Tawab Malekzad Bio Pic

Tawab Malekzad

UWC attended: From Lester B. Pearson UWC of the Pacific in Canada

I was born in Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan. I studied there for a while, but because of the political unrest, my family and I left Afghanistan and moved to Peshawar, Pakistan where I continued to study. We moved back to Kabul after September 11, 2001 and I continued my studies in one of the nearby schools and I graduated from high school in 2006. During my school years I was taking English courses.

I worked as a volunteer teacher for seven months in a Canadian-owned private kindergarten in Kabul, where I heard about the United World College program and especially about Lester B. Pearson United World College in Victoria, Canada.  I applied to the UWC system and was accepted in Lester B. Pearson UWC of the Pacific.

I had the most amazing years of my life at Lester B. Pearson. There, I met people from 100 different countries and I learned a great deal about my peers and their respective countries. Because Lester B. Pearson UWC was the first place that I lived by myself, I had some difficulties at the beginning, but I figured things out as time passed. At Lester B.  Pearson UWC I met the closest friends that I ever had in my life.

I actually did not know much about Lewis & Clark College before I applied. The very first time that I heard about L&C was from my friend Mihret Teklemichael (a Lester B. Pearson UWC graduate) on Facebook.  I started doing research about the college and I found out that it offered the courses that I wanted to study. I chose L&C because it, like the UWCs, embraces  and celebrates the idea of internationalism. Additionally, after living on the West Coast, I started loving its weather. 

I will try to be involved in community service and campus activities at Lewis & Clark as much as I can. I am thinking about double majoring in computer science and political science. My goal at Lewis & Clark is to make it an enjoyable place for me and the people around me and also to get a great education.