Designing My Own Major by Angela

Designing My Own Major by Angela - August 2023 Scholarship Essay

As a CUNY BA student, My biggest achievement during my educational career was designing my own major. CUNY BA for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies is a program where students design their own majors. When designing my degree I took all my life experiences, passions, and goals and asked myself what solution to what problem I want to be.
I created my double majors in Multicultural Marketing and Experiential Communication and Design. As someone who has multiple identities and has always felt lost in finding community, I wanted to learn more about culture and how society communicates and builds on identities to create the multicultural world we know today. This helped me design my “Multicultural Marketing Degree”, studying culture through the lenses of policy and cultural anthropology and communication through marketing and administration. My second degree is “Experiential Communication and Design”. As a person with learning disabilities and a child of immigrant parents, my family and I did not absorb information the same way others do. I wanted to learn different ways to communicate information that surpasses words and numbers and focuses on the experience of communicating. I chose to study this through the lenses of performance, digital design, and humanities. Reflecting on my life, I am reminded of numerous instances where the presence of someone with my degree could have made a significant difference. For instance, my family, unaware of our eligibility due to immigration status, missed out on accessing welfare rights. This is largely due to insufficient information and ineffective communication channels. During my younger years, I hid my disabilities and queerness, believing that being a child of immigrants was already bad enough. The lack of representation and meaningful discussions surrounding multicultural identities created these challenges.
I am proud to share that I have already been able to put my degrees into action and achieve part of my goals while working on the New York State Department of Health and Education accounts and contributing to addiction and overdose digital campaigns by assisting in figuring out different ways to communicate with the Latino community, as well as conducting in-depth research and presenting compelling arguments on the significance of diversity in advertising. By taking my life experience and honing them into my degree I am able to use my skills as a tool to create positive radical changes for underserved communities like mine and create sustainable equity through marketing and advertising.