A first-year student at Explo, Asma has already made waves in the community. As an Explo TED speaker, Asma recently challenged her peers to take an active role in stopping oppression. Besides her interest in medicine and ensuring equality for all, Asma is a cross-country runner, an avid reader, and a caretaker of her younger siblings.
Unlike many people who have a fear of it, I actually love public speaking. I'm usually Explo's newscaster during Community Meetings each week, but yesterday, I was able to give a TED talk about oppression instead. I spoke about how oppression can be found anywhere; from bullying at school to genocides across the world, and I challenged others to be more aware of ways we can stop oppression close to home. It was an incredible experience and at the end, I got a standing ovation.
My biggest dream is to become a doctor when I'm older, and I think Explo is helping me prepare for my goal. My Medical Careers course really shows me some of the everyday things that a doctor does. Like today in class, we're engineering devices that can control blood clots. We're tying little loops to make a flower structure so blood clots don't get through the device and so we can stop the blood clot. In the past week, learned how to triage, we dissected a fetal pig, and even got to see the inside of a body! The things we learn are really pretty amazing and have helped encourage me to pursue my dreams.
I think that an awareness of oppression throughout the world will be so useful to me as a doctor in the future. I've heard stories from my own family about being put down because of race and oppression in the work environment, so I am determined to not let that happen to me and make sure that does not happen to my patients in the future. At some point, I would love to go work at a clinic in another country to provide service to people in need.
Explo is so effective because it is a lot more hands-on than school. The best thing about Explo is that I get to do so many activities that I've never done before. It's not just a strict focus on one thing; I get to jump from learning about medicine, to leadership, to playing water polo and canoeing for the first time. I get to explore a lot of subjects for the first time and try so many new things that I never had a chance to do back home, there's really no where else like Explo.
Jaryd Frankel