When I first heard Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. on the radio I remember getting shivers down my spine at the line, “And I’ll gladly stand up next to you / And defend her still today.” I was an eight year old Armenian immigrant who had recently moved to Brooklyn from Russia, and to me, that song did not have any political meaning or social impact. It just made me proud to be an American, even if at the time I did not really know what that meant.

My appreciation of the power of art and music came from my father. As a way of rebelling against the Soviet machine in the late 1980s, he spent his 20s in an underground rock band in Moscow. For my father, self-expression - or what little of it was allowed - was achieved through his music: the words, the beat, the rock and roll. At a time when music was heavily regulated for fear of spreading Western thought, my father’s band influenced young Muscovites to demand change. Unfortunately, he was not able to participate in that change. As conditions worsened for Armenians, my mother and I left for America as Armenian refugees, and my father came shortly after as a political asylum seeker. We came straight to New York, not knowing the language, the culture, or the people.

My father’s musical talent was inherited by my younger sister Emily, who was born soon after as a brilliant performer with a fearless voice. From the time she was five, she sang worldwide at competitions in the U.S., Spain and Italy. When I first saw her on stage, it shocked me how something so small could have the gall to get up in front of a huge crowd. When she sang, I felt the impact of every word. It was not necessarily the songs she sang that moved me, but the realization that a singing voice could be a portal into another world, revealing a person’s innermost feelings and emotions.

Unlike my sister, I grew up afraid of public performances. When I was younger, I was soft-spoken and shy. I did not speak English and I felt disoriented in my elementary school in Bay Ridge, where most of the children were upper middle class Italian Catholics. I was unable to connect with my peers linguistically or culturally. Unlike my sister, who was born and raised in the U.S., I was too afraid to turn to music as an artistic outlet for fear of being laughed at, ridiculed, or, quite simply, pronouncing a word wrong. Instead, I turned to the solitude of painting. Visual art allowed me to create my own world and find meaning within it. I submitted my work to contests and exhibits, and won local competitions.

As much fun as I had painting, however, I felt I was missing the element that my father and sister had in their music: the ability to provoke emotion and incite change. I was able to paint a town or a pretty flower, but I felt the aesthetics failed to communicate what I was thinking inside. In high school, things changed when I joined the debate team. At the time, this was a terrifying decision, but I knew there was more that I wanted to be and say than I could reflect in painting. Surprisingly, I thrived. Debate became the new artistic outlet for me: oral argument became my music and the auditorium my stage. Every time I got up in front of my audience, my stomach hurt, my knees would shake and my fears of mispronunciation resurfaced. But then I would summon the world that my sister and my father create when they perform, and my worries slowly disappeared. These debate practices – over topics such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the death penalty, or the International Criminal Court – bolstered the formative years of my adolescence and gave me a staple form of expression throughout college.

Perhaps my attraction to debate was inspired by my family’s history of oppression as Armenians living in Azerbaijan and Soviet Russia. Like my father, I too felt compelled to layer artistic expression with political meaning. However, the passions I channeled through debate were not abstract or lyrical like those of a song; rather, they were concrete and specific. After taking constitutional law classes at Hunter College, I found the tools I needed to explore the issues that I cared about. It was in my Women and the Law class where I first had the opportunity to make an oral argument in front of my class, defending the right to equal employment under the 14th Amendment. The thrill I got from answering impromptu questions from was unlike anything else in my academic career up until that point; I was not just arguing, I was participating in an age-old debate about society and constitutional law.

Being able to fight for the liberties that I believe to be fundamental to American ideals is my music. Unlike my ancestors, I have the privilege and joy of living in a country where I do not have to disguise my thoughts or code the meaning of my words, as my father had done in the former USSR. Every time I moot, I see myself as the attorney I aspire to be, arguing an issue that may seem unimportant to others but that I know is fundamental to the integrity of the system I am working within. I look forward to law as the continued practice of an art that my family and I have come to hold sacred.