During my first semester, my family back home experienced the effects of Hurricane Maria—which is how my interest in environmental studies began. From then, I started to realize how important it is to advocate for change in how the world uses and depletes its natural resources. If we don’t want our climate to become unpredictable and for natural disasters to worsen, change needs to happen.
After everything I had learned and experienced by moving to Washington, I knew that once the opportunity to study abroad during my Junior year came along, I wanted to be in a program dedicated to environmental topics and issues. I was immediately drawn into the structure of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, which brought together not only international students, but students from across the Middle-Eastern region—from Israel to the West Bank to Jordan. I was really interested in being in an environment that brought together so many people from different backgrounds to work on issues that affect us all—and not just environmental ones.
Thankfully, while doing research on how to fund my study-abroad program in Israel, I found out about and then applied to the Gilman Scholarship, which helped alleviate the financial costs of the trip. The scholarship gave me the opportunity to focus on my studies there and to immerse myself in a region I knew very little about. Before I went to university, I had had the opportunity to travel to Senegal, which, like the Middle East, is in a semi-arid region. I therefore had some idea of I what the climate was going to be like in Israel. But other than the topography, Israel showed me a completely different lifestyle and pace of life I had never been exposed to before.
