Honors 100 Assignment 1

Francis Wilson

From the start, nothing about my life has been monolithic. The list of adjectives that could
describe my upbringing is a myriad of ethnicities and traditions: Catholic and American, Filipino and
Indian, mathematical and literary. From a background where there was never any single dominant force
influencing my life, I have always wanted diversity both in my daily life and my academic studies. With a
computer engineer for a father and a poet for a mother, I have always been surrounded by the
connections and interaction between two greatly different ways of expressing and studying the world.
People tend to seek out what is most familiar to them, and it was the interdisciplinary focus of
UW Honors that first piqued my interest in the program.
More than that however, the academic similarity of the Honors program to the small classes and
motivated students of my previous school appealed greatly to me. Although going to the same school
for eight years was occasionally cloistering, the bonds that I formed with my classmates were extremely
close. I saw in the Honors community the chance to form those same strong academic and social bonds
while still being able to interact with the vast group of individuals that make up the entire UW campus.
Another aspect of the UW Honors program that drew me to it was the opportunity for learning
among me and my fellow students. As the article we read pointed out, the most important lessons are
those that we learn are from our mentors and peers. By taking classes with students from a wide range
of majors who view academics with the same wide lens that I do, I want to learn from and even be
challenged by the viewpoints of others.
However, what finally convinced me to come here to the UW Honors program was the Mary
Gates scholarship that I received. Lifting the burden of paying for college for my parents for the first two
years gave me the freedom to pursue International Studies, a potentially risky major in a jobs market
where humanities majors are having a harder and harder time finding work.
Now because of this academic freedom, I hope to explore my interests more specifically than
ever before with the wide ranges of courses available here, while still finding common threads and
connections between the realm of International relations and other disciplines such as Statistics, my
other major. Few things are more academically satisfying then finding a connection between two
seemingly unrelated courses, such as knowing what flagella were in Advanced Bio because I took Latin,
or my final Calculus project, which combined historical information about the Black Death with the
patterns of differential equations.
While here at the UW, I especially want to learn through travel and immersion, through actual
human interactions with the regions of the world that interest me the most. Through study abroad or
possibly one of the Honors experiential learning programs in another country, I want to learn about the
world from the world itself, not just a textbook. These are but a few of the opportunities that I want to
seize while here, and for now my main concern is whether I will have time for it all.
While the end of my journey through the Honors program may seem a long way off, I still have
some idea of what I want to gain from my time here. I want to be able to gain a foundation in both the
humanities and the sciences that will allow me to analyze the world on multiple levels. I want to gain
academic knowledge, but also want to learn how to actually use that knowledge to gain more
understanding of the people from all over the world that I hope to interact with in my future career.
I believe that the moment you stop finding new and unfamiliar situations and adventures to
challenge and test yourself against, life becomes empty and hollow. I hope that the UW Honors program
not only provides a new challenge for me with its courses and programs, but also teaches me how to
deal with the challenges of the future.