POC HIGHLIGHTS

This is a blog started by a group of BridgeUp Students @ Smith! We wanted to create an online platform where we can celebrate POC highlights at Smith College.

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Featuring... Asha Reed-Jones’20

Asha is a POSSE scholar from Clinton Hill and Crown Heights in Brooklyn, NY (where Biggie is actually from). She spent most of her younger life with her cousins in her great-great-grandmother’s brownstone, where there was a strong sense of community. Asha strongly values her family and community. She was raised by a family of women who taught her to “show up, make the best of things, and have a good time.”

Asha is a pre-medical student majoring in neuroscience with a minor in psychology. She loves learning about the brain and spends much of her time conducting research on implicit bias, discrimination, and stigma. She began research on this topic as a high school student and conducted an independent research project on the correlation between age and rewriting biases after the death of Trayvon Martin. Asha is also a BridgeUp scholar, SHEP scholar, and member of Peter de Villier’s language and cognition lab. Last year, Asha and her POSSE cohort started a grant for students to access educational tools. This year’s incoming POSSE cohort will be receiving computers through this grant. As an incoming first-year, Asha did not have access to any of these resources and she is happy knowing that she is leaving Smith in a better place. Her work to increase access and care for others outside of the classroom is what drives her academic efforts.

In the future, she sees herself as a doctor who is accessible to the black community and knows how to listen. To her, giving back is a little like paying back rent. She wants to help others because she is grateful for the opportunities and gifts she has. Besides continuing to conduct research, volunteering, taking care of her three dogs, and designing a dream home with a beautiful view, Asha also wants to try everything at least once -- including sky-diving, surging, jet skiing, and climbing the world’s second tallest mountain. Her ultimate goal is to buy back her grandmother’s brownstone in Brooklyn and open up a home for at-risk women with her mom and aunts, who are all counselors and medical professionals: “It was a home for me and I feel like it should be a home for other people as well.”

Asha wants to remind future Smithies of self-care: “You matter. You are enough. You matter more than this institution.”

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Featuring... Cara Flores ‘20

Cara is a junior double-majoring in Sociology and Studio Art who was born and raised in the Philippines, and is now based in Portland, OR. She identifies as a Filipino-American and loves everything Filipino, especially the food. When applying to colleges, Cara chose Smith because the open curriculum allowed for the option to major in art and something else. After taking classes in different departments during her first few semesters, she ended up in SOC 101 with Prof. Candelario, where she learned what sociology could teach her. In classes with Prof. Banerjee and Prof. Candelario, she loves that intersectionality is central to their teaching and research, not just another chapter in a book. What she learns in her sociology classes informs her art. Cara believes art should not be apolitical, and turns to print-making and etching as ways to think more visually about identities and intersectionality.

When she first arrived at Smith, Cara struggled to find an affinity space on campus that felt like home. As a first year, she started Pan Asians In Action (PAIA) with a few graduating seniors. She describes PAIA as a space for “misfit Asians” who are interested in investigating the intersection of queer and Asian identities to unlearn expectations of hyper-feminization and submissiveness. Cara and her friends at Smith fondly call themselves the “Gaysians.” One of her favorite memories was racing and splashing in Paradise Pond with the Gaysians. Cara’s low-income background also shapes her experience at Smith. Next year, she hopes to center class identity in PAIA’s discussions and work, alongside to race, gender, and sexuality. She stresses that “class is not just a number that you fill out when you apply to FAFSA, it’s a mentality that is internalized from lived experience.”

Cara is passionate about creating POC communities across Smith campus as well. She is one of the founding organizers of POCheese, a newer cross-campus house tradition. As a HONS (Head of New Students) last year for Comstock House, she worked with other students and Reslife to establish this through applying for an Innovation Grant. Cara is also a Multicultural Recruitment Intern for Admissions, where her job is to talk to prospective students of color. She loves sharing her knowledge and experience to help newer Smithies learn how to “finesse things to make things work on a campus that is not made for POC.”

But wait… there’s more! This semester, Cara participated in the Draper Competition with her friend Jane Lee to make Spark, a database for connecting ad agencies to creatives of color. Cara is committed to making space for POC at Smith and beyond, and hopes to continue this work after Smith. Besides pursuing a career in advertising, she wants to continue helping to build supportive communities for POC and return to the Philippines, all while roller derbying: “I love the Marxist idea of being able to do it all, and I’m going to try despite capitalism.” She is grateful for all the opportunities she has had at Smith and will one day come back as an alum to donate $1million to POCheese and POC financial aid.

Cara urges every Smithie (newer or older) to take Prof. Banerjee’s “Gender and Globalization” course: “you will have your mind blown.” She also wants to remind new Smithies to not be afraid to build something, especially community.

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Featuring... Kitty Chen ‘21

Kitty is a first generation immigrant and first generation college student who grew up in Shanghai before moving to San Francisco at the age of 10. She describes herself as being endlessly curious about people, which manifests in her academic fields of study– Kitty is a double major in economics and psychology, with an “unofficial” minor in architecture. She enjoys using the different lenses of academic theory to understand study of behavior, choice, and space. After Smith, she plans to pursue a career in business.

Although she has lived in America for half her life, she is very passionate about retaining her Shanghainese culture and traditional Chinese values. Her status as an immigrant is both her greatest challenge and her proudest accomplishment. When she first arrived in SF, she struggled with overcoming the language barrier, and disliked speaking up in classes unless she was able to articulate provocative conversations in English. After years of practice and falling in love with stories and reading novels in her own time and in her AP English courses (her favorite book is East of Eden), she realized that “One day, my English is just as good as people who were born and raised here.” This realization taught her she could achieve anything with enough determination and perseverance. Now, when faced with challenges, she draws on this notion of fearlessness: “I build my wings on the way down.”

Because of her Eastern cultural background, she is incredibly group-oriented. She approaches all her group commitments with the goal of creating diverse experiences, because her value is to leave a community a little better than she encountered it. “You don’t see a lot of Asian leadership in the business world, or in psychology. That made me want to pursue those fields and show people what an Asian presence looks like.” In the Fall, she was teaching assistant for Intro to Psychology, and has been a research assistant since her first year. On Monday nights, you can find her at BridgeUp meetings.

Today, Kitty is deeply involved in the design-thinking and entrepreneurial community on campus. She is competing in the Draper Entrepreneurship competition this year, is a member of the Smith Start-Up Consulting Group, and is currently participating in a Valley Ventures Mentors startup accelerator program. Kitty also runs the Smith College Consulting Club (IG @scconsultingclub) as the Marketing Director, and puts together events to support fellow students who want to enter the field of consulting. Her motivation stems from turning creative problem-solving into a career!

She wants remind new Smithies of the power of mindset. Adjusting to Smith, and any college, is hard, but “your mindset is the most powerful belief you can hold on to because it will inevitably get you to where you need to go.”

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Grace was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya. The youngest of 8 siblings, she faced (and faces) enormous pressure to succeed. At 18, she packed up her life and moved to Northampton for Smith–describing the transition as “easier than I expected.” Having connections at Smith meant she had someone to pick her up from the airport, but later she would find a true support system within a new group of close friends. All her favorite memories are from time spent with them in the Mwangi Cultural Center.

Although most of her siblings decided to take the path of studying business, Grace found her true passions in Neuroscience and Economics, her two majors. She enjoys research at the crossroads of her majors and data analysis. Currently, she is working in the statistics and neuroscience labs on campus. An interesting independent research project she is working on explores the effects of sexuality, socio-economic status, and mental health on college students’ social status. Grace has grad school on her radar; she is eager to delve even deeper into her undergraduate interests.

She was one of 10 undergrads in the US funded to attend COSYNE (Computational and Systems Neuroscience) Annual Conference. However, what she is most proud of is having made it here to Smith.

Outside of her curricular activities, she is involved in the Smith Student Ambassador Program, SACSA (Smith African Caribbean Student Ass), AEMES Mentorship Program, BridgeUp Leadership Program, and SOCSS (Students of Color in the Social Sciences). On top of everything, she also works as a Head Resident.

When asked if she has any advice for a new Smithie, she said “If you want something, go for it. You have to fight for what you want. Ask for it, funding, research, help, everything… “