Student Activism Panel gives hope for the future
The UHCL Common Reader Program is a subdivision of the First-Year Seminar course, a class that aims to foster the intellectual readiness that encourages first-year students to thrive in college. This class has a “common reader,” which is a school-wide book that all First-Year Seminar class sections read and analyze to stimulate their critical thinking skills. This year’s common reader is “Hidden Figures,” written by Margot Lee Shetterly. The UHCL Common Reader Program hosted a Student Activism Panel Feb. 7 to utilize the themes from this novel to inspire students to be active, global citizens around issues such as race, social class and ethnicity.
Last year, my friend Natalia Marfil, biology major, and I went to a Student Activism Workshop on campus, which was the ultimate spur for the creation of the Social Justice Organization. Since Marfil serves as the president and founder, and I serve as the vice president of the organization, we were invited to be a part of the panel to talk about why the organization was created and what activism means to us. Seeing as we had both served as peer mentors for the First-Year Seminar program, we both jumped at the opportunity to be a part of this event.
When we first walked into the room and saw the panel of community activists dressed in business attire, we made eye contact and said, “we are ridiculously underdressed.” We shrugged and sat down on the panel and waited for the event to start. Anne Gessler, co-chair of the Common Reader Program, gave a warm welcome to the audience and began the event by allowing the panelists to introduce themselves and elaborate on their personal activism experiences. The panel consisted of Cesar Espinosa, executive director of “Familias Inmigrantes y Estudiantes en la Lucha” (FIEL Houston); Adrienne Bell, educator running for U.S. Congress as a representative in Texas’s 14th Congressional District; Omah Williams-Duncan, an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction with STEM at UHCL; and Marfil and I, officers of the Social Justice Organization.
Being one of the two students serving on a panel with all these prestigious community activists, I was understandably nervous. However, once the panel actually started and the moderator, Kanalyn Jackson, coordinator of Student Life, began to ask us questions, I quickly realized we were a lot more similar than I had previously thought. Even though everybody on the panel was affiliated with different types of activism, we had all went through the same struggles of doing something to try to enact change and feeling as though we weren’t making an impact. Thankfully, we all shared the traits of passion and persistence which ultimately keeps us going in everything we do.
A quote that stuck with me from the panel was actually from Marfil when she said, “With social activism, it’s working towards a world that you’re not going to be able to see and you have to be ok with that.”
This mentality is hard to maintain, but it’s essential for an individual to have if they hope to bring about long-term change.
This event was inspiring, and I’m honored that I got to be a part of it in any capacity, let alone serving on the panel. I’m glad that UHCL is able to have common reader events like this, not because I’m a peer mentor for the First-Year Seminar program, but because I genuinely enjoy having these types of conversations that the average student doesn’t get to partake in. I learned a lot through introspection and listening to the community activists on the panel, and I even found out who had my vote for the US Congress.
