Personal Narrative: Field Experience

As I sat in the boiling hot sun, the heat that had overwhelmed me throughout the day surpassed. I was engulfed by Lu Paul, a native Hawaiian advocate who was telling me the story of how Native Hawaiians loss their rights. “How did my people become a minority in their own land?” he asked me inquisitively. I found myself making many connections with this man’s story and my own. As he answered my questions about inequality in his community, he began to speak of many things that I had witnessed in my life, that I thought only my own culture experienced. “My people need to fight for equal education, language rights, and employment”, he stated firmly. It was in this moment I began to broaden my perspective of inequality and minority rights. This along with the many other field experiences I had during my semester abroad, help shape my desire to attend law school and work both nationally and abroad in civil and human rights.
In the fall semester of my second year of college, I received the HBCU Scholarship to attend the Semester at Sea program. For five months, I participated

I empathized deeply with these groups and gained a broader perspective on global struggles with inequality. When I returned to my home university, my mentor and professor, Dr. Hopkins, encouraged me to explore the issues I had learned about abroad in greater depth. Before I left to study abroad, I had developed a questionnaire to assess the perceptions of inequality in each country I visited. Now that I have returned to my university, I have begun mining my data to answer four primary questions: To what extent are people conscious of inequalities? To what do people attribute inequality? To what extent does inequality affect the quality of life in a given country? Does skin tone/color correlate to inequality