Storytime

Please tell us what from your current and past experiences (either academic or personal) attracts you specifically to the Columbia College field or fields of study that you noted above. If you are currently undecided, please write about any field or fields in which you may have an interest at this time.


When my great-grandmother was on her deathbed, I heard her speak for the first time. Through her shaking words and glittering gaze, she transported me to her teenage years. Describing living during the era of Rafael Trujillo, a time of harmful, racist policymaking, she showed me a lost side of history: her history.

My great-grandmother was a high school dropout, and at the age of fourteen she became a seamstress, starting her own sole-proprietorship and joining a community of indigenous women. However, even as I found my eyes buried between the covers of books that sought to recount this time in the Dominican Republic, I didn’t hear about the women like my great-grandmother, the uneducated, and the impoverished class who worked with their hands for a living. I didn’t hear about the indigenous women who, amidst fervent bigotry, ached to preserve a part of their culture. Where were their stories?

The narrations of the elderly have opened a portal of discovery for me, a world of untold stories that must be heard. Stories such as these have the power to draw an individual narrative in a broader landscape. It is in that pursuit that I wish to study sociology alongside public policy. To find the intersection between individuals,...

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