Candy Martinez, a doctoral candidate in Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz, has received a Fulbright grant to study how indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, define and cope with trauma. Full article
Since graduation, Richard has been busy travelling before starting work at LinkedIn in October. He was in Asia during the month of June, Europe in July, and now spending 6 weeks in Peru (specifically Cusco and Lima). Thanks to all the various events that the Spanish Department hosted, he has learned to speak the language freely and understand different dialects. Richard is currently using exclusively Spanish working on a hacienda in the village of Ttio for 3 weeks before working at an international hostel in the city of Cusco. He speaks Spanish with his mom all the time and plans on practicing it with fellow employees out in San Francisco.
Since graduation, Tatiana has begun her academic career as a predoctoral VEST Fellow in the Educational Psychology-Applied Developmental Sciences Ph.D. Program at the University Virginia Curry School of Education. Her intended specialization is centered on studying how the unique cognitive development and family interactions within the home of English Language Learners/immigrant students/multilingual students in general (primarily those with Spanish as a first language) contribute to school performance. Ideally, she wants to design programs and educational interventions that celebrate the cultural backgrounds and cognitive advantages of multilingual, multicultural students in order to facilitate learning for ELLs.
During Tatiana’s junior year in college, especially after studying in Barcelona and becoming more cognizant of her own development as a bilingual individual, she realized she wanted to incorporate her studies in Spanish into her vision of pursuing Psychology research. She became very introspective about her own process of acquiring a second language, which led to a desire to promote multilingualism in the United States and ease the transition of English Language Learners, especially first and second generation students, into an English education system.
Tatiana tries to practice Spanish and plans to use Spanish in her research conducting or coding interviews of English Language Learners and their families.
Saul majored in Spanish and English at Amherst. He was highlighted for his participation in the New England Public Radio’s Valley Voices story slam in September 2014 in this article:
"The Whole World Just Stopped to Listen": Amherst Senior Succeeds at Local Story Slam
Katherine got the call from a federation representative in Puerto Rico a little while after graduating. For several weeks she trained with her brother, Forest Sisk '17, before heading off to Puerto Rico. When she arrived, she began training with the national team in Bayamón. Two representatives from the team were so generous and welcomed her into their home for the summer. After about a month of training, she was fortunate enough to be selected for the travel roster. Her teammates speak in Spanish, and all the practices are conducted in Spanish as well. A lot of my teammates that she has met on the under-20 team joke that she has improved a lot. She owes a lot of that improvement to her time studying abroad in Sevilla and to her studies on campus. Though she has to say that Puerto Rican Spanish is really different, and by far her favorite. She is currently with the team in Trinidad competing in the Caribbean Finals. While the team will not be advancing to the next round of World Cup qualifying, this has been a big step for women's soccer in Puerto Rico and she believes full-heartedly that this process of improvement will continue, and that Puerto Rico will send a team to the World Cup sooner than most people think.
After graduating from Amherst in 2010, Gina expanded on her Spanish and English double major by pursuing work in the literary and publishing industry, with an emphasis on world literature. She interned at PEN American Center and stayed on as a volunteer during the yearly World Voices Festival. She carried this interest into her later work for Farrar, Straus & Giroux, where she was a publicity/editorial intern before taking up the role of a contracts assistant. She truly enjoyed being at a publisher whose extensive backlist included works by paramount Chilean writers Pablo Neruda and Roberto Bolaño, and where she used her skills to read Spanish-language manuscripts and contracts (including the Chilean miners’!).
Gina’s parents are from Santiago, Chile, and her Amherst College thesis was a novel for the English Department that drew on family history, her experience studying abroad in Valparaíso, and her study with Professor Lucía Suárez of the relationship between the arts and historical memory. Inspired by the support she received from both departments, she pursued her writing by attending the NYU MFA program.
At NYU, Gina bridged the gap between fiction and poetry by co-curating the KGB Emerging Writers Reading Series—monthly readings involving NYU writers reading alongside established headliners—and serving as a Poetry Workshop Fellow at Goldwater Hospital—a weekly workshop with hospital residents. She graduated in 2013 and has since been working as an editorial assistant in NYU Law’s Office of Communications.
For the first time in her life, school is no longer on the horizon. After a packed three years, Gina has slowed down so she can have more idle time, which she finds is key to fueling her writing. Today, she is working on short stories, and is in pursuit of a storytelling voice that lives up to the resilience she has seen from writers around the world—an appreciation for historical trauma balanced with humor and gusto for life.
Nick has been offered a Fulbright to teach English in Argentina. He majored in law, jurisprudence, and social thought, and Spanish. Nick hopes to engage with peers in Argentina with his interest in sports and work in a law firm or with law students. His future plans include law school and a career helping law clients understand the legal system.
This summer Nick will be a camp counselor for Overland Summers leading a language acquisition and exploration trip throughout Spain. The program will be based in Barcelona. After returning from Spain he will be teaching English at An Giang University in Long Xuyen, Vietnam from August until January. Then in March he will go to Argentina to work as an English Teaching Assistant at an Argentinean college.
Nick says: "Spanish will play an important role in my future not only because I'll be in Spain and Argentina, but also because I hope to continue spending time living and working abroad after my English teaching days have passed. My goal is to eventually speak Spanish as a native speaker, and because of the amount of time I plan to invest in continuing to work on my Spanish I absolutely expect to use my language skills in some capacity when I return to the US. Although I'm not sure exactly what I want to do when I get back from abroad, I have considered the possibility of going to law school. I recognize that there is a strong possibility that my plans will change, but for the moment I'm interested in public interest law both because I believe it would be a meaningful field to which to dedicate my career, and because it would allow me to utilize the Spanish I've spent so much time learning."