Michael Goodwin

SFS ’17
Age: 19
Hometown: Seattle, Wash.
Major: Undeclared

What do you hope to get out of Georgetown?
I think at the most basic level the reason you go to any college is to further your education and your career, but specifically for me I think [what] I really wanted to get out of coming to Georgetown was getting out of my comfort zone and coming to a whole new place and starting over with a whole new group of people. I love my friends back home; they mean the world to me, and I still keep in really close contact with them, but at the same time, I had gone to school with pretty much the same group of people since I was in kindergarten. And I felt like that was really important for me in terms of growing up, to come here and start everything new and have new experiences. So coming to Georgetown I wanted to try new things. There’s obviously a practical concern: Georgetown is a really good school, so that played a role, but I also wanted to be in a different environment and do my own thing.

And have you found things to be a lot different here?
I’ve found that people are all pretty similar deep down. There are some surface level differences in terms of what people wear and what kind of words they use, but at the end of the day, people are people, and I’ve made really good friends here. I really enjoy being here. I love the West Coast, and I’ll probably end up back there, but I’m glad I came here.

What has been your favorite class so far?
I would say my SFS proseminar. I was in a class about the political economy in China and it was really interesting. I had no background in China. It was me and mostly international students, a lot of them from Taiwan, China, Japan, the Philippines and that whole area, and I was probably one of three native born U.S. citizens, and it was really interesting and really engaging. I think the proseminar system is just a good set up: It allows you to delve into a specific topic with a specific group and setup and you build a relationship with a professor, and I just thought that class was really interesting.

Do you have any idea what you might want to do after Georgetown?
I have no idea career-wise. In terms of where I’ll end up or what I might be doing, at this point it’d be so speculative that I really can’t say. I’ve liked being here, but I do think I’ll end up back home, especially because Seattle has a really thriving jobs market in terms of young people finding good positions at strong companies. And that’s one of the reasons I came here. You can get a degree in anything and people will see that you went to Georgetown, and you can get a job doing anything regardless of what you majored in.

Have you ever consciously changed anything about your personality?
Not for more than five days, I’d say. There are always little things, but changes in personality come about more subtly than a conscious change. I’m a fairly self-aware person in terms of examining who I am, and I can tell I’ve changed over time. People change. Hopefully for the better. But in terms of consciously sitting down and saying “I’m going to change this about myself,” I’ve never done that, at least not effectively.

If you could lead a protest on any one thing, what would it be?
Right now, I would say one thing that I think is really important and is heading the wrong way is campaign contributions. That’s something that I think is headed in the wrong direction and none of us win. It shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It shouldn’t be us versus them. This should be clear. We shouldn’t allow money to unfairly influence the way our democracy works, and I feel like with the current Supreme Court decisions and the overall trend of things, that we’re headed the wrong direction and it’s a scary prospect for democracy as a whole.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned here so far?
How to start over. How to be your own person not knowing anybody and go out and seize the day, make new friends and find new opportunities.

What’s the best thing about Georgetown?
It’s that there is no monoculture. I think some people think there is; I hear some things like that; I think people get upset about that. But I come from a place that is very different because there is a lot of stigma about coming to the East Coast and the East Coast in general, but I don’t feel like it’s that pervasive. We have kids from all over the world, people from all different backgrounds, people who are Catholic, people who aren’t, people from all different economic backgrounds, and you get a really good sampling. If you get involved in enough things and try enough things and meet new people, you’re going to get a very ideologically diverse set of people.

And what could Georgetown do better?
I think there’s a lack of school camaraderie and spirit. Obviously it takes a uniting factor, and maybe that’s just my perspective because the basketball team wasn’t that good this year, so maybe we just have a skewed view this year, but there needs to be a greater sense of Georgetown pride. There could be more unity in that regard, but it’s by no means a debilitating problem.

Interview by Ben Germano