What were you doing 1 year out of college?
I had just finished Peace Corps training and was beginning service as an economic development consultant in the Dominican Republic. I was assigned a consulting project to help an NGO collaborate with tourism companies in order to develop ecotourism products whose revenue could be used towards the conservation of the area's coastal reefs.
What are you doing now?
I'm a Fulbright grantee working in Mexico City. As per my grant, I work full time for a Mexican company, in my case Tequila Casa Dragones, and take MBA classes at a university in the city.
I left the Peace Corps knowing I wanted to continue working in the field of social impact, but my time there led me to be interested in pursuing this work in the private sector. Because of that, I wanted to get some experience with a for-profit company as the next step in my career. Also, my classes and study abroad experiences at UNH had left me with a very internationalist outlook so I was hoping to continue living overseas. When I learned about this specific Fulbright program I knew it was a perfect fit!
In what ways has your UNH liberal arts education helped you get where you are today?
My liberal arts education gave me the ability to think through problems and draw information from various disciplines and sources to solve them. Nothing has been more useful to me in the work I've done since graduating. In the Peace Corps it allowed me to draw on and synthesize the perspectives of the for-profit and non-profit organizations I worked with in order to advance my projects, and here in Mexico it's helped me adapt those experiences to a very different kind of job in a very different working culture. It's a skill that I'm sure will be useful wherever I go and whatever I do.
Also, all of the papers I had to write as a history major and philosophy minor vastly improved my writing skills, which came in handy when writing application essays for the Fulbright grant!
