Humility Cohort

Alia Hassan

Liberal Arts Honors, Economics B.S.
Bellaire Senior High School
Bellaire, Texas

I am a recent graduate of Bellaire High School in Bellaire, Texas. Throughout high school, my mission was to explore how service can be expressed through different modalities, particularly through advocacy and learning how other people experience the world.

I found my people in high school through the Bellaire Debate Team, where I roleplayed as Representative Hassan in Congressional Debate for five years and learned about policy from around the world through International Extemporaneous Speaking. Speech and Debate took me not only across Texas but across the country to compete. My five-year career concluded with an advancement to the semifinal round of the 2026 National Speech and Debate Tournament in Richmond, Virginia. Most fulfilling, though, was serving as a Congressional Debate and Extemporaneous Speaking coach on my team, creating curriculum and administering practice rounds for our over fifty novices in the program. Through debate, I was able to explode out of my shell and find my voice to fight for others who haven’t yet found theirs.

Eventually, roleplaying as a policymaker wasn’t enough. I wanted to genuinely serve the people affected by the policies I spent years debating. As Bellaire High School is a Title I campus, many of my peers come from low-income households where food was not always a guarantee. That led me to join the Houston Food Bank Student Heroes program, where I realized the sheer lack of education surrounding what food banks actually do and the role they play. After serving as Secretary of the program my junior year, and President as a senior, my mission for the over 200 student leaders across the greater Houston area changed. It became about emphasizing that food banks are merely a safety net, but our responsibility is to learn how to solve food insecurity and create programs that act as trampolines, helping people become food secure and bounce back on their own two feet instead of remaining caught in a cycle of dependency. During Hunger Action Month of my senior year, I organized a city-wide food drive to help combat the $11 million budget cut that the food bank suffered. Through partnering with my school and numerous faith-based organizations in my community, I was able to collect the equivalent of over 10,000 meals to support the food bank’s operations in a time of critical need.

Seeing news cameras constantly coming through our apple-stickered doors, I became moved to apply my video editing skills to more than just personal travel and cooking vlogs. I joined the Three Penny Press, my school newspaper, where I served as Features Editor, editing stories for the over 60 journalists on staff. Although I also wrote news, opinion, and sports stories, learning to engage with new people in the hallways of my school sparked my passion for Feature writing, where I won five Best of SNO journalism awards for five separate articles. Journalism taught me that sometimes the greatest act of service is simply giving someone else’s story the attention it deserves, and that those stories can shape communities just as much as policies can.

When I’m not waking up at 6 a.m. on Saturdays to compete or getting the equivalent of a full-body workout at the food bank, I’m probably somewhere high in the WiFi-free mountains of a national park, sandwich in hand and sweat drying in the aggressive winds that mark the elevation I just powered through. Travel is my reset, but it’s also how I expose my home- and bed-loving self to discomfort in new surroundings.

As a seven-year German student and eventual Vice President for the German National Honor Society, that discomfort took a new leap when I studied abroad in Berlin during my sophomore year summer. Beyond discovering–and eating my weight in–Döner kebab, I learned the beauty of being in a foreign environment by myself and getting lost. I learned how to solve my own problems without relying on my parents to do it for me, and how much confidence can come from navigating the unfamiliar. Beyond becoming more fluent in German, I discovered a version of myself that was more curious and willing to embrace uncertainty. One of the things I am most excited about in college is getting to experience that feeling of the unknown all over again. Where will I get lost next?

In debate, I learned to argue for better policies. At the Houston Food Bank, I learned who those policies affect. Now, I hope Economics will teach me why systems both succeed and fail, and how they can better serve the people they are meant to help. I can’t wait to join the Dedman Distinguished Scholars Program and learn alongside an incredible community! Hook ‘em!