Hi potential Government concentrators! My name is Hana, and I am from Gaithersburg, Maryland, though I also spent some time growing up in Tokyo, Japan. I am a senior double concentrating in Government and Economics and I am so excited to be a PCC this year!
I chose to major in Government because I’ve always been fascinated by how public policy reflects—and reshapes—our beliefs about fairness, opportunity, and social mobility. My academic interests include comparative social policy, public education reform, and how narratives of meritocracy and justice shape attitudes toward redistribution. For my senior thesis, I’m exploring how students in the U.S. and U.K. evaluate the fairness of university admissions systems—particularly race-conscious affirmative action and race-neutral contextual admissions—through interviews and a cross-national survey experiment.
Outside of academics, I teach fitness classes at the MAC, volunteer at the Y2Y youth homeless shelter in the Square, help lead the IOP and Model Congress, and occasionally take air on WHRB 95.3FM. If not at any of those places, you’ll usually find me working on my thesis in Widener’s Loker Reading Room or convincing the baristas to put extra matcha in my drink at Cafe Gato Rojo. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to discuss the logistics of double concentrating, the joys of writing a thesis, or the wisdom I’ve gained through trial and error as a senior.