UC alumna picked for Pickering Fellowship

As a first-generation college student and American, Shaya is humbled to represent her family and UC as an award winner.

“I really have a lot of appreciation for my family during this time, because as the daughter of Iraqi immigrants, my parents didn’t go to college and my dad's a mailman,” explained Shaya. “Both of my sisters work in the State Department and paved the way for me to even know about opportunities like this. I feel grateful for my parents and the sacrifices they've made.”

For Jenny Hyest, director of Nationally Competitive Awards, Shaya’s application was a distinct match for the Pickering Fellowship.

“Sometimes a candidate comes along who is just a perfect fit for an award—and that was the case with Trinity and Pickering,” said Hyest. “Everything that Trinity has done—from her research on gender, sexual violence, and human trafficking to her work with refugees in Cyprus to her current service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia—has led to this, and we in NCA could not be more excited for Trinity. She will be a tremendous representative of the U.S. abroad through the Foreign Service.”

“It's important to give back. That was a strong part of my time at UC, especially as a Turner Scholar,” stated Shaya. “Community service is a key component of that program. UC does a really great job of making sure that people are global citizens and giving back to their community.”

In 2020, Shaya added another country to her roster by studying abroad in Thailand, although the program was ended abruptly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though the semester was cut short, Shaya detailed that her experiences at UC laid the groundwork for further global exploration.

“You learn so much within the classroom, but there's always going to be a component that doesn't fully connect or is just outside of classroom theory,” Shaya said. “You can't really experience the world unless you're living among different communities, seeing different people and experiencing other ways of life.”

After graduation in 2021, Shaya continued to pursue global experiences. Her first post-graduate position was an internship with Caritas Cyprus, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees.

While interning at Caritas Cyprus, Shaya assisted with intake forms for beneficiaries and explained their rights and obligations as asylum seekers. She additionally led weekly art classes, which offered constituents a unique point of connection.

“That experience really opened up my eyes to how migration is a form of trauma, and how many different vulnerabilities people can be exposed to just from the journey itself,” Shaya elaborated. “[The class] became a really beautiful, safe space for people to share their stories, share their experiences, share how they were feeling, and do all of that using art.”

In 2022, Shaya was accepted to the Peace Corps program and trained for several months to volunteer in Zambia, a country in southern Africa. She explained that the transition from training to embedding into the rural community was much larger than she expected.

“During pre-service training, the issues seem so black and white, like, this is how we can prevent malaria,” she added. “And then you actually get into these villages and you see how difficult flooding is from the rains and how that contributes to mosquitoes breeding. There's just so many other things that, until you're actually in a specific environment or with different groups of people, seeing their day to day realities and lives and geography, you're not able to connect how things interact with each other.”

Since her training, Shaya has been teaching sustainable health practices to combat malaria, malnutrition and other prevalent public health issues to rural villagers.

Image at top: Trinity Shaya graduated from UC in 2021. Photo/provided.