I was born to a nuclear family in which mother and father are both well-employed, healthy, and still in love. I was born to money, able to go to the college of my choosing and emerge without student debt. I have grown into a 6’1” white male with a body and mind that both work reliably and well. The list goes on and on: straight, gender-normative, American. In short, I was born to privilege, checking all the boxes that allow an individual to grow up healthy, happy, and loved. I have been granted innumerable passes by our systems—be them political, social, or economic—that allow those who look like me to succeed and hold back those who don’t. 

 

This realization has been accompanied by feelings of immense gratitude, feelings of guilt, confusion, and reckoning. More than anything, however, this realization is accompanied by a desire to use my privilege for good, to uplift those who have not been granted the privileges that I have. I have become driven to work for real, tangible change. That is what I’ve done at the University of Michigan. I co-founded the Climate Action Movement, a group pressuring the University to act as a truly public institution by adopting an ambitious climate plan that forefronts climate justice and equity. I co-founded Live in Color, a group painting murals across campus to illustrate how our built environments both have an impact on our mental health and reflect our values as a community and society. 

 

My time in college has taught me a lot about myself—really everything that I know about myself. I was a rower from my sophomore year of high school through my freshman year of college, and the stress, pain, and all-encompassing time that rowing took up rendered me unable to think about other things like art, myself, life, death, and more. My quitting of rowing was accompanied my a flooding of high-level, complex emotions and thoughts that my over-stressed brain was unable to think about. I have learned more about myself in the last 3 years than I had in the proceeding 18.

 

I learned that I love to change things, be it my desk organization, room organization or the way the University of Michigan's buildings are painted. I learned that I love to lead, to paint, to learn how things work. I have learned about my own identity, how messed up the world around me is, how much more I eat than everyone else. 

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In the end, the combination of learning how things work, seeing when something is missing, and working for that change is something that I dearly love, be it through the lens of design, policy, or activism. This project is an example of that, and one that I am very proud of. 

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In the future, I want to keep using my privilege to create a more equitable, justice, and sustainable society, be it through the lens of climate policy, activism, urban planning, design, journalism, or some field that has yet to cross my horizon. I am incredibly excited to keep working for change.

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