WHO AM I?

Thank you for stopping by! My name is Salman Al Khalifa, and I am a first-year graduate student at Georgetown University enrolled in the Communication, Culture, and Technology program.

I graduated from Bentley University in the summer of 2022 with a degree in economics and finance. I have always been captivated by the financial markets and their interdependence with modern-day technological developments. This captivation prompted me to diversify my skillsets to incorporate a greater level of understanding with the ever-changing field of technology, which brought me to CCT.

In the spring of 2020, when COVID hit, the world as we know it paused. We became a population limited by restrictions. I was no longer able to enjoy the sports I loved with the people who were closest. Endless scrolling through various social media applications seemed like the only thing that would pass the time. With a phone in my hand and a charger nearby, I was able to enter a state of stagnancy and timelessness; hours would have gone by without a slither of realization. This ended up taking a heavy toll on my mental health. I started going to the gym to reconnect with my body physically and emotionally. The physical part was straightforward, but the emotional aspect of the journey came with some hurdles.

The more I exercised, the more I realized how emotionally attached I was with social media and how this emotional dependence was limiting our willingness to prompt our bodies into motion.
This motivated me to start raising awareness of the importance of mental health and social media’s impact on our psychological and physical health.

At Georgetown University, I plan to take this level of societal awareness to the next degree and further understand today’s generation’s dependence on social media. This is precisely why I chose the keyword “kinetic” what better way to describe influenced inertia than the force that drives motion.