McGill and I go way back. My parents got married at the Birks Chapel. My family moved to Montreal from New York state when my mom took a position as a professor in the Faculty of Education. I’m a proud graduate of SSMU daycare. I asked for tickets to the AUTS musical for all my tweenaged birthdays. Exploring McGill as an undergraduate student felt like looking up and seeing the full picture – literally! What was once the endless field I ran in as a toddler became just another parkette surrounded by McGill’s eclectic mix of neoclassical and brutalist buildings. For the last three years, this campus has been my home, offering me countless opportunities for adventure and the kind of independent research and experiential learning I find most rewarding.
I travelled with the Model UN team to UC Berkeley and Cornell, where I won the deathly serious Rupaul’s Drag Race Board of Advisors and Percy Jackson War Council committees. The Arts Internship Office gave me the opportunity to work at the real UN – I moved to Vienna in summer 2024 to help represent Canada at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. I followed up my internship with an independent research paper on the efforts to regulate Canada’s transnational mining corporations in the 2000s.
I also wrote a thesis on the convergence of environmental and anti-immigration politics in the United States. Thanks to the support of the Research Group on Constitutional Studies, I’ll be presenting this research at conferences in Glasgow and London. Professor Amy Janzwood supervised both my research projects. After having worked as a student partner on her course POLI 350: Global Environmental Politics, I am joining her team researching Canadian decarbonization politics this summer.
Together, we have the power to affect change
At the end of Professor Tari Ajadi’s inspiring seminar on Black culture and politics in Canada, the final credit of my Political Science degree, I asked him what, if anything, was giving him hope right now. He responded that people have gotten more efficient and effective at collective organizing. Having witnessed the power of student activism at McGill these past three years, I’m inclined to agree. A decade of student and faculty campaigning resulted in McGill’s divestment from fossil fuels. A year after the historic pro-Palestinian encampments on university campuses across the world, McGill undergraduates voted to strike on the motion that McGill divest from “all companies involved in the production and sale of weapons and military technology linked to genocide and occupation [...].” This was the first strike in SSMU history. These moments where students have shown their courage and conviction are those when I am proudest to be part of this community.
Things will come together and fall apart (and come together again!)
The question I asked myself constantly over the course of my undergraduate degree was “am I doing this right?” Am I making the most of my time here? Have I found my people? What experiences did I miss out on because I forgot to register for frosh on time?! I suspect I’m not the first undergraduate student to worry I’m doing it wrong.
If I can reassure you: everything eventually does come together. And then it falls apart, and comes together again! Accepting that failure and success, joy and grief, will continue to cycle through my life like seasons has been the most challenging and comforting lesson of my undergraduate life.
Thanks all the people that have made it all come together for me: Amy, Bria, Madi, Natalie, Fion and the rest of the political theory community at McGill, whose passion for philosophy translates into the best advice I’ve ever received. Clio and Will, my fellow McGill interns at the Permanent Mission of Canada in Vienna – there are no two people I would rather stumble through Austrian life or groan at political debates with. Environment students, and particularly those I had the pleasure of working with on the McGill Environment Students Society and at Terra Journal, provide an enduring source of hope that climate justice and a world that champions kinship with all life is achievable. I can also definitively say that they are the best dressed McGill students.
I will continue to turn to Professor Amy Janzwood’s engaged scholarship as a model for the purpose-driven, community-oriented career I aspire to. Professor Jacob Levy has sparked some of the most stimulating intellectual debates of my undergraduate degree, and through the Charles Taylor Student Fellowship, introduced me to some of my dearest friends. I am unendingly grateful for Professor Janzwood and Professor Levy’s support, and for showing me what it means to have a calling: to be excellent at your work, to do so to the benefit of others, and to love it.
Arwen is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Joint Honours Political Science and Environment. She will be working in policy research in Europe before pursuing legal studies. Arwen loves cooking noodle-based dishes and providing moral support to her trivia team.