Meet Sarah Meyerhoff!

Name: Sarah Meyerhoff

Year: 2014

Major: Political Science with a concentration in International Relations and Environmental Studies

Could you tell me about some of the things you do on campus?

I have done a few teaching and outreach related things. Over Winter Study, I did a class on Fortbuilding at Williamstown Elementary-that was so great! The kids would come in their pajamas. We were so exhausted at the end of the day. I also have helped out in the Youth Center, at Williamstown Elementary during the day, and in the Writing Workshop. 

Our Campus Celebrity last week, Rika Shabazz, mentioned taking part in your “Love Your Body” Project. Could you tell us how that project got started?

“Love Your Body” Project came out of a project that I did for Claiming Williams. Maria Cruz, the college campus nutritionist, wanted me to help her with a body consciousness photo project, and she wanted me to have it be a photo project and a discussion. I think coming into the project, she had the idea of having the project’s focus be more on weight and body type. However, it became clear when I started the project that that is not the only way people at Williams relate to their bodies. Even if people do think of their bodies in terms of their weight, it often intersects with other parts of their identity. People think about their weight in certain ways because they are a female, or because they are an athlete, or because they are black. There’s really no way of disentangling those different ways in which your identity relates to your body, and it was a bit frustrating because of that. I’m really glad I did it though because I met really wonderful people. It was a great, crazy experience-it all happened in three weeks. There was such a wide array of responses and things that people wanted to share and contribute. There were girls who came in who had struggled with eating disorders but then there were guys who had struggled being on a team and struggled about how their bodies look and whether they were a certain type of athlete. There were people who came in with tattoos, scars, and acne. Peer Health asked me if I would do it again and open it up.  

You were the photographer for the project; is photography something you did before coming to Williams?

I haven’t been able to do much photography while at Williams. However, I have taken a few drawing classes. One of the classes was “Creating Bodies,” which was about the figure in art. I’ve always been really interested in how bodies are portrayed in art, from an art history perspective and also seeing how people construct bodies through drawing. I’ve also been to a lot of figure drawing classes, so I’m really used to being around a lot of naked people in the art studio. I did a lot of photography in high school, and it just sort of came together that way. Photography has always been a hobby, and when I got to Williams it became something that kind of happens more at home. It was really great to back into the swing of it though. 

Since you’re a senior, it’s only natural that I ask you this. Do you know what your post-Williams plans are?   

Right now I don’t have any, which is a little stressful. I am from D.C and would love to go back because I’m interested in the policy world. I’m very much interested in development policy, but also where development policy intersects with climate policy and the climate justice type of work. I worked in the [Capitol] Hill a couple of summers ago and I have worked at a couple of think tanks that I would love to go back to. So we’ll see how it goes. 

You do a lot of teaching-related things on campus. Have you considered teaching as a possibility post-Williams?

It’s definitely something I thought about. I actually was talking to Teach for America for a while in the fall. For some reason though, it just didn’t feel quite right. I have spent a lot of time volunteering in the classroom in D.C. in my time off, and over Winter Study last year I got to teach at a school in Harlem, which was really great. I think part of why I leaned away from teaching is because after that experience I went to Uganda for a semester abroad and became more invested in development work than I already was. That’s where my heart is right now. I think I would love to teach on the side though.

What exactly did you do in Uganda?

I was in a development studies class, which is not necessarily development policy, but more an overarching thing that includes development politics, and development economics. It was more about the social and cultural implications of development efforts. We did a lot of contrasting local in-country development initiatives versus World Bank or IGO initiatives. We studied for half of the semester and then did independent research projects. I spent my second half of the semester researching the relationship between tribal conflict and oil development in the West, although I’m actually much more interested in food security and environmental policy. However, I was able to approach issues in a practical way, which I hadn’t really been able to do before. It was really useful to make some of these concepts I was learning about less abstract and look at how they actually happen on the ground. 

Do you have any piece of advice you wish you had been given?

I think this happens for anyone that goes abroad, and I don’t want to sound like, “I went to Africa and discovered myself,” but I think when you’re in a space for a limited amount of time, you learn to make decisions about what to do with that time. You also learn to listen to what you want in a way that I hadn’t learned before. Even being at Williams for a few years, I really don’t think I had learned to listen to what I actually wanted out of myself, out of my school, and out of my friends. I came back to Williams really excited because I realized what I did want, but also a little disappointed because I realized that there were a lot of friendships that I had built that I wasn’t really being enriched by. It’s hard to say “figure out what you want and chase after it” because that’s sort of what college is about-learning to listen to yourself. However, I think the sooner you can develop that ability and activate it, the better, because there are things that I feel I kind of missed out on here.