"As a Scholars in the Nation's Service Initiative (SINSI) graduate fellow, I’ll spend two years of the master’s program in rotations in the federal government. One of which I plan to do with the Department of Transportation. I'm hoping to keep moving my childhood passions up further and further. I first came to Princeton as an undergrad, majoring in history with a minor in Russian. I've always been really interested in history, but not as an end in itself. It’s easy to think of policy as something that exists only in the present and not something dependent on overcoming history and learning lessons from history. As an undergrad, I took a fantastic class on reconstruction after the Civil War. I found it amazing that it's an often-overlooked period in history. There were a lot of remarkable successes at overcoming racism in the immediate aftermath of the Confederacy and slavery. Successes that are overlooked because it is, in part, overshadowed by this horrible period in the country's history. People, especially in the policy sphere, tend to view history — and the dark parts of history, especially — as something that we're battling against or that we have to overcome. But it's worth noting that if the problems are in history, maybe the solutions are too.”