KATHARINA OBSER, ADVOCATING FOR A BETTER WORLD
CURRENT POSITION: Senior Policy Advisor at Women's Refugee Commission
LOCATION: Washington, D.C.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN DEGREE: BA in Political Science and French
GRADUATION YEAR: 2006
ACTIVITIES AT MICHIGAN: Michigan Pops Orchestra, Campus Band and Campus Philharmonia Orchestra, Michigan in Washington program, Sigma Iota Rho
MICHIGAN POPS ORCHESTRA INSTRUMENT: Flute
Listen to one of Kat's favorite Pops pieces while reading about her Pops Life!
A CONVERSATION WITH KAT
KELLY COMPTON, our Pops Life correspondent, chats with Katharina about finding her voice and passion in advocacy, and embracing the lifelong friends she has made along the way
KC: Would you mind telling me a bit about your musical background before coming to Michigan?
KO: I played flute starting in middle school and played all the way through high school. For a year I was active in marching band in high school. My school didn’t have an orchestra program, so being accepted to the Oakland Youth Orchestra really expanded my ability to play classical music, which I loved.
KC: Once you got to Michigan, what drew you to the Michigan Pops Orchestra?
KO: When I was a senior in high school, I visited a friend who had been a year above me (so he was a freshman at Michigan at the time). He lived in South Quad, and someone on his floor had a Pops poster on his dorm room door. That was the first time I ever heard about Pops. When I finally got to Michigan myself, I was very excited about the possibility of joining the orchestra. But when I showed up for the audition, there were a lot of flute players auditioning for just one or two spots, so I did not get in until my sophomore year. I think that was a time when Pops was starting to get more interest than the orchestra had capacity for!
KC: Tell me about your experience with Pops, and share some favorite memories!
KO: Pops was my refuge; it was this place where for two hours at the end of a weekend you could just be with a bunch of wonderful people making wonderful music together. It was amazing for me to be able to use a different part of my brain separate from studying each week. The friends I’ve made in Pops continue to be my very best friends, and we’ve shared so many ordinary and extraordinary moments together, from walks through the Arb and late night shenanigans while we were still in college to big life events in the years since.
KC: What have you been up to since graduating from Michigan?
KO: I work on immigration and asylum and refugee policy in the United States. That means I research what’s going with how immigration laws and policies are affecting people seeking asylum or otherwise seeking protection here. I also do advocacy in Washington DC to try to improve those policies. I’ve been on this path since graduating; in my final semester at Michigan, I participated in a program that had just been created called “Michigan in Washington” – that allowed me to study and intern in Washington DC. I had an internship with a human rights organization that also works on asylum issues. When my semester was over and I was graduating, they happened to have a position open. I had no expectation that things would work out, but I applied and got the position! So I spent the first two years out of college with them. In that job, I was working directly with asylum-seekers who were here in the United States and applying for asylum. We worked with them to try to find an immigration lawyer who would take on their case. I then did a Masters degree in South Africa on migration and refugee issues. When I came back to the US, I had the opportunity to start working more directly on advocacy to improve and change U.S. policy, and that is basically how I got to where I am now.
Source: Women's Refugee Commission Facebook page
In between all of that, I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of personal travel, internationally and a fair bit on the U.S. West Coast. I love to run and spent a few years running a lot of races, including marathons in South Africa and New York, though I’m not sure I ever need to run another one.
When I had some time between leaving my first job and moving to South Africa, I spent a month working on the Obama campaign in 2008 in my hometown in Michigan, and then ended up traveling abroad for six weeks.
(Lesson learned: always take advantage of gaps between jobs, school, or projects, because you’ll never know when you have that amount of time again!)
KC: At this point, would you ever consider going to law school?
KO: I did consider it for a long time, but because I was able to get to where I am today without a law degree, I feel like I’m in the place where I’m supposed to be. The idea of taking that much time away from my job and the debt is a little scary at this point. That said, I’m one of the few people I know doing this work who is not a lawyer. There are many times when I wish I were, because I think lawyers have amazing superpowers, and there are things they can do that sometimes I can’t do. But there’s a lot I can do, and I love doing it! My masters degree is in a very relevant field and involved fieldwork that’s actually similar to the work I do today, in which I speak to migrants and asylum seekers, often in detention centers or near the border, to understand their experience.
KC: Do you feel that your professional experiences have been influenced by your involvement with the Pops?
KO: What I do is obviously not related to music making or the professional music industry, but I do think there’s a camaraderie, joy, and work ethic that I gained through Pops that has stayed with me throughout everything I’ve done.
KC: What projects have you felt the most passionate about in your line of work?
Click above to read a summary of Kat's report!
KO: A lot of what I do involves the issue of immigration detention, the practice by which a lot of immigrants in the United States are locked up while they’re going through their immigration process. I just helped to write and publish a report that looked at women who are seeking asylum in the United States and reviewed how they’re impacted by detention and what their experience with detention is like. We went to seven detention facilities for the report, and it was really powerful to detained individuals share what they’re going through and how U.S. policies impact them.
I’ve been to probably more than 20 detention centers at this point, meaning I’ve also traveled to some of the more remote parts of the United States. I’m hopeful that this topic continues to get a lot of attention, because it’s often a hidden issue of what’s happening in this country.
KC: What advice would you give to students interested in a similar career path?
KO: Try to get as much experience as possible working on the issues you’re passionate about and be creative about what that looks like. It doesn’t have to be in the form of a paid job; it can mean you volunteer with an NGO or another program in your area. That experience also doesn’t have to be in DC –working at a state or local level is incredibly important and can later be translated into working on policy at the national level. There are a lot of people who intern and volunteer throughout college, so it’s VERY important to get that experience as soon as possible, and stay in touch with those you meet along the way. The second thing that really struck me from the moment I graduated is to always work on writing skills.
KC: What does the Pops mean to you personally?
KO: The first word that came to mind when you said that was “family.” It’s where I’ve met so many of my close friends who I’ve stayed friends with for more than a decade. And it was a home for me. When I first graduated, some of my friends were a year or two younger than me and therefore still at Michigan, and I was living in DC, so it was lonely at times to be so far away from everyone I had known for the last few years. Reconnecting with my Pops friends by returning for concerts literally felt like I was going to my home. Even post-graduation Pops continued to expand my friendships; at the concerts that I returned for, I met a couple of Pops alums whom I had never overlapped with in Pops because they had graduated before me. Those are some of my closest friends now as well! Pops was a true family that has stayed with me for all of this time.
KAT'S FAVORITES
- MOVIES OF ALL TIME: Roman Holiday and Vertigo
- PARK: Far too many beautiful ones to count, but perhaps Rock Creek Park, which is my backyard, and North Cascades National Park in Washington
- EXPERIENCE OVERSEAS: Another category in which I'm so lucky to have so many to choose from. Hiking in the Drakensberg in South Africa holds a special place in my heart. So does spending three weeks learning Spanish and hiking around Cusco and Machu Picchu in Peru.
- RESTAURANT IN A2 AND WASHINGTON D.C.: Madras Masala in A2 (at least when I was studying there) and if I had to pick, Masala Art in Washington, DC.
- SOCIAL CAUSE: I work on immigration issues, and though I'm not a lawyer I've seen firsthand how crucial legal counsel is for so many who can't afford it. Ensuring that people who need it have legal assistance is really important to me.
- RACE THAT YOU'VE RUN: DC's Cherry Blossom Ten Miler is beautiful. The NYC Marathon is the most amazing race I've ever experienced.
- POPS PIECE: Songs from a New World 4/1/18