thinking out loud

I’m a curious 17-year-old from BC, Canada.

@selinjessa · selinjessa{at}gmail{dot}com

I like interdisciplinary projects, especially those at the intersection of science, art, and technology and tending toward social change. I care deeply about empathy, making things, learning, being outside, and leaving the world better than I found it.

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This is an idea of the topography of my life recently and currently:

I’m happily immersed in research projects right now, thinking about resilience and sustainability, and exploring how some people naturally control HIV.

I spend much time thinking about how communities can support youth and how youth can give to our communities, and I do what I can to create safe and rich spaces for youth to explore these ideas. We Are Family Foundation brought together teenagers from around the world to work towards peace last March, and I’m honoured to be among them.

In December of 2011 I travelled to Antarctica on a youth expedition with Students on Ice. That’s the trip in a nutshell, but it doesn’t quite capture how deeply it impacted me - so I’m writing about it. My trip writing has trailed off, but only because I’m still not sure how to capture it, how to express it. I will keep trying; I’m striving for some sort of cross between the kind of stories exchanged around campfires and a deep map.

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Here’s a collection of my writing. I’ve given a couple talks on my thoughts on the environment, this one about the most powerful moments of my trip, and this one about what the ice taught me about oceans and interconnectedness. (Sound quality’s not so great on the latter, I know… I think I’ll post a transcript sometime.) I’m borrowing Alex’s disclaimer, for both this blog and those talks, that “my thoughts and opinions change from time to time… I consider this a necessary consequence of having an open mind.”

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I keep a commonplace book of sorts over here, dog-ear bits of the Internet over here, and occasionally share notes from books I’ve read over here. Twitter home is here, and you can send me emails here.