The Council on Hemispheric Affairs is accepting Spring 2016 internship applications. The deadline for applications for Spring is December 1. COHA recommends candidates apply as early as possible. You can get more information about internship opportunities here.
If you know me, chances are you know that I am Polish. I flaunt my heritage so that people are forced to assume that I am proud of it. Walk past my apartment, and you’ll hear patriotic Polish ballads blasting as I study under my Polish map of the world, wearing my Polish soccer scarf. Yeah, I am that Polish.
Yet, this confidence in the culture of my family’s motherland has just recently become a defining trait of mine. As a child, I was paralyzingly embarrassed by the foreignness of my family. English is not my first language; I was a monolingual Polish speaker until age five upon integration into the American school system. I grew up with this absorbing focus on communication with people – more so with my frustration with my own inability to do so as well as my classmates. However, hearing and seeing my friends from the Latin@ community of my hometown speak to their families in Spanish changed my outlook on my own bilingualism, and my own dual-identity. I had always considered it as a disability of mine, and the structure of American school systems enforced that view. Continue reading
I entered the university as a biology major. I took the Spanish placement exam, and realized I would have the time to complete a major in Spanish, as well. Spanish was, for a long time, the “icing” on the cake. Biology, and then biochemistry, and then political science made up the cake itself. The standards that had been set for me didn’t register “just Spanish” as an adequate use of my time. But when I took time off for various reasons, including the fact that I hadn’t settled on a “cake” and couldn’t waste any more time changing my studies, I also realized that, just as high school was made to be an unnecessarily high-pressure environment, my undergraduate career was becoming a stressful game of squeezing in as many requirements as possible. I wasn’t taking courses I liked. I was taking ones that would “count.” When I returned, I knew that I both wanted to enrich myself and move out of undergraduate in a timely fashion. I dropped my secondary major, and began exploring the depths of the course catalog, seeking out classes that were of personal interest or that would compliment my studies. Continue reading
¡Hola a todos! Me llamo Alicia LeClair. I’m a junior here at UMass Amherst and I am double majoring in Spanish and Spanish & Linguistics, as well as working towards a Latin American and Caribbean Studies Certificate!
Dado que este año es mi tercer año en UMass, tengo más tiempo para “crecer” a mi especialización pero estoy en una buena posición ahora con mis ideas de carreras “de sueños” y mi percepción de la ya ha cambiado mucho. Continue reading
When I first landed in Spain, my brain seemed to make the shift almost automatically. I was in a Spanish-speaking country, reading Spanish signs, listening to Spanish passengers and airport employees and passersby and children, trying to figure out the Spanish wifi password so that I could tell my mom that I’d landed safely. Gone was the English buffer zone. For some reason, even hearing people speaking to their dogs in Spanish wasn’t all that much of a culture shock to me, even though it hadn’t occurred to me before we landed that I would be hearing commands like that in Spanish as well. What was actually the oddest thing to me was the giant hoard of English-speaking students that I’d crossed the ocean with to get to Madrid, all cluttered around the airport exit where we were supposed to meet our Spanish-speaking guide (our savior) and get on a bus with a Spanish-speaking driver to take us to our Spanish hotel. I was actually quite ready to be immersed in the Spanish world. Continue reading
Since I heard about this wonderful experience that I had in Luis’s 394 class when the Seniors came to visit, I feel that it is my responsibility to share it with everyone else so that they can to do what I did. I wasn’t able to study abroad while I was at UMass and when I signed up to do the Holyoke tutorial it just didn’t fit in my schedule. Lucky for me, I had found an alternative that my advisor deemed valid to count for my IE.
It all started when I was sitting in 394 and one of the Seniors, who came to visit and tell us about their IEs, mentioned that he got to travel for free to Spanish speaking countries over the summer. He went on to say that “Teen Tour” companies would take college students who spoke Spanish and pay for them to be a sort of counselor on these teen tours. I was immediately intrigued by the possibility of being able to travel and use Spanish for free over the summer so I went home and googled “Teen Tours”. Continue reading