Harvard College '12 (Eliot House)
AB, East Asian Studies
JD, Harvard Law School
Taylor’s decision to concentrate in East Asian Studies provided her with incredible opportunities to work closely with faculty on campus and abroad, and prompted inspiring and life-changing conversations. Taylor is currently back at Harvard as a law student, and plans to become a public defender in the United States. Her path to law school originated with her EAS concentration, and the cultural and linguistic studies she pursued as an undergrad continue to inform her legal education and advocacy.
[Since the time of this interview, Taylor earned her JD from Harvard Law School (2016), where she founded the Harvard Law School Student Mental Health Association. She has held multiple positions as a law practitioner, including with The Legal Aid Society and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. As of 2019, she is Staff Attorney at the Office of the Appellate Defender (OAD), one of New York City’s oldest providers of appellate representation to poor people convicted of felonies.]
Taylor initially chose to concentrate in East Asian Studies because she wanted to continue studying Mandarin, and the plan of study represented a compelling alternative to those in Government, Economics, or History and Literature (where most of her friends were declaring). Taylor was able to declare a secondary field in Neurobiology, take interdisciplinary classes covering a range of subjects, and check off concentration requirements along the way. She enrolled in classes taught by well-known China experts Roderick MacFarquhar, Bill Kirby, Michael Puett, and Peter Bol. Additionally, the EAS curriculum allowed Taylor to study abroad in Tokyo with Shigehisa Kuriyama, the Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History, and read East Asian religious texts with Ryuichi Abe, the Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions. Rowan Flad, a Harvard professor of anthropological archaeology, invited Taylor to join his archaeological team in Chengdu during her sophomore year, and she ended up taking his class on Chinese archaeology her senior year. These unforgettable experiences granted Taylor the chance to engage with faculty beyond the classroom.
Most important, for Taylor, the department’s flexibility enabled her to nominate Arthur Kleinman, in the Anthropology Department, as her senior thesis adviser. Dr. Kleinman’s mentorship during a summer of independent research in Shanghai, China, facilitated a project both difficult in undertaking and meaningful in scope. For her thesis, Taylor interviewed patients with depression about diagnosis and treatment. She counts that summer in Shanghai as one of the most challenging experiences she has faced, but also as one of the most rewarding.
Taylor quickly became passionate about mental health advocacy. Over the course of her thesis research in Shanghai, she learned how to listen to firsthand accounts of experiences with mental illness despite not being able to offer an immediate solution. While working for NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness) after graduation, she developed a deeper understanding of the serious difficulties people living with mental illnesses and trapped in the criminal justice system face. Taylor’s experience in Shanghai and the skillset she developed at NAMI continue to resonate in her career, and she even has the occasional chance to practice her Mandarin with a client.
The perspectives Taylor gained as an East Asian Studies concentrator, particularly regarding literature, language, and political and cultural history, remain immensely relevant to her current professional pursuits. Yet, in Taylor’s words, “What I appreciate most is the way people react to finding out I concentrated in East Asian Studies. Interviewers, supervisors, professors, and classmates say again and again: ‘Wow, that's so interesting! I wish I had done something like that. Tell me more!’