Q: Tell me about your semester in Morocco.
A: I studied at Mohammed V University, which is the big university in Rabat. There were nine of us on the program — seven from Vassar and two others. We were placed with host families all around the city, so I think everybody had very different experiences, which is instructive in itself, because you can’t just categorize “the Moroccan family” and expect that to mean something. My family had four kids; I shared a room with the 16-year-old daughter. I think the marriage was arranged; my host parents didn’t really talk all that much.

I don’t even know how to describe it. Rabat is the capital city. I don’t want to say cosmopolitan, because that carries certain connotations. We didn’t have hot water in the house, but we had a normal toilet, which was a good thing because other students lived in houses that had Turkish toilets, which is quite an experience, let me tell you. You can Google search that if you want to.

In most Moroccan cities, there’s something called the Medina, which just means “city” in Arabic. That’s the part of the city that existed before the French. Around it, or on one side of it, is the French city, which is now inhabited by Moroccans. And on the outskirts, there are shanty towns. I lived in an area called Hasan, which is part of what used to be the French quarter.

Q: Did you experience culture shock?
A: Oh, definitely. But once you get acclimated, it’s not as different as you might think. People ask me, for example, how women were treated in Morocco. When I first arrived, I tried to be an observer and not rush to judgment. I would look around, and there would be a lot of people wearing veils and scarves, and I didn’t really know what to make of it. But in the end, I came to the conclusion that a lot of it has to do with choice. In Morocco, standards of dress are not imposed by the government. Yeah, you’re going to get harassed if you dress a certain way. But some women see the veil as a protective garb, some see it as a religious expression, and some see it as a cultural expression and a source of pride.

There’s something called a jelaba, which is basically a coat with a hood, and both men and women wear them, but it’s more popular for women on a day-to-day basis. My host sisters would put jelabas over their jeans, just like a coat. Sometimes my sister wouldn’t wear a scarf to work, or sometimes she would throw a light one on. But my host mother always wore one that was very tightly wrapped whenever she left the house, and she always wore a jelaba. So it has to do with your generation and your family and different cultural choices.

Q: How did you get interested in journalism?
A: That was kind of a revelation I had when I was in Morocco. I spent time thinking about what I wanted to do after Vassar. I wanted to travel more. And at the same time, I was thinking about something I’d been studying — how do representations of “Morocco” differ from what I’m seeing right now? Before I went to Morocco, I thought I might want to do humanitarian work, but being there and interacting with Moroccans made me realize that I didn’t want to do that, because it felt kind of paternalistic. I would hear things on the news about people trying to “save” the Moroccans, and that reminded me a lot of the colonial and post colonial readings I had done, and I said, no, not for me.

But what I did like was the idea of journalism, the notion of other people’s voices speaking straight through to the reader. Of course, there are elements of representation in that as well, but I felt like it was the most direct way of letting people tell their own stories, and using my skills in language and writing to get those stories across. So that’s how I started working for the Misc.

Q: So before Morocco, you hadn’t really considered journalism?
A: Not really. I kind of lacked direction, to be totally honest. So I applied for the position of news editor. Big time commitment! It’s a pretty insane thing to do your senior year.

Q: How did you become interested in the Middle East?
A: I started taking Arabic my sophomore year because I wanted to take a language that I wouldn’t necessarily have an opportunity to take elsewhere. When you’re in high school, you can take French and Spanish and maybe Italian, maybe Latin. And I said, okay, I'm in college now — I’m going to take advantage of it and learn a different language. So I narrowed it down to Russian, Chinese, and Arabic, and settled on Arabic, not really knowing what I was getting myself into. It was also because I wanted to go abroad someplace cool, so I took Arabic, and then I went to Morocco. I also took a course called the Roots of the Palestine-Israel Conflict with Josh Schreier who ended up being my thesis advisor, and just got really into it.