I first encountered Spanish when I was in fifth grade. I remember it vividly. I had just moved to a new school, and all of my classmates had started Spanish classes in kindergarten, so they were way ahead of me. At the start of my first class, my teacher walked in and began speaking Spanish, and I slouched down in my seat in the hopes that she wouldn’t notice that I was there. She did. She walked over to me and smiled gently when she saw the look of terror on my face. “You’ve never taken Spanish before, have you?” she asked. All I could do was shake my head no. 

Throughout the course of that year, my teacher was a constant source of encouragement. She would pull me aside in class and help me with my vocabulary, she stayed after school to help me practice sentence structure and writing skills, and she set me up with an online language software so I could practice speaking the language. These lessons were all very helpful and appreciated, but the best thing that she ever did was start speaking only in Spanish for the second half of the school year. By the end of the year, I was able to read whole stories that I hadn’t been able to understand at all in September. This was the first time that I had ever been exposed to another language, and the first time that I had really stopped to consider what life outside of the United States might be like. This experience opened a whole new door for me. It gave me a sense of confidence in myself, it made me realize that I loved learning about languages and cultures, and it opened my eyes to the possibilities of traveling in the future. Something just “clicked” for me that year. It felt natural to speak a new language, and I knew then that I had to continue with it. 

When I first came to UMass, I didn’t know what I wanted to study. I had taken Spanish all throughout middle and high school, and I knew that I was going to continue to take it, but I still didn’t know in what capacity I wanted to do so. I took a Spanish class in my first semester, and after that, I knew I had to major in it. The only problem was that I still didn’t know how I was going to use my degree once I graduated. I figured that I could move to a Spanish speaking country and find a job there, but still, what could I do? I spent most of middle and high school learning about Spanish in relation to Spain, but I did not have any formal background in its relation to the United States. I took Spanish in the US this semester with professor Armstrong Abrami, and it opened my eyes to the Spanish speaking communities near me. I always knew that Spanish was prevalent throughout the United States, but everyone always talked about these communities as if they were thousands of miles away from Massachusetts. In this class, we watched interviews and conducted surveys with participants from Holyoke and Springfield. We were learning about a variety of dialects and sociolinguistic issues that were common in the next town over. 

I also took an integrative experience class this semester, and one of the things that we talked about was charity versus solidarity. This really resonated with me. As a second language learner, it’s easy to just say that you want to “help” people, but the only way to truly make a difference in someone’s life is to listen to them before doing anything else. I had been considering a career in the foreign service or as an ESL teacher (abroad) because I wanted to help people, and these seemed like the most obvious choices to accomplish that goal. After taking this class, I think the more important question that I should be asking myself is, what career can I choose that will have an authentic, positive impact on other people? 

I am still not completely certain what I would like to do once I graduate, but I have a few ideas, and I think that this semester brought me closer to making a decision. I knew that I loved Spanish by the end of fifth grade, but I don’t think that it was until this semester that I started to really dig into all of the nuances of the language and the social and linguistic implications that come with it. I still have so much to learn, but it’s moments like these that make me really glad that I decided to pursue it.