Zohreen Badruddin

SFS ’14
Age: 22
Hometown: Vaucersson, France
Major: International Political Economy

Do you feel obliged to be busy at Georgetown?
I personally enjoy being busy, so the natural environment at Georgetown lends itself to that, so it works well. You don’t have to be, but it seems like everyone is.

What do you do on campus and for fun?
I’m involved with the International Relations Club and Innovis Solutions, a socially minded entrepreneurship and consulting club on campus. It just got incorporated so now we’re a business, which is exciting. I do a lot of D.C. Reads and a couple things with the South Asian Society. In my free time I sing, I read excessively and I spend fair amounts of time wandering around D.C. And I teach religious classes for our community in Falls Church.

What are you writing a thesis on?
The correlation between corporate tax policy and level of innovation. There’s a big debate in Europe at the moment: What can governments do to encourage investment and job growth? Innovation is more what governments want but it’s harder to measure. It’s good for both the politics and economics sides of degree.

My favorite thing is the people. You do have people here who have lived in so many countries and come from so many different family backgrounds. While in general Georgetown has a certain profile and many students here are very privileged, I don’t think that that’s a limiting factor, and just looking at the number of countries students study abroad in, different majors, there’s always something different you can talk about with people. When you start talking, there’s always a topic you can have a fun and intelligent conversation about.

You claim you’re good at breaking out of the Georgetown bubble. What is your advice to those who have difficulty?
Force yourself. It’s the biggest thing. Especially as a senior I’m making myself get out and see things when I have the opportunity. We all can very easily say, “No, I have work.” I really should have been spending this weekend on my thesis but I spent most of Saturday at the Japanese food festival, part of the Cherry Blossom Festival. There was such awesome food. You have to take advantage of every chance you have. RAs and different club leaders sometimes give out free or subsidized tickets. I went to the Cherry Tree Massacre with free tickets, the Japanese street festival was free, I went ice skating at the Georgetown Waterfront for free this year. There are just a lot of events that clubs host and they want you to go to them. It’s a question of realizing that I’m going to have a great time and that it’s worth the time that I won’t honestly be spending working. As the years have gone by I’ve done more fun activities and more going for a walk around Dupont, not rushing from one place to another even when I’m off campus.

What’s your favorite class you’ve taken at Georgetown?
“The Islamic World.” It’s a great course because Jonathan Brown is a great professor. He’s really dynamic and engaging. More than that, it’s not just about Islam or the Middle East. It’s so much bigger than anyone going into the course would imagine. Even I, as a Muslim, learned so much about my religion and about so many people around the world. Professor Brown has traveled to so many countries that it’s an eye opener in terms of what you thought you knew about different regions but realized you actually had a very minimal understanding of.

How did you pick Georgetown?
I heard about Georgetown at the end of tenth grade — overseas Georgetown traveled to different schools around Europe and stopped by my school. The person presenting talked about the SFS and I had been doing Model U.N. since seventh grade. I saw IPEC as a degree and decided that’s what I wanted to do, being a tenth grader and not realizing how difficult the college process is. Georgetown was always my first choice and I was lucky that everything fell into place. I was looking between the U.S. and U.K. I didn’t want to say in France because I wanted to get out and live on my own. I wasn’t looking at that many places in the U.S., but D.C. was definitely one of them because it’s a capital city — which for IPEC is brilliant — and it has an international airport.

Where are you from? Compare and contrast it to Georgetown. Where are you more comfortable?
The biggest difference between here and Paris is the variation in types of people that you’re surrounded by. I did live in the U.S. — I was born in Chicago and lived there until I was 12 — and then I went to American school in France where most kids were international. The biggest difference here was that as diverse as experiences are of Americans, there are certain things that people are not as aware of, and it depends on the type of people. They’re much more aware of U.S. politics, what’s on U.S. media, what’s going on with U.S. celebrities, unless you’re with a group of international friends you don’t necessarily have the conversations as I did with my friends in high school. Here, it’s mundane. You ask what people are doing for vacation and people would just be going home. In France, just because countries are much closer to each other, people go to another country for just a week, which is not something you hear here as much. For us it never was a big deal. From where I live, Belgium is a three-hour drive and it’s not as exciting as people think it is. You’re still stuck in a car for a period of time. It’s just that the focus is a little bit different, and America, in terms of geographic space, is so much larger. In terms of culture, it has a much larger global impact that people give it credit for. Here naturally people know more about America than they do about what’s going on everywhere else — depending on who you’re talking to of course.

If you could lead a protest on one thing, what would it be?
Probably the misuse of terminology in the media, which you couldn’t really protest, but that’s one thing that really bothers me. Having grown up hearing a lot of Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-Sharia rhetoric, it’s not just in those cases, but in general the way the media deals with different cultures and things you’re not aware of. The media misuses terms and phrases without understanding their full meaning before broadcasting; the misinformation that goes through media is frustrating.

What’s a D.C. bucket list item you have yet to cross off?
I haven’t gone to Eastern Market yet. That’s one of the big ones that has been nagging in the back of my head that I need to go do. And of course all the Georgetown ones like running through the fountain — I haven’t done those. The seniors will be doing them in the next month so I’ll get them done.

Interview by Braden McDonald