International Relations and Global Affairs and Anthropology double major

Like so many of my peers, I came to Eckerd to study marine science. I left with a new passion to understand the social world.

Just before coming to Eckerd, I spent a week in a village in El Salvador, visiting a clinic that I had been fundraising for through high school and listening to the incredible stories of village residents that refused to be beaten by years of civil war and were in the midst of rejuvenating their vibrant community. My consciousness was rocked by what they’d suffered and overcome.

As much as I loved my marine science classes, that experience left me wondering just how much of the human world I still failed to understand. In so many ways—classes, peers, mentors, and service—Eckerd gave me the space to explore and nurture all of my passions. I made lunches in a soup kitchen downtown on Saturdays, tutored struggling students in St. Pete schools, and help coach an amazing soccer team of children of Florida’s migrant farmworkers. And, perhaps most intensely, I joined hundreds of my peers promoting dialogue around and eventual activism against the US’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.

These opportunities, these spaces, were reinforced by at least half a dozen faculty—across disciplines—who stood ready to help me grapple with big picture questions, to make sense of suffering, to understand power relationships, and to find my own way to give, to lead in the midst of it all.

Eckerd cultivated my curiosity and my courage, leading me to the Peace Corps in AIDS-stricken Swaziland and now an incredibly fulfilling career building more inclusive financial systems around the world. I work with poor communities around the world to understand how they manage money and help banks and governments design financial products and regulation that better fit their needs for safe, dignified savings and payments services.

In my small way, I feel like I am changing the world.