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WORLDWIDE
academia fosters intellectualism, and it doesn't always have to be so "serious."
I’ve been a Swiftie (Taylor Swift fan) for as long as I can remember. I recall being around nine years old when she started getting big and being on award shows, and I would watch admiringly from the couch. My tip-toe dancing to avoid getting splinters from the front porch of my old house extends even further into my childhood. I wrote a biography about Taylor Swift in elementary school and again in middle school language arts because I loved taking the opportunity to lean on my interests. Her music has truly been an integral part of my adolescent/adulthood development and identity, and her vast and growing catalogue of music, experiences, and impact has provided me with plentiful material to lean on throughout my academic endeavors– as both content and comfort. But, coming into college, I wasn’t sure if integrating this non-inherently academic passion would be feasible, acceptable, or taken seriously.
One of my very first big projects in college was for LEAD 100, which I took during my first quarter at the UW. In this course, we read and analyzed John P. Dugan’s text “Leadership Theory: Cultivating Critical Perspectives” to gain a comprehensive understanding of twenty different leadership theories, develop deconstruction and reconstruction tools that acknowledge and ameliorate systemic issues within the theories, and advance society toward a more just world. This assignment required us to integrate the theories that resonated with us most into our own models of leadership to represent who we are, or who we want to be, as leaders. I remember feeling stuck and uninspired until I indulged in my creativity and considered how I could align the different leadership styles we were learning to Taylor Swift's albums. The feedback I received on this assignment was overwhelmingly positive and reassuring, and it was this experience that helped me realize it is not only possible to incorporate personal interests and areas of knowledge into academics, but it is creatively challenging, stimulating, and intrinsically motivating.
Enlightened with this newfound knowledge, I continued exploring ways to embrace my Swiftie-self in academics. In my second year, I wrote one of my favorite papers ever in an Honors class called “What is Time?” about the types of temporalities one might experience through attending the Eras Tour. I explored how different senses and perceptions of time were central to the Eras Tour experience, from presentness to nostalgia. This was especially important to me as I had attended one of the Seattle shows the summer before, so I engaged with this paper in a much deeper way than simply an assignment I had to get done; I found it slowly becoming an expression of myself and my experiences narrated through the lens of interdisciplinarity.
Additional papers and projects I've been able to sprinkle my Swift-isms into include:
I was a Residential Adviser (RA) my junior year, and one of the many responsibilities I was tasked with included creating and maintaining a floor theme. Unsurprisingly, when I was given permission to turn the 5th floor into a tasteful Taylor Swift experience, I poured my time, energy, and heart into creating an environment that was both a space that felt inviting and meaningful to me, but also one that could appeal and be welcoming to others. Each floor represented a different era– debut through The Tortured Poets Department (the most recent at the time)-- and each era was centered around a lyric that was reminiscent of the college-age, change, growth, and/or community. Some of my favorites included:
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Trying to find a place in this world
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In this moment now, capture it, remember it
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Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you
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You’re on your own kind, yeah you can face this
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The future’s bright, dazzling
Not only did I receive feedback from my residents and community members themselves about their appreciation for my floor, but I posted my work to TikTok where 42.4k people viewed and nearly 9,000 liked my post. External validation, I have learned, is not the best motivator; however, at the time, to have created something I was immensely proud of and to be so seen for it made me realize how powerful and beautiful it is to be a Taylor Swift fan and to have inherent community and connection because of it.
This is not a comprehensive list as I am sure I’ve snuck Taylor Swift into my UW experience in less extricable ways– such as tucking my identity as a Swiftie into my biography when I earned the Junior President’s Medalist award. Nonetheless, these samples provide a good representation of the breadth and depth in which I managed to creatively, interdisciplinarily, and experientially make Taylor Swift a relevant reference to me. These odes to Swift represent the creativity and connection that I have found to be possible when exploring innovative ways of thinking. This perspective has enabled me to conceptualize my courses and experiences in leadership, social sciences, and psychology through the lens of art and pop culture. I’ve been able to expand my view to broader sociological and cultural perspectives in ways that my courses and roles haven’t always explicitly outlined as outcomes and because I was able to truly make these assignments my own, it helped me engage deeper and value them more; they weren’t just tasks I had to do, they were projects I wanted to do.
I’ve always been intrigued by this Taylor Swift quote: "I wanna be defined by the things that I love– not the things I hate, not the things I'm afraid of, not the things that haunt me in the middle of the night. I just think that you are what you love."
I have found myself coming back to yet feeling detached from it– as if hesitant to suggest its resonance may be perceived as me understanding that I know who I am. If we are who we love, then we are something– we must be. The recognition that, perhaps, this may not be the tangible, knowingness that I once thought it was– that I wouldn’t wake up one day and suddenly know all of the intricacies of my own character and person– has been a slow-developing and intimidating realization. However, through this Swiftie-lens of interrogation and introspection, I have come to understand that I am a product of the people, places, experiences, and passions that I love. That I have loved. That I will love. All of these versions of myself build upon each other and though there are elements that adapt upon reflection, no longer serve me, or are proximally less important than they once were, there are also parts that have remained thorough-lines and that I foresee always being a part of me.
Taylor Swift has remained a constant in all of these foundational phases and life stages– from my elementary school self to the pre-teen who thought she had it figured out to the adult who knows she never will. I want to be defined by the things that I love, and being a Swiftie is one way in which I’ve done that– through life, identity, and even academia. I think maybe more than anything else, this exemplifies my determination to make what I do capture what is meaningful to me– to put as much of myself into what I create.
