elk Mountains helped drive that expansion. There are the usual challenges and logistics women must arm themselves for in field research, much like those I learned through prior travel, which can feel limiting. But navigating those constraints, learning that self-advocacy, finding that my strong attention to detail contributes to uncovering otherwise unnoticed joys and patterns– such as understanding the questions that dominating perspectives have yet to ask– it has gifted me with the gusto and humility I need to succeed and embrace discovery.