BPATS Student, Raina Zainab, Appointed Student Trustee
Bachelor’s Program for Adults and Transfer Students (BPATS) Student, Raiha Zainab (Liberal Arts ’24) has been appointed as a Student Trustee for the ’23-’24 school year alongside Parsons’ student Madina Masimova (MFA ’24). After a process of nominations and interviews, a selection committee made up of staff and faculty advanced the candidates, and they were approved by The New School’s Board of Trustees.
As a Student Trustee, Raiha will provide a student perspective to the Board of Trustees and weigh in on issues that impact the future of The New School. In her role as Student Trustee, Raiha is a representation of the New School’s commitment to student achievement, thanks to Student Success, our department dedicated to fostering and celebrating students as a whole.
Raiha Zainab is a senior liberal arts student at The New School studying a self-designed degree in journalism, international affairs, and social innovation design. As a transfer student from Indiana University, Ms. Zainab was intrigued by The New School’s multidisciplinary curriculum and was excited at the prospect of combining all her interests, engaging in deep study into the art of change-making. Her research focuses on human trafficking in the South Asian garment industry, and she is interested in investigative international human rights journalism. From courses like Visions of a Post-Neoliberal Future to Politics & Environment of South Asia, she studies how to meaningfully transform our systems into ones that are kinder and most equitable for all.
In NYC, Ms. Zainab can often be found writing poems for strangers. She works as a typewriter poet and account manager with Ars Poetica, a poetic agency that books poets to write people custom poems at events. She also performs as a spoken word poet and runs creative community events in the city.
She came to The New School after taking a gap year, during which she spent 4 months solo traveling across Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. She can often be found roaming the streets of random cities and writing in various found coffee shops.