“I was the most delinquent Key Club member ever,” she laughs.
When she arrived at Harvard, Eskander participated in the service-oriented Freshman Urban Program (FUP). She also served as a FUP leader at the start of her senior year. At FUP she says she learned that service is a two-way street.
“I kind of had it all wrong,” she says. “I thought I knew so much more than other people who are less privileged,” she says.
If it were not for FUP, she says, she might have gone about community service “from an arrogant standpoint.”
TUNES OF CHANGE
Next year Eskander plans to combine her love of service with a passion for music.
She will travel to South Africa on a Rockefeller fellowship in order to teach music as a tool for change.
Eskander has performed in the Kuumba singing group for four years and served on its 10-member board for two.
She had an interest in combining education and African music, but her proposal crystallized when a tutor in Pforzheimer House told her about a school choir in a township near Cape Town.
Her work in South Africa may even serve to solidify her career plans. She came to college planning to be a doctor and concentrated in biology, completing a senior thesis on Alzheimer’s drugs.
But during her time at Harvard, Eskander questioned her choice to study medicine and took classes in many other fields.
“What frustrated me is that I couldn’t apply biology to my life,” she says. “I had it all figured out, ever since high school, but slowly realized that [medicine] was perhaps too rigid a path for me.”
While in Africa, she will pursue her interest in health care creatively, and has considered encouraging students to sing for people with AIDS or lobby the government through music.
Despite her ideas, she says she wants to learn from the students and help them use music to achieve their own goals.
“It’s one thing to sing protest music here in America,” she says, “and another to sing it in a place where it has affected people’s lives.”
—Staff writer Claire A. Pasternack can be reached at cpastern@fas.harvard.edu.