This week, we interviewed Zuhal Saljooki (she/her), a sophomore from Long Island concentrating in Computer Science. Read our interview below:

Do you remember your first day at Brown? What was the experience like?
My first day at Brown, moving in, was such a trip because I had been looking forward to that day essentially my whole life.

My entire family comes to move me in, all the other kids are with their moms and dads, and with me it was the whole setup. We had to borrow a mini van because I had so much stuff. As a first-gen low-income student, I had no conception of what it was like to live in a dorm or be in college so I overpacked a lot.

When my family left, I was on my own. My window was open and it was gorgeous and beautiful outside. But I was so confused on my first day.

What should I do first, do I take a shower? My first hour of freedom. I could hear the noises of everyone else outside, interacting. I remember being paranoid, thinking oh my god am I not going to make friends, is this what college is going to be like, am I just going to be in this room forever? I walked outside, and there was a circle of kids, so we all got dinner together.

Something you wish you could tell your freshman year self?
It’s okay to not finish things. You’re not a quitter if you leave something because you don’t like it. It doesn’t mean you’re a quitter, it means you’ve learned enough about something that you can make an informed decision.

I was an engineering concentrator my first year at Brown and I stuck with it because I thought it was what made a winner, but I was just making myself unhappy.

I’d also tell myself that Brown is not what you think it is. It’s not the cool liberal Ivy. It was not built for you — it was built for people who are not UFLi, not a person of color. It wasn’t built for me and I had to figure out how to go about Brown in my own way. I thought I was going to be much more supported. But there’s so much I had to face about myself, about the world, that I thought I’d known.

Favorite part of your concentration? What led you to it?
In my engineering classes, even among all those amazing minds and people, I was one of the only ones that would get a perfect score of close to perfect score on the computer science portion and tank the physics portion, so that decision kind of came on its own.

I was taking material science and CS17 my first semester of sophomore year. I hated every minute of material science and I would do my computer science homework as a way to procrastinate my material science homework.

I feel like in the CS department, they’re starting to make more moves for students with mental health issues. Now they’re also making more moves for UFLi students, and I just feel way more supported in the department.