Waking up to a hot July day in Boston, I got out of bed, brushed my teeth, and called my mother to rant about how different everything was here. We talked a lot about nothing. “Alright, I’ll let you go now—what are you up to today?” I asked. “We’re thinking of going for a swim, so we’re going to stay at the house in Mati tonight.” I finished the call, then my economics classes, then my day. When I woke up, I picked up my phone to find a barrage of notifications: “Fire in Mati, Hundreds Missing.”

I’d received calls and texts from nearly everyone close to me except for my mother. I called and texted. No response. Halfway across the world, I was powerless. I called friends who lived nearby, only to get more bad news. One had lost his home, another her grandparents. I hope I never again have to feel relief like that which I felt when my mother called me soon after to let me know that she had never ended up going to Mati. Yet, as the relief began to fade, my attention turned to how such a thing could happen. The news dove into a shortage of firefighters and equipment caused by drained emergency funds due to country-wide belt-tightening, and suddenly, as everything seemed to do, it all came back to the Crisis.

The Sovereign Debt Crisis was the defining event of my generation. I grew up with it. All around me, people were overcome with debt. I said goodbye to friends whose families left our country in search of better lives. Through the worst of it, my mother was the chief spokesperson for the government, telling millions every day that there would be more debt, more austerity. Despite its defining influence on my life, nobody seemed to be able to tell me just what the Crisis was or why it had taken place. To find answers, I plunged into economics. I took no-credit summer classes and read every article I had a prayer of understanding. I learned that our bonds had gone under and that the creditors entrusted with organizing our bailout had exploited us. The more I learned, the more indignant I felt. Most countries recovered from such crises in a few years, and yet for us, almost a decade on, there was no end in sight. Nevertheless, as I delved deeper into the subject, I felt relief. There were answers out there. I saw a path to learning how to ensure no such thing ever happened again; with college on the horizon, economics felt like the best fit.

Finally, I could start asking the right people the right questions. I was probably the most bizarre visitor of my professors’ office hours: a little freshman asking twice a month about the Greek Economic Crisis. However, I soon realized that the answer to preventing the Crisis had been apparent to many. From its onset, economists screamed at the top of their lungs that the course was wrong, that the European institutions were sending a message: there were to be no handouts in the European Union. I could acquire all the models and information to prevent the next crisis, but they would do so only if people acted with perfect predictability. I finished my freshman year of college with my interest in economics waning.

I found myself wanting instead to understand the institutions involved in the management of the Crisis. They had exacerbated it, yet I knew nothing about how they worked. That summer, an internship at the European Parliament and a course on EU politics would allow me to look critically at the workings of the European Union both from within and from without. My course acquainted me with an institution under which laws passed by different actors at different times had accumulated into an unfathomably intricate web of sometimes-conflicting rules. At Parliament, I was empowered to help constituents navigate this opacity. Often, I spoke with Greeks who, frustrated with the EU’s migrant policy, called with some degree of vitriol to try to “get rid of the migrants.” I felt the best way forward was to try and ease tensions by informing them of specific provisions and laws related to their individual problems. Finding those provisions wasn’t without its challenges, but the tradeoff was that they were most often there to be found. The act of picking up existing law and placing it between people who—because of their having been impacted in disparate ways by broad policy decisions—might otherwise find themselves in more direct conflict enabled me to ameliorate a situation filled with ineluctable tension.

My experiences helping people navigate the EU legal system caused me to suspect that this was the kind of work I’d want to do. Economics had left my mind by this point, and though policy seemed to provide another route forward, my time in Parliament pulled me farther and farther from that path as I observed policy that, no matter how evenhanded, faced the impossibility of accounting equally for each interest reliant on the EU’s multifarious system. Law, on the other hand, proffered an opportunity for me to help fellow constituents leverage situationally useful legal codes within the diverse assortment already available to us. I’m eager to gain know-how with which to help protect individuals and ensure accountability where systems fall short, and I hope to learn ways in which individual solutions might trickle up into systemic ones, building—from a past fraught with rich complexity—a promising future.