Shillington Scholarship Application Video Transcript

 Hi, I’m Olivia Blinn, and I’m applying for the Shillington half scholarship. I love design because, ultimately, I love storytelling. I believe that it’s a fundamental part of our existence and how we understand and move through the world. Design is an incredible tool through which we communicate stories.

I’ve been a humanitarian relief worker for the last five years, working in seven countries on five continents. I’d love to tell you a story about that, that’s really led me to where I am today.

In the fall of 2015, I was working in Greece during the European refugee crisis, as refugees were coming over on boats from Turkey. I was on the island of Chios, where I met a family from Mosul, Iraq. They had fled Mosul the year before, when the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, came into the city. There was two brothers, one of whom had worked for the U.S. Army, the other was a police officer — both pretty immediate targets for ISIS. So, they had made the decision to pack up their families and get out of Iraq. They spent a year in Turkey, but they didn’t receive any humanitarian assistance, so they decided to make the dangerous journey from Turkey to Greece. They really had nothing with them, except the clothes on their backs — their kids, their parents, their siblings were all with them — and that was all they had. To many, they would be the “lucky ones” for having escaped such a difficult situation in Mosul.

Just over a year after that, I boarded a plane to Iraq. I’d been hired to work at an emergency field hospital outside of Mosul, during the battle between the Iraqi security forces and the Islamic State. Our hospital had been open just about a week, when a family came in who had been in an explosion — parents and two kids. As I got into the ER, I was trying to make sense of what was happening, and I just see the father — his face is peppered with shrapnel wounds — and he just keeps screaming “my baby, my baby, my baby!” over and over again. As someone who was in charge of data at the time, I get asked if we have a death certificate. It’s then that I learn that we have to tell this father that his six-month-old baby has died. His wife goes on to lose her arm and her opposite leg, and their toddler had to be transferred to a hospital about an hour away, unaccompanied, because they had a head injury that couldn’t be dealt with in our hospital.

I thought about that family, and I thought about the family I’d met the year before, and I wondered who was “lucky,” if that was even a word we would use to describe the situation. As you can tell, this story has stuck with me and has stayed with me. And I believe that they’re important, they’re important stories to tell. As someone who has a background in journalism and photography and mathematics, the way I’ve made my way into aid work has largely been through data management. And I believe that numbers are incredible, because numbers tell stories, as well. There are stories of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, all over the world, who are struggling, and I want to use design to tell their stories — to make those situations known, more noticeable, to really do a lot of data visualization.

I think Shillington is the perfect place for me to learn how to do that. If there’s anything that I’ve learned from disaster relief, it’s that I love intensity, very much — it’s a work hard kind of situation where you go full-force until the work is done. I believe intensive-style is incredible. I’ve also just finished up a Masters degree in International Disaster Management, so you could say that I’m a master of disaster. I’m no stranger to hard work, certainly.

But as well, I learned once from a former boss that one of the best ways we can approach our work is to take our work very seriously, and not to take ourselves too seriously. So that’s an attitude I’ve really tried to take on. Even the quote behind me, that I made a number of years ago, that’s traveled with me says that, “I wake up every morning determined both to change the world and have one hell of a good time.” That’s largely what I’m looking to do in those things.

And why me? Why should you pick me? Well, I’ll be honest, quite frankly, war zones don’t always pay well. It may come as a surprise. But more importantly, I’ve actually looked at the Shillington program since 2016 — looked again and again and considered it, and tried to figure out how I could make it work. And for the first time, this would really be able to make my dream a reality — to learn new skills, as well as continue in a career path that I love and want to take on kind of a new role within that. I already have a trajectory and I just need a few more skills in the toolbelt to be able to get where I want to go. And I know that Shillington could help me get there.

As well as, I quite frankly, have a lot experience an ambassador, and I think that’s a huge part of Shillington, is students that are speaking out and graduates, telling their stories. Because that’s how I first learned about the program, as well, was through a friend who shared about his experience. And so that’s actually something I have a lot of experience with — I’ve been an ambassador in my undergraduate program. As well as, external relations have been a huge part of my job. As well, being able to tell stories and communicate in a whole bunch of different mediums. So, I really look forward to, hopefully, joining the team. I believe that I come with a lot of interesting experiences previously and have a lot to contribute, as well as, I know there’s so, so much that I would learn. It would be an incredible beneficial experience for me. In that, I think it would definitely be a mutually beneficial experience if you were to pick me.

Thank you so much for your time.