The summer before beginning my education at UMASS Amherst, I was married to the idea that I would one day become an ambassador. I loved the idea of playing a significant role in relations between the United States and another country, the travel that would surely accompany the job, and (assuming my role is with a Spanish-speaking country) would utilize the two skill sets I sought to acquire through my education: Spanish and International Relations.

Nearly four long years later, that dream is not dead, nor is it my immediate priority for the future. I am planning on applying to law schools after a sabbatical year, and I intend to focus on environmental and natural resource conservation law. Continue reading →

I grew up in a constantly changing environment; my family moved from place to place and I was always surrounded by different cultures. My best childhood friends were Chinese, German, South African, Lebanese etc. so I was always engaged and learning about different places. I began taking Spanish because I was bored. I was tired of the monotony of the French and Latin classes I dreaded all throughout middle school, tired of learning about just a language with disregard to the culture that it stood upon because in my eyes language was about culture and personality and traditions, not just solely conjugating verbs. Continue reading →

I will graduate this spring of 2017 with a dual degree in Linguistics and Spanish, but a little over four years ago this wasn’t my plan at all. I was accepted to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst as an undergraduate Biochemistry major, and that was what I was for the first semester of my college career. As the fall semester of my senior year comes to a close, I feel that now is a good time to look back and reflect on my journey so far in order to make sense of how I went from a biochemist to a linguist. Continue reading →