As a child, Sepideh Moafi ’07 had no idea where in the world she and her family would end up living. Her parents fled Iran in the early 1980s, and she was born in a refugee camp in Regensburg, Germany. They moved to California when Moafi was a child, and she grew up in a working-class neighborhood in the Bay Area.

Amid these hardships, classical music was always a fixture in the Moafi family. Sepideh and her father bonded over a shared love for Mozart and Rimsky-Korsakov. But costly extracurricular activities like private voice lessons were never part of the equation. “I reluctantly took choir to knock off some fine arts credits in high school. But when we started working on Vivaldi’s Gloria, the bug bit me. I fell madly, obsessively in love.”

During her sophomore year of high school, Moafi’s choir director asked her to stay after class. She thought she was in trouble for chewing gum—again. Instead, he asked her to sing. She did, and he advised her to immediately start taking lessons. “He told me I had a voice—that I had ‘it.’ I didn’t really take him seriously.”

Within two years, Moafi was enrolled as a freshman at SFCM. “I applied to only a few schools, and SFCM stole my heart. The faculty was warm, kind, inspiring and welcoming. Sylvia Anderson was a big reason why I was interested in the program. I was fascinated by her relationship to music, her career, and once I was able to meet and work with her, I knew SFCM was the right place for me.”

For Moafi, her years at SFCM felt like heaven. She was finally free of the incessant bullying she experienced growing up and found a family that accepted her exactly as she was. Music helped her express herself in a way she had never been able to before.

“Growing up in a refugee immigrant family wasn’t the easiest experience for a number of reasons. When I found music, I didn’t just find my voice, I found my language. I was finally able to express all of the deep, rich feelings and complexities within. I don’t exaggerate when I say that I would walk to school every day with butterflies in my stomach. As soon as I’d approach that old building on Ortega Street and hear an orchestra of instruments each in their own worlds, I felt at home.”