Josianne Alwardi
Plan II Honors & International Relations
My third year at UT has been the most challenging yet most rewarding year yet. Thanks to my Dedman
stipend, I spent the summer in the 5th arrondissement in the heart of Paris, studying the roles of international organizations such as Amnesty International, UNESCO, the EU, and the UN as well as global topics in international relations. I spent plenty of blissful days on the Seine eating the best desserts and
delicacies, and then returned to UT for the fall semester, where I had the privilege of serving as the President of the Texas Mock Trial team. This year, I led my team to a top–10 finish at the National Championship Tournament and helped secure over $20,000 in donations for my team. I also served as the Philanthropy Chair for the Arab Students Association, where I revamped the position by introducing semester–long fundraising campaigns with lasting, international impacts, such as raising over a thousand dollars benefitting Syrians affected by the horrendous earthquake and cholera crisis.
This year, I worked as a TA for my favorite professor and role model, Professor Lee Walker, and guided
two groups of freshmen in semester–long civic engagement–oriented projects that aimed to identify and
enhance UT’s role in climate change and mental health. I studied for the LSAT for five intense months
and made the Dedman Scholars lounge my personal LSAT study lair. Though my academic interests
usually lay in Middle Eastern politics, terrorism, and law, this spring I broadened my scope by taking
Professor Smith’s “The Age of Rembrandt and Rubens: Northern Baroque Art” course, which molded me into a novice art critic. I look forward to spending a summer with family in Syria, in the most beautiful
village, al–Hawash, applying to law school, taking more art history classes, finally seeing the Lumineers in concert, and captaining a team for Texas Mock Trial.
Neerul Gupta
Psychology and Rhetoric & Writing
All that I’ve learned from junior year can be found in Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese.” Julie shared this poem with me when I needed it most, and Oliver said I did not have to be good. I did not have to walk on my knees for a hundred miles; I only needed to let my body love what it loved. This year was a lesson in giving myself the grace to change course. It was my most trying and transformative one yet.
Last summer, I completed a fellowship at The Menninger Clinic, a psychiatric hospital part of the Texas Medical Center. With the outstanding guidance of Mr. Ryan Smith and Dr. Michelle Patriquin, I studied the relationship between open-mindedness and anxiety, depression, emotion dysregulation, and suicidal ideation over the course of inpatient treatment. I presented my results to the Menninger Research Department and, this past April, the Anxiety and Depression Association of America 2023 Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. Additionally, with the mentorship of the Menninger team, my article “Tuskegee’s Ever-Lasting Stain on Black American Trust” was published on the front page of the Psychology Today website and was promoted to #1 Essential Read in the Race and Ethnicity column.
The Lewis-Peacock Lab continued to be a central point of my school year. During my sophomore year, I was awarded a grant for a research proposal I crafted with my mentors Zachary Bretton-Granatoor and Jarrod Lewis-Peacock. This past year, I collected and analyzed data, wrote a manuscript, and submitted our work to a journal. I also presented our project at UT’s annual Longhorn Research Poster Session, where I was awarded 1st place for my poster presentation, and the Stanford Research Conference, where I was awarded Best Poster. This project, which analyzes anxiety and intrusive thinking, is the result of two years of persistence by me and my mentors. I am endlessly thankful to Zachary and Dr. Lewis-Peacock for believing in me. In addition to my research assistantship, I served as a lab manager, an incredibly rewarding position that further developed my appreciation for the lab’s researchers. While my tenure as a research assistant has ended in the lab, I will continue serving as lab manager and giving back to a space that has largely defined my undergraduate research career.
This year, I joined Dr. Christopher Beevers’ Mood Disorders Lab and worked closely with my mentor Mackenzie Zisser. Alongside growing familiar with depression research and helping Mackenzie with her dissertation, I wrote the introduction and methods to my thesis. I’m studying redemption, which explores personal interpretations of significant negative life events, and its relationship with cognitive bias, age, depressive symptoms, life satisfaction, and temporal distance. I will be finishing data collection this summer and wrapping up my second independent research project in the fall.
The most fulfilling parts of this year were the writing communities and courses I participated in. In the fall, I served as a Writing Fellow for LAH 102H for the second year in a row. My role required prioritizing sensitivity and encouragement to my students, and I tried my very best to impart a love for writing from and for the heart. My students shared vulnerable stories with me that I will treasure forever. Furthermore, I participated in Dr. Larry Carver’s Liberal Arts Honors Writing Institute for the second year. While I still haven’t nailed the classical style, I now more than ever savor the beauty of a carefully curated sentence, trying to glean the rhythm, sounds, and energy from works by Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and Mark Twain and replicate them in my own writing.
I enrolled in the most memorable courses of my undergraduate years. I took Dr. Annie Hill’s Rhetoric and the Law in the fall and Rhetoric, Feminism, and Science in the spring. I did not consider myself to be ignorant, or perhaps it was naivety, but these courses lifted my rose-colored lenses. From forcing me to face the homophobic and racist realities of U.S. legal systems to the sexist history and subjectivity of science, these courses essentially killed how and in what ways I believed the world operated. I plunged into (academic) stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, and even some depression. I did not, however, experience acceptance. Instead, I’m an angrier and more educated young woman who does not miss her protective lenses. I’m endlessly grateful to Dr. Hill for transforming my vision of my sociopolitical role in the world.
Additionally, I took Dr. Alison Kafer’s Sick Theory Writing Madness. Should I ever become a professor, I hope to mirror the accommodating, welcoming, and warm environment that Dr. Kafer nurtured in the classroom. This class reconstructed how I think about (dis)ability, access, and in(ter)dependence, a product of intentional introspection and honesty from myself and my classmates. My favorite reads from class included Alice Wong’s Year of the Tiger and Audre Lorde’s A Burst of Light & Other Essays. Second-most, I hope to honor the feminist, queer, and crip theories and methodologies I’ve learned by continuing to engage in books and conversations about disability and disability activism. Mostly, I hope to continue practicing compassion and vulnerability, even if that means shedding a few tears during office hours.
While this year was incredibly rewarding, it was also incredibly exhausting. I’m happy to say that writing this reflection is the first time I’ve opened my laptop in two months. After submitting a final essay 30 minutes before my flight, I left to spend a Maymester in Italy with one of my best friends and fellow Dedman, Nina. We traversed through the cobblestone streets of Rome and Florence, took spontaneous day trips to Milan and Venice, and completed a rigorous 7-hour hike in Cinque Terre. (We went to class, too.) After Italy, I went to India. I hugged family I hadn’t seen in four years, became engulfed by the chilly Himalayan breeze, and felt immense gratitude for my mothertown of Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. These two months gave me space and time I haven’t experienced in years to ask myself critical questions about what type of lifestyle I want to live, with whom I want to spend my time, and where I want to go in the future. In a few days, I will be heading to New York City, where I will continue to search for the answers to these questions, explore the sleepless city, and soak in the last weeks of my summer break.
As much as I’ve resisted what Julie has named the Dedman Pivot for the past three years, I am completely immersed in it now. My senior year and postgrad plans may look very different than my friends, family, mentors, and even I would’ve thought or even wanted for me. But I’ve learned that the world offers itself to my imagination, and I have a place in the family of things within it. I’ll find my place. I thank the Dedman family for their support, Dr. Musick for his mentorship, Dr. Pikus for her honest advice and love, and Julie for her kindness and brilliant poem recommendation.
Josh Russell
Plan II and Rhetoric & Writing
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
That sentence stuck to my skin four years ago after reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for the first time. At the time, during the end of my senior year of high school, it seemed like every question had been answered. UT Austin. Dedman Scholars. Poetry. Complete Change. Life finally.
Yet, it seems that every single year since then, I’ve been unmade and remade to ask the same crucial question: What will you do?
A younger me could never have told anyone that an answer would allow me to call myself a keynote speaker for the first time, especially speaking to the very people who’d taught me so much. Yet this summer, at the Literacy Love Festival, that very dream breathed. With over 200 English curriculum specialists and teachers across LISD, I was posed the question “what is the power of literacy and literary activism?”. For over an hour I shared the journey that my mother, Zora, that UT Austin had walked with me on, and had the overwhelming realization that I have answers.
Those same answers would allow me to convince the director of a Black Maternal Health Non-Profit that poetry, picture books, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved could help to reach a much larger community. Art is flammable, and now Austin Black motherhood poetry slams, maternity photo shoots and writing workshops, and UT Austin panels on disparity are plans we can both hold in our hands now.
I’m grateful for Dedman, not only because they’ve provided many resources to continue answering questions for the people who need them most, but because it’s allowed me to do it alongside other scholars who pose the same passionate questions. Now, I’m asking everyday with my project partner Eddie Bankston how we can make a vision for an Austin Black Expressive Arts festival more of a reality. Every meeting with another non-profit, every successful pitch, every day we come to another answer and with it another question, brings us closer to that reality.
It’s been a wonderful, unexpected, thought-provoking three years. Now, this year, this “final year”, is screaming the same anxious question. What will you do?
Only now, I think: What’s possible?
Anuraag Routray
Plan II and Government
I can’t believe I’m about to be a senior—seriously, these past few years have flown by so quickly, and now I’m tasked with making the most out of my last year before I leave the forty acres (for now). I’m writing my bio this time from Seattle! I’m currently interning at Microsoft on the Azure HPC (high–
performance computing) + AI (artificial intelligence) team as a technical program management intern. I get to work on some of the most exciting fields in tech, think supercomputers, self–driving cars, digital
biology, and more. I’m learning so much and meeting insanely smart people that inspire me to do more and reach higher. I think this really is another chapter in the meeting of my interests—finding the intersections between technology and public policy. Working on high–performance computing encapsulates that fully: about half the market for these resources is the public sector. This is really just another extension of my academic experience at UT, where I took classes on the management of American natural resources to understanding private technology transfers in multinational corporations.
I also pursued a variety of academic experiences outside the classroom. Being a Clements Undergraduate fellow, I got to meet a variety of fascinating speakers and hear from people who have lived rich lives serving their country in everything from the State Department to the CIA. As a Brumley Scholar, I took what I think will be the defining class of my time as an undergraduate, a seminar–style class with two amazing professors, Dr. Holsten and Dr. Mosser, while also spending a week in D.C. seeing how real policy is taken from think tanks to policy shops in federal agencies. I was also a writer for Texas Triple Helix, an undergraduate research journal, where a piece of mine was published regarding the surprising correlation between sanitation efforts and a country’s technological innovativeness. And perhaps most important to me personally, thanks to the Dedman Enrichment Fund, I was able to spend another year mentoring the kids in the high school robotics program that gave me so much as a student.
Outside of learning, I continued having fun in Austin, exploring new food scenes and parts of the city I didn’t even know existed before. I played another year of intramural basketball and was fortunate enough to join the Silver Spurs this year, the honorary student service organization responsible for Bevo, along with representing the university when asked, while giving back to the community through the NLP program. I’ve met some incredible people and have been able to do more service as a student due to the organization. After the end of the semester, again also enabled by Dedmans’ generosity, I was able to explore Europe to better understand their approach to public transit and sports, two of my personal interests. Seeing how crucial those two items are in the high quality of life their citizens enjoy has given me new energy to contribute back home. There’s so much to do and so little time left, but at the end of my four years here at UT, I’m confident I’ll have done as much as I could, all only possible through the Dedman program.
Ingrid Piña
Liberal Arts Honors/Humanities/Mobilities Ethnography through Film & Fiction
A week after attending the DDSP kick-off dinner, I flew to Tucson, Arizona to begin a semester studying migration, borders, and transnational communities with the School for International Training (SIT). After visiting the U.S.-Mexico border and Tucson immigration courts, our group of 7 students flew to Oaxaca, Mexico where we would spend the next few months taking classes and living with host families. As we prepared independent study project proposals in a research methods class, we volunteered with various migrant shelters and visited Chiapas, walking along Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. I’m struggling to summarize this semester that I’ll never forget, the semester that depleted my Dedman academic enrichment fund and filled my mind with sorrow and anger, to witness devastating impacts of U.S. migratory policy day in and out. And interspersed——whirling moments of joy. Music in the zócalo, quesillo on the walk to school, a phone call from one of my family members affected by the U.S. suddenly extending Title 42 expulsions to Venezuelans. My independent study project investigated the U.S.’ federal communication surrounding this policy change, and how Venezuelan migrants used social media to fill the information gaps, to make better decisions for themselves, their families and communities put at risk by the changing situation.
I presented this research for SIT and later in the spring at the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) colloquium. I adapted my findings into a 2-minute video for the Texas Student Research Showdown, and received an honorable mention. This research also became the backbone of my application for the Truman Scholarship, which helps fund grad school for students interested in public service. With the support of Dr. Bruster and Dr. Thomas in the ODPS office at UT, I was chosen as one of 9 finalists to interview in the state of Texas. While I was not selected to receive the scholarship, I’m so grateful for the application/interview experience, and to have met the other finalists. I find encouragement in my Mellon cohort of students, my friends, who are also preparing to apply for post-graduate scholarships and opportunities this fall. As I continue research on migratory policy communication for my MMUF thesis, I also look forward to a year of working on my Humanities thesis in which I can incorporate my creative interests.
But I’m not rushing summer. I’m about to start a dream job, leading a trail crew of six high-schoolers setting stone steps on the Appalachian Trail near Rangeley, Maine. I used to be one of those high-schoolers benefitting from the Student Conservation Association (SCA)’s mission of supporting the next generation of environmental conservation leaders. My trail crew leaders were and are my role models and inspirations; Sam Rush, while leading the crew I worked on in Glacier National Park, spoke to me about their poetry practice. I later took Sam’s poetry course, and Sam wrote the back-page blurb for my chapbook, Ragweed Body! These past two weeks of June, I’ve completed a road trip from Texas to North Carolina, to Maryland and back, for SCA work skills training and to take a Wilderness First Responder course. I spent my birthday around a campfire and was able to share my trail crew story at SCA’s board meeting with founder Liz Putnam present. This summer is so special to me, and to my 16-year-old self, who first started working with SCA and got to experience the outdoors in a way I never had before.
I’m still writing poetry, and feel grateful to have won the inaugural LAH Literary Award this past spring for a few of my poems. In Oaxaca, I got to see Irma Piñeda read, in Zapotec and Spanish, from her book of poetry, In the Belly of the Night and Other Poems. Piñeda worked with a translator from the U.S., Wendy Call, who read the poems’ versions in English. I found my heart warming around its different valves that speak different languages and have lived in different parts of the world. When I moved back to Austin in January, I moved into Pearl St Co-op, where I have enjoyed cooking arepas for the house and making friends with the many exchange students that live there. At the end of the semester, I brought a group of Pearlies, from China, France, and South Korea, on their first time camping in Texas. The stars at night were indeed bright.
Dedman friends are woven throughout my every story above. This year, my dear Conviction cohort (Marisa, Avi, Pooja, and Bronson) graduated. I will miss them so! I wish them the best, that they may find many more spaces in which they can commune with friends and feel safe venting life woes and inventing life ideas, as we did.
I still have a year more at UT, due to taking pauses to do an internship and study abroad. I have endless gratitude to the Dedman family and program, THANK YOU, for supporting me, and believing in where my meandering interests are taking me. We’ll see!