 Hi, my name is Niki Maddi. I am a sophomore from Bethesda, Maryland studying international relations and political science and last year I was in the 2019 epic colloquium where I had the opportunity to organize my own panel on gender and migration. In the process I got to invite leaders in the migration policy research sphere from around the globe to come and speak at our conference and I made some really amazing connections both with these researchers and advocates but also with my fellow epic colloquium members. I just really got engaged with this global community of leaders, thinkers, and students and it was just so exciting to get to engage with a totally different side of Tufts campus and I had some opportunities that I never would have had anywhere else. Namely I got the opportunity to intern at the immigration hub in Washington DC this summer through a fellow epic alumna security talent. There I did immigration advocacy where we worked with legislators on the hill and other advocacy groups to bring about progressive immigration reform and this is totally in keeping with the IGL's mission and everything that I learned in my class and epic and also that I've continued to do on campus through my work with Amnesty International. I'm the IGL liaison for Amnesty and that means that I get to help work with the IGL on incorporating the values and mission of this institution with Amnesty International as a club and also connecting with the IGL student groups. So as the liaison I've helped coordinate activities with other clubs like allies and women in international relations where we've hosted speaker panels and events that try to engage the Tufts community with international concerns and human rights. I also get to do other really cool things through the IGL. Last week I got to meet with Ambassador Samantha Powers as part of the inaugural Jonathan Moore Memorial Lecture Series about ethical and moral global leadership. It was this sort of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I never could have imagined having but the IGL just presents them all the time. So last year when I was helping select the panelists for my panel on gender and migration we leaned really heavily on the network that Professor Abby Williams had with members from the United Nations and also that the IGL has with other research institutions. So I think one of the coolest people we were able to get was Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute and she just has a wealth of experience and research and a lifetime of advocacy talking about these issues and the intersection of migration and gender and she just brought a really new perspective and a really powerful perspective about the history of this discipline of research and also where it's going and it really inspired me to keep learning and finding my own role in the migration policy sphere. And it was just an opportunity to meet with somebody who had seemingly figured it all out and it was just amazing but that sort of caliber of individual was willing to come to Tufts and be a part of something that we were organizing and it was just incredibly fulfilling and exciting and a really unique opportunity for a freshman to have. But another really cool thing that we got to do through Epic was take what we were learning and teach it to others. So as part of the inquiry program when high school students from the surrounding Boston area and also from around the country came to participate in our little simulation it was really cool because we got to take the things that we've been learning in our Epic class and also that we've learned from our panelists in this symposium just a couple weeks before and really transfer that to like the next generation. So I got to talk about issues that we've been learning about all year and so it was this really educational and didactic experience where the high schoolers could ask me questions about what they were debating in their different committees and I could give them some background and some research and some perspective and I think hopefully they learned a lot from me but I also learned a lot from them. So it was really cool to kind of create this full circle of being educated and that getting to give that education down to the next generation. Well something incredibly funny that happened was during the Epic retreat last year at the I think Warren Wolfen conference center in the middle of nowhere, Massachusetts, they had this beautiful lake and one of the team building activities that Heather Berry had created for us was building crafts and rowing out into the center of the lake and so we had a team of about four people all of us liberal arts students not engineers the most latest so our craft was doomed from the start and it was so bad in fact that when we finished with the amount of time that we had to build our boat that no one on our team wanted to get on this but we were really convinced this was never gonna work let's just give up but my friend from Epic Carlos and I decided you know what let's let's just see how this goes like what's the worst that can happen we sink um and so we got on it and it did sink but it was such a shallow lake that we could actually walk along the bottom of the lake so Carlos and I walked our boat along with the team into the center of the lake and it was humiliating because our boat was such a failure but it was really fun to have a friend who stepped up kind of just lived in the moment and we made fun out of our failure but it was a really great like bonding experience like some of the other groups did actually have boats that floated and that resentment lasted for a while but we all got over it and it was just like a really fun bonding experience and I still get a lot of flak for it but I've learned and I may not be good at making boats but we've been a couple of friendships so it was okay I came into Tufts with a pretty good idea of what I thought I wanted to do I knew I wanted to study international relations and then I wanted to do something working in the global sphere and engaging with people from different countries speaking different languages but I didn't know how um and so my experiences of the IGL have been really informative in that not only have I found a specific discipline within international relations that I'm passionate about which for me is migration studies but I've also been exposed to a variety of ways to impact change and to engage in that sphere so I've met with practitioners and government officials I've met with researchers and scholars um and I've also just met with other students who are all figuring it out and everybody kind of has a different path and a different passion and interaction but it's really excited to be part of a community where everybody in the end wants to be having some sort of global impact and they want to take their experiences their privileges and their education and leverage it for the betterment of the global community and so even though we're all getting there in a different way we all kind of have this same goal um so it's really exciting to learn from other people and for me that's kind of shown me that I'll need to potentially pursue a law degree um if I want to work in the public policy sphere which is not something that I'd planned on before coming to Tufts but uh so many other people I've met through the IGL have said get a law degree you'll figure it out from there so that's exciting to have a little bit more direction but also I've heard from so many people time and time again that it's okay not to have it figured out and seeing everybody's meandering career paths and meandering passions is really exciting because I realize there's not going to be a linear path to success but rather if I continue to do things that do good for the world that it doesn't matter how I got there and I will figure it out because all these other amazing people did too