Upward Bound

By Kristine Breese

Published Apr 1, 2007 8:00 AM

Marwa Kaisey

"Out there it's like a microcosm of the world."

USAC president Kaisey chairs a lively student government meeting

Copyright ©Photo by Matt Black

Another student who crossed borders to get here is senior and current Undergraduate Students Association Council (USAC) president Marwa Kaisey. Born in Iraq, she and her family fled the country during the first Gulf War. "It's one of those dramatic stories," she admits. "We had to leave everything behind and start over. "We first moved to England and lived in three different cities in five years. We didn't find it very welcoming," she says. When Kaisey was 16, they moved to California, in part because, "we'd heard about the great university system, and we knew there were people here from all over the world." She attended high school in San Diego and arrived at UCLA in the fall of 2003.

"Don't you just love it?" she asks, waving her hand toward the window of her third-floor office in Kerckhoff Hall. "Out there it's like a microcosm of the world. It's not just in class that you learn, but on the floor of the residence hall, walking across campus. If you're open to it, you can learn about the world just by talking to the person next to you when you're in line at the student store."

In her third-floor Kerckhoff office, photos of past student body leaders keep her company. On the wall outside the office, a well-wisher has scrawled “Hi, Madame President!”

Copyright ©Photo by Matt Black

She laments that many of the school's multicultural events are attended only by people who look just like those up on stage performing. "It does seem sometimes like we just entertain ourselves," she says. "But I consider myself an honorary member of all the groups, and I try to attend as many different types of events as I can." Kaisey adds that as the school's (and maybe the UC's) first Arab — and also the first Muslim — student body president, she feels like not only a representative for USAC, but also an ambassador of sorts for the Middle East.

"Most people only think of Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and then they meet me and they can have maybe their first personal experience with someone who is Muslim or Arab," she says. "Because we're all so different, students at UCLA learn from each other like this all the time … and then we see that we're not that different after all."