A Course That Changed My Understanding for the Better by Claire

A Course That Changed My Understanding for the Better by Claire - September 2021 Scholarship Essay

Sometimes the most influential beliefs you have are the subconscious ones. Those underlying biases, assumptions, and understandings of how the world works and your individual role within it, to name a few. As much as we can try to overcome these biases in an effort to move through life with a wider and more truthful lens, they can be hard to shake. So hard to shake that it takes being forced to see the world differently to realize your assumption was there in the first place, and to see just how wrong it was.
I was born in Stamford, Connecticut, a diverse, mid-size city 45 minutes from Manhattan. I went to a public school, in a middle-class family, but had the privilege of living in a city that had exposed me to people of different income levels, races, ethnicities, gender, and sexual identities. Going to Ohio State University in Columbus, I felt I was coming from an east coast city with an east coast city mindset, thinking I grew up as unshielded from the diversity of our country as could be. For a while, I thought I was right. The friends I made at Ohio State didn’t grow up going to the friend’s bar and bat mitzvahs, having their families favorite local eatery be from the Ethiopian restaurant downtown, or go to high school with students who relied on the state-funded breakfast and lunches as their only meals of the day.
Yet, In my junior year of college, I took a course called the “Sociology of Poverty”. I was almost done with obtaining my undergraduate degree in Criminology and Sociology, so topics addressing race and income issues in our country weren’t new to me. In this class, however, I was challenged not just in the coursework, but how every day I was taught something I didn’t know, and up until that point didn’t have to know and were uncomfortable to find out, about the reality of poverty in the United States. A large portion of our semester was focused on reading the book, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, which focused on the lives of the approximately one and a half million Americans who live on less than $2.00 a day. The authors discuss the importance of public benefit programs from those in this extreme income class, and the even more critical issue over cash assistance. It was the first time I was introduced to the term “social capital” and how houseless people who lack the social capital that implicitly teaches the rest of us about the importance of obtaining your high school diploma to enter the job market, much less the explicit instruction of how to write a resume or shop for what to wear in a job interview. The book, and the subsequent class discussions, put the term “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” in a new light, as I saw how impossible that is to do when you don’t have the “bootstraps” to pull up in the first place.
It exposed me to a world of poverty I truthfully assumed didn’t exist in the United States of America. Learning about this extremely impoverished population showed me I may have had a more sheltered upbringing than I thought. The class taught me that there is so much left to learn about the world around us, which may change your perspective of that world dramatically. It taught me that it’s easy to ignore these issues that you don’t think affect you, and sometimes you have to go out of your way to educate yourself about it (or are lucky enough to take the right college class). I walked away with the sense that I needed to use my privilege of coming from an average middle-class background, and all that comes with it, to continue my education and eventual career with those most at-risk populations in mind.
Four years later, I’m pursuing a law degree with a focus in public service law, and I credit much of my drive to work for the public to what I learned in that class all those years ago. It challenged and changed my understanding of what our country was and how much work there was to be done for extremely low-income communities, and I’m so thankful for it.

Works Cited

Edin, Kathryn J., and H. Luke Shaefer. $2.00 a Day Living on Almost Nothing in America. Mariner Books, 2016.