Grad's guide to graduate admissions essays - Colleen Reding 2015
Georgetown university - Communication, culture and technology
General graduate studies
Only 30 minutes have passed since our bus left the hotel in Seoul, but the view from my window is already losing the capital city’s vibrancy. The warm hues emanating from its electric skyline have given way to a steel-gray overcast; the neon spectrum of small stylish cars I’ve gotten accustomed to vanishes, and now convoys of armored infantry trucks stretch along lanes of the highway on both sides of us. Just beyond the barbed wire fences that line the road to Panmunjom, the vegetation abruptly stops, revealing the barren surface on the other side. There are no trees, our tour guide begins to explain, because the North Koreans have cut and burned them all for fuel.
My daytrip to the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea the summer after college was my own personal capstone to the semesters I had devoted to understanding the needs of postconflict societies. I had diced up the course catalog to assemble my own curriculum, debated in diplomacy simulations around the nation, and pored over international legal briefs with professors during their office hours. In the end, I graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service with an expert sensibility about transitional environments. Stories from Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan leapt off the pages as I studied the critical points where punishment met reconciliation and international law met local custom. Helping a society that had been torn apart by years of ethnic conflict find sustainable peace requires creative and comprehensive solutions, and I am fascinated and emboldened by the challenge.
Yet what I found in my visit to Korea was not the postconflict case study I had expected, but a vivid canvas of design and technology in action. My perspective as an international relations student was shifting, colored by the extensive portfolio I had built up as the primary graphic designer for more than 40 of Georgetown’s student-run events and organizations. Seoul’s marketplaces teemed with young artists eager to share their vision for Korea through their work. Elaborate monuments and memorials, rich with multimedia and digital art, beautifully captured Korea’s turbulent history and illustrated its steadfast hope that its two halves would become whole again. I photographed, sketched, and blogged every minute of my trip, ever-intrigued by Korea’s cutting-edge reinterpretation of its historical narrative. Through the experience, I discovered that this was an area where my own two halves—part artist, part analyst—could come together, too, and found myself back in DC a week later to explore that intersection. I never left.
It has been over a year since I returned to Georgetown as an alumnus, trading in my textbooks and term papers for a cubicle and project briefs. As the interactive communications manager for the Office of Advancement, I use web applications and social media to help Georgetown build its community beyond its campus. I have worked closely with designers, programmers, fundraisers, administrators, writers, and many others to help push Georgetown’s digital identity forward, and, in doing so, have been involved in projects from conception to coding. Though the technical skills I am developing have helped me make an impact at my alma mater, my dedication to learning about technology and its role in building community relates to serving the greater purpose I began to understand while in Korea. I believe that, with the right mentorship, I can make a transformative impact on communities in transition, and that learning from the world-class faculty and students in the Communication, Culture & Technology program at Georgetown will make this possible.