It was during my freshman year course "Theorizing Activisms" with Visiting Professor Janet Jakobsen that I decided to concentrate in WGS. A freshman in a class of near-graduates, I had access to a group of students who demonstrated to me what the WGS intellectual community was fundamentally about: intellectual rigor, a drive to understand what is so political about the personal, a commitment to challenging the status quo, an ingrained practice of creating and maintaining cooperative learning environments, and a near-universal desire to take classroom knowledge into extra- and non-curricular life.

The intellectual community enjoyed by the students was initiated by the professors, all of whom provided extensive feedback on written work, and who always found the space within the classroom to capitalize on the strength of the personal transformations so many of us who pass through WGS experience. The ideas I explored in WGS transformed me.

I was able to study masculinity studies and race relations at the University of Havana due to WGS's commitment to individualized study, and pursue research on gendered violence on the U.S.–Mexico border. After graduating, I finished a K–12 teacher education program, and then worked as a union organizer for the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). I then took a position as managing editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas, a quarterly magazine on Latin American politics and social movements, before starting my PhD in NYU’s department of Media, Culture, and Communication. My dissertation project is on the early twentieth century history of IBM in Brazil, with a focus on the pre-computing IT sector in the U.S. and its relationship to U.S. foreign policy in South America. I am a proud member of GSOC-UAW Local 2110.