Service
COMPASS at Michigan
COMPASS at Michigan is an annual workshop for students from underrepresented backgrounds in philosophy who are considering applying to graduate school. I attended COMPASS as a participant in 2017. Because of the impact that COMPASS had on me, I volunteered to help with the COMPASS program upon starting graduate school.
I have been a COMPASS mentor for five of my six years at Michigan, and I co-organized the workshop for three. As a mentor and organizer, I viewed my role as twofold: first, to provide the program participants with honest information about both the value and challenges of graduate school in philosophy (including issues that specifically impact marginalized students); and second, to help equip them with the confidence and resources needed to pursue graduate school in philosophy, if they chose to do so.
Over the past several years, I’ve been proud to see participants from workshops I’ve organized join me as colleagues, both at Michigan and in other excellent programs!
For more information about my commitment to promoting equity in philosophy through my service and teaching, please see my diversity statement (linked).
Here, I (top center) am forming a compass with my 2019 COMPASS co-organizers (Ariana Peruzzi, Angela Sun, and Sumeet Patwardhan)
GEO
Throughout my graduate career, I’ve been very involved with UM’s graduate employee union (GEO).
From 2020-2021, I served as one of my department’s GEO stewards. The primary role of a steward is to be a liaison between graduate students and the union; I communicated information about rights and benefits from the union to graduate students and connected graduate students who were experiencing challenges (such as overwork or trouble accessing appropriate accommodations) to the appropriate union resources.
From 2021-2022, I took on a larger role as GEO’s Grievance Chair. In this role, I acted as an advocate for student employees facing a number of workplace challenges, including instances of discrimination and harassment, barriers to accessing gender-affirming healthcare, and lack of access to necessary resources for safe work.
Representing GEO!
Conference and Working Group Organizing
In Spring 2024, I co-organized UM’s Spring Colloquium (an annual conference that centers around a particular theme or topic). Our theme was “The Many Flavors of Metaphysics.” It turned out to be a blast!
From 2021-2022, I co-organized “RGFP,” an interdisciplinary graduate student working group focused on work on race, gender and feminist philosophy. As a co-organizer, I aimed to organize events that were not just philosophically engaging, but also helped support the careers of graduate students and junior faculty working in these important subfields. We hosted a talk by Perry Zurn, a junior professor who spoke about practices of trans inclusion in universities; a works-in-progress session on a project about systemic oppression by another junior professor, Dee Payton; and several presentations by early-stage UM graduate students who were developing papers from recent seminars.
During the summer of 2021, I co-organized UM’s Philosophy Alumni Conference. The alumni conference is a bi-annual conference featuring talks by University of Michigan Philosophy alumni. The conference took place over Zoom, which allowed us to host a fun Zoom reunion for many alumni who wouldn’t have been able to join in person!
Poster for the 2024 Spring Colloquium (design credit to Mia Arnold)
Other Service
From 2019-2020, I served as one of two graduate representatives to the faculty in my department. In this role, I worked with the department chair and with fellow graduate students to address climate concerns in the department, such as unequal distribution of service labor among graduate students and overwork issues for graduate student instructors.
I also volunteered for several years with the A2 Ethics Bowl program: first as a team coach for 1 year, then as a co-organizer for 1 year, and finally as a judge for multiple Ethics Bowl events. The A2 Ethics Bowl brings together high school students from across Ann Arbor to discuss complicated ethical cases. I found it so rewarding to see the student participants grow over the years not just in their ethical insights, but also in their abilities to engage with one another thoughtfully and respectfully. As a former Ethics Bowl participant myself, getting to work with the A2 Ethics Bowl program was especially meaningful to me.
Fun fact: I was on my college’s Ethics Bowl team! Here’s a photo of us in action.