Student body president to deliver speech at UCLA commencement

"Actions speak louder than words. You need to do as much as you say you are going to do. Never do anything you won't be proud of," says Homaira Hosseini, a political science major and UCLA's student body president, who was recently selected as the student speaker for the UCLA College of Letters and Science graduation ceremony, to be held at Pauley Pavilion on Friday, June 12.

 

Hosseini knows her words might sound like clichés, but she stands by them. She adds that during her year as president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, she has completed everything on the platform on which she campaigned — and then some.

 

You might say bold, decisive action is in her blood. When Hosseini was just 2 years old, Soviet troops invaded her native Afghanistan and imprisoned her father, who was a justice of the nation's highest court. Her father escaped and the family fled to India, then on to the United States when she was 4. They settled in Fremont, Calif., a Bay Area community with the largest Afghan population of any U.S. city.

 

Although Hosseini says she experienced the indignation of poverty, culture shock, discrimination and disempowerment by language barriers, she gained an early appreciation of the hardships her family had escaped and a desire to help those left behind.

 

In 1994, at the age of 7, she returned to Afghanistan to visit family. There she witnessed the devastation of war and visited a refugee camp, a Taliban-controlled school and an excavated mass grave of skulls and bones.

 

"I learned very early on that I was destined to aid people afflicted by the scourge of conflict and injustice," she said. "As a victim of war, I knew that I held sole responsibility for my success in life."

 

Hosseini says her experience traveling back to Afghanistan has continued to be her source of motivation throughout her life pursuits in education and community service and her commitment to being an architect of positive change.

 

In Fremont, Hosseini became a youth coordinator for the nonprofit Afghan Coalition, working to empower her community domestically while providing much-needed humanitarian assistance abroad. She organized fundraisers that collected $60,000 to send blankets and other aid to Afghan women and children left to fend for themselves in their war-torn country.

 

At UCLA, she helped coordinate the first "Thinking Globally, Acting Locally" conference, which focused on raising student awareness about international poverty and oppression.

 

She has also been deeply involved in student-initiated community service programs at UCLA, including the Incarcerated Youth Tutorial Program and Mentoring for Academic and Peer Support, a program through which she provides academic guidance and personal support to students at Jordan High School in Watts.

 

Hosseini also helped establish a program pairing underclassmen with upperclassmen mentors at UCLA. As student body president, she has sought avenues to help students who are disadvantaged and give students a voice.

 

Her key achievements have been developing a tuition installment plan for students, a program that will likely go into effect next year; establishing Bruins in the City, which works with the city of Los Angeles to place students on city commissions; and organizing the first BruINTENT event to raise student awareness about homelessness in Los Angeles, and even on the UCLA campus.

  

For all her accomplishments, Hosseini isn't one to rest on her laurels, and she will be advising her classmates accordingly in her commencement address.

 

"The titles we have at UCLA mean nothing in the outside world, but UCLA is a microcosm of society, and I want to express to students that our experiences here are connected to what's out there," she said. "We are the first graduating class to have an African American president. What are we going to work on? We are going to be the class that does what? I want my fellow classmates to think about that as they approach this new segment of their lives."

 

As for Hosseini's immediate plans after graduation, she has been selected to participate in the prestigious Coro Fellow leadership training program close to home in San Francisco next year. She eventually plans to attend law and public policy school.

 

UCLA is California's largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university's 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer more than 323 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Four alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

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