It has been a privilege to interview Rahael Borchers, this week’s Campus Celebrity.
Despite this appropriate accolade, she may be the most humble young lady I have ever met. Bring up EPIC (Ending Poverty in Charlotte), one of two campus groups for which Rahael serves as co-president, and she warmly describes her passion for hosting and hanging out with our homeless neighbors from Urban Ministry of Charlotte. Minutes pass while she enthusiastically explains the NC congressional Democratic candidate campaign she will support as the co-president of the College Democrats. Her face lights up and a smile breaks across her face when I ask her about the Westminster Fellowship at DCPC, where she attends a weekly Bible study and works as a youth mentor.
Yet she refuses to take any credit for her contributions to these organizations. She sees every position as an opportunity to grow; she describes her extracurriculars with gratitude and without a tinge of pride. Did I mention she’s also a Belk Scholar? Those familiar with this lovely lady will understand that it is with total sincerity that she resisted my initial request to include that tidbit in this article. She doesn’t want to distinguish herself from the myriad of equally impressive and talented students on this campus.
A junior political science major with a concentration in international studies, Rahael is certainly familiar with the basement of E. H. Little Library, but she also manages to maintain rapport with a sizeable group of students, staff and faculty. Rahael’s hobbies include discovering new people and cultures, cuddling in her mother’s lap, keeping current with the news – she listens to the BBC News podcast while getting ready for class in the mornings – and soaking in sunshine whenever possible. I inquired about her decision to attend Davidson, and she launched into what I recognized as a familiar, though clearly unrehearsed, response: she relishes being a part of the diverse, nurturing community of students on our campus, and she will happily indulge anyone in a discussion of our revered Honor Code. She eloquently says, “At Davidson, we hold together two values that are too often in tension – academic excellence and strength of integrity; here, I love that students hold them both at the same time.”
Family is incredibly important to our Californian Campus Celebrity. The ostensible affection and warmth in her voice when she speaks of her younger sister Sara, a first year student at Wake Forest University, hints at the years they’ve spent teasing and encouraging each other. They enjoy spending summers visiting relatives in Maryland, India and Germany. During this past spring break, Rahael flew solo across the Atlantic to spend a week with her paternal, German grandmother, whom she hadn’t seen in almost three years. The language barrier is only a small hurdle for this multilingual traveler, who speaks Spanish and English fluently, understands conversational German, and wishes she knew more of her mother tongue, Malayalam.
Over the past two years, her family has grown to include familial figures on Davidson’s campus. I was one of a very diverse group of people whom Rahael invited to last year’s Fall Convocation, where she was awarded the Goodwin-Exxon Award for her exemplary displays of character, sportsmanship, friendliness and consideration for others. Other attendees included her freshman roommate, her professor and mentor, Dr. Wertheimer, Gardner Ligo and Edith Boltman, an employee at the Lula Bell Houston Laundromat whom Rahael admires and has become quite close with on campus.
Outside of the “Davidson Bubble,” Rahael has spent time exploring national and international politics through summer programming and her journeys abroad. As a student in Davidson’s 2013 summer program in Washington D.C., Rahael hopped around D.C. as an intern for Locke Lord, a lobbying and law firm whose main client at the time was Pakistan. Her favorite moments included piecing together parts of Benazir Bhutto’s life and getting soaked in a flash flood while delivering newsletters to congressional offices. It might also be of interest that she smiled and maintained sustained eye contact with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel outside a congressional building, and she nearly collided with Ryan Gosling leaving class one afternoon.
While spending her fall semester in Chile, Rahael collaborated with her advisor, Davidson political science professor Dr. Crandall, to write a piece on the recent Chilean presidential and congressional elections. Their article was recently published in foreign policy magazine The American Interest.
This ray of sunshine on Davidson’s campus can’t be summed up in just a few paragraphs, but she’d love nothing more than to talk with a potential new friend about her activities on campus, her adventures abroad or her passion for Commons’s winter squash lemongrass coconut soup. Go ahead – make her day.