My Story
The park and me
I grew up in a quiet coastal town in southern Connecticut. If I wasn’t wading through muddy salt marshes or spearfishing in the Long Island Sound, I was sprinting up and down the soccer field most evenings. I was fortunate to grow up on state park lands, with vast expanses of woods and beaches to be explored all around me. During summer I would bike down to the park at least three times a day, enduring the thick humidity to fish the jetties and chase white-tailed deer in the forests. My favorite past time, however, was people watching.
As one of the closest public parklands to New York City, my park offered the perfect escape from the bustle and hustle of urban life. People of all walks of life flocked to the park, and their cultures were transmitted through the sounds and smells of the food they were cooking, the music they were playing, and the languages being spoken. I noticed that, in the morning, different groups would set up camp in their unspoken “territories”; for example, the South Asians occupied the pavilion, while Afro-Caribbean families made use of the barbeque pit fields. However, by the end of the day, the boundaries always seemed to have blurred — as particularly evidenced by the growing number of multilingual soccer scrimmages!
This was my first taste of experiencing different cultures and my escape from the predominantly high-income white-majority society I grew up in. It was integral to my conception of a wider “America” and what America could be, and it ignited my passion for seeking out and learning from different cultural traditions.
I was fortunate to be raised by parents who understood the importance of exposing their kids to different people, places and cultures. Ever since I can remember, my parents took my two older siblings and I on unconventional adventures around the world. I still have vivid memories of the cities we visited, the places we stayed, and the peoples and cultures we engaged with.
I grew up in a quiet coastal town in southern Connecticut. If I wasn’t wading through muddy salt marshes or spearfishing in the Long Island Sound, I was sprinting up and down the soccer field most evenings. I was fortunate to grow up on state park lands, with vast expanses of woods and beaches to be explored all around me. During summer I would bike down to the park at least three times a day, enduring the thick humidity to fish the jetties and chase white-tailed deer in the forests. My favorite past time, however, was people watching.
As one of the closest public parklands to New York City, my park offered the perfect escape from the bustle and hustle of urban life. People of all walks of life flocked to the park, and their cultures were transmitted through the sounds and smells of the food they were cooking, the music they were playing, and the languages being spoken. I noticed that, in the morning, different groups would set up camp in their unspoken “territories”; for example, the South Asians occupied the pavilion, while Afro-Caribbean families made use of the barbeque pit fields. However, by the end of the day, the boundaries always seemed to have blurred — as particularly evidenced by the growing number of multilingual soccer scrimmages!
This was my first taste of experiencing different cultures and my escape from the predominantly high-income white-majority society I grew up in. It was integral to my conception of a wider “America” and what America could be, and it ignited my passion for seeking out and learning from different cultural traditions.
I was fortunate to be raised by parents who understood the importance of exposing their kids to different people, places and cultures. Ever since I can remember, my parents took my two older siblings and I on unconventional adventures around the world. I still have vivid memories of the cities we visited, the places we stayed, and the peoples and cultures we engaged with.
Seeking to understand social impact
In my first year at Santa Clara University, I came to understand the “Santa Clara bubble” and the threat it posed to my passion for seeking perspectives from different cultures. I soon jumped at an opportunity to work for a nonprofit organization in Panama called Give and Surf for the summer and never looked back. This leap of faith, diving into an entirely new country, culture, and work environment, both scared and excited me.
Little did I know at the time, spending a summer at Give and Surf would give incredible clarity to my academic and professional aspirations. What was particularly valuable for me was working with and getting to know the indigenous communities of Bocas del Toro, an archipelago in Panama’s northwestern Caribbean lowlands. This was my first real experience of engaging with environmental and social justice issues in the flesh, and not just reading about them in an environmental studies textbook (not that those textbooks aren’t great, by any means). My favorite part about learning from these communities was gaining insights into local and ancestral knowledge, especially about the island’s marine ecology; when you want to learn about the ocean and the communities around it, it’s always best to ask some old fishermen.
The following summer, I carried this same eagerness to learn about community development and engagement to Bolivia. While in a dry Andean valley, I found that, in order to work with any community, one must first be a participatory observer and listener, gaining the trust of the local people. Why should anyone care what some outsider thinks or wants to accomplish? Nothing is possible without mutual trust and understanding. Working on a rural farm outside the city of Cochabamba, I again found myself fully immersed in the stories of my host Pocho, a farmer that had worked the land his entire life. Hearing the community’s issues from Pocho related to conflict over land, governmental discrimination, and loss of traditional culture pushed me to go further into social impact-focused research.
Out of all of my experiences working and living abroad, my year spent in the Bahamas was by far the most formative and important year of my life thus far. How do you even go about reflecting on an entire year of memories, experiences, and valuable life skills learned? As an assistant lab manager at the Bimini Biological Field Station (AKA the Shark Lab), I got to work on shark research projects out in the field everyday. Yes, the tiger sharks were amazing, the people some of the nicest and most welcoming I have ever met, but most of all, the personal growth I experienced shaped me in profound ways. As just a twenty year old college student, it was not easy to step into a managerial role of a world renowned shark research station. The other staff members were in their late twenties — mostly with degrees under their belt in marine biology — and here I was, a soft-spoken kid from Connecticut. There were many times last year where I had to step back, reflect, and then giggle to myself; I thought, how crazy lucky am I to have this experience? Attending meetings with National Geographic and Discovery channel film crews, drawing blood samples from four meter tiger sharks in the middle of the night, and leading university courses from the US, were just several highlights from my adventures on Bimini.
In my first year at Santa Clara University, I came to understand the “Santa Clara bubble” and the threat it posed to my passion for seeking perspectives from different cultures. I soon jumped at an opportunity to work for a nonprofit organization in Panama called Give and Surf for the summer and never looked back. This leap of faith, diving into an entirely new country, culture, and work environment, both scared and excited me.
Little did I know at the time, spending a summer at Give and Surf would give incredible clarity to my academic and professional aspirations. What was particularly valuable for me was working with and getting to know the indigenous communities of Bocas del Toro, an archipelago in Panama’s northwestern Caribbean lowlands. This was my first real experience of engaging with environmental and social justice issues in the flesh, and not just reading about them in an environmental studies textbook (not that those textbooks aren’t great, by any means). My favorite part about learning from these communities was gaining insights into local and ancestral knowledge, especially about the island’s marine ecology; when you want to learn about the ocean and the communities around it, it’s always best to ask some old fishermen.
The following summer, I carried this same eagerness to learn about community development and engagement to Bolivia. While in a dry Andean valley, I found that, in order to work with any community, one must first be a participatory observer and listener, gaining the trust of the local people. Why should anyone care what some outsider thinks or wants to accomplish? Nothing is possible without mutual trust and understanding. Working on a rural farm outside the city of Cochabamba, I again found myself fully immersed in the stories of my host Pocho, a farmer that had worked the land his entire life. Hearing the community’s issues from Pocho related to conflict over land, governmental discrimination, and loss of traditional culture pushed me to go further into social impact-focused research.
Out of all of my experiences working and living abroad, my year spent in the Bahamas was by far the most formative and important year of my life thus far. How do you even go about reflecting on an entire year of memories, experiences, and valuable life skills learned? As an assistant lab manager at the Bimini Biological Field Station (AKA the Shark Lab), I got to work on shark research projects out in the field everyday. Yes, the tiger sharks were amazing, the people some of the nicest and most welcoming I have ever met, but most of all, the personal growth I experienced shaped me in profound ways. As just a twenty year old college student, it was not easy to step into a managerial role of a world renowned shark research station. The other staff members were in their late twenties — mostly with degrees under their belt in marine biology — and here I was, a soft-spoken kid from Connecticut. There were many times last year where I had to step back, reflect, and then giggle to myself; I thought, how crazy lucky am I to have this experience? Attending meetings with National Geographic and Discovery channel film crews, drawing blood samples from four meter tiger sharks in the middle of the night, and leading university courses from the US, were just several highlights from my adventures on Bimini.
Action-based research
Making the decision to return to Santa Clara was not easy for me to say the least, but it was the right decision. I have returned a reinvented version of myself, with clear vocations in mind and a new sense of academic and personal motivation. After my time in the Bahamas, my vocation has shifted to include my new passion for research. I quickly became involved in a long term research project in Nicaragua, looking at the coping mechanisms and cumulative hazards that smallholder coffee farmers have to face, which recently led me to present my work at a geography conference in Washington D.C. It is funny sometimes how your life may seem unconventional and sporadic, but I have found that if you stick with your passion, everything seems to work out in the end.
What drew me to the Global Social Benefit fellowship was the opportunity for me to bridge the gap between two of my passions: community work and research based approaches to action. Through my experiences in Panama, Bolivia, and the Bahamas I developed a love for working with and learning from rural communities. From those projects, I have found that only when we immerse ourselves in the perspectives of the community and engage with the issues , on their own terms, can we begin to understand how research-based approaches could lead to positive impact. This is what drives me to pursue a career at the intersection of social work, entrepreneurship, and action research.
Making the decision to return to Santa Clara was not easy for me to say the least, but it was the right decision. I have returned a reinvented version of myself, with clear vocations in mind and a new sense of academic and personal motivation. After my time in the Bahamas, my vocation has shifted to include my new passion for research. I quickly became involved in a long term research project in Nicaragua, looking at the coping mechanisms and cumulative hazards that smallholder coffee farmers have to face, which recently led me to present my work at a geography conference in Washington D.C. It is funny sometimes how your life may seem unconventional and sporadic, but I have found that if you stick with your passion, everything seems to work out in the end.
What drew me to the Global Social Benefit fellowship was the opportunity for me to bridge the gap between two of my passions: community work and research based approaches to action. Through my experiences in Panama, Bolivia, and the Bahamas I developed a love for working with and learning from rural communities. From those projects, I have found that only when we immerse ourselves in the perspectives of the community and engage with the issues , on their own terms, can we begin to understand how research-based approaches could lead to positive impact. This is what drives me to pursue a career at the intersection of social work, entrepreneurship, and action research.