In the Spotlight: Spanish Sociolinguist Dr. Rebecca Ronquest

Dr. Rebecca Ronquest, New FLL Tenure-Track Faculty

Dr. Rebecca Ronquest, New FLL Tenure-Track Faculty.

Rebecca Ellen Ronquest joined the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures during the Fall 2013 semester as an Assistant Professor in Spanish Sociolinguistics and Acoustic Phonetics.

A native of the Midwest, Dr. Ronquest started working in the department last year as a Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar before making the transition to her new position as Assistant Professor. Her specialty is acoustic phonetics, particularly that of Hispanic bilingual speakers residing in the Carolinas.

The following is an email interview that FLL Webmaster Samuel Sotillo recently conducted with Dr. Ronquest.

Samuel Sotillo: First, could you tell us a little bit about your background? Where are you from? Where did you go to undergrad and graduate school?

Rebecca Ronquest: Although I was born in the Midwest and moved around a lot when I was very young, I spent most of my childhood and teenage years in Northern Virginia. After high school I attended the College of William & Mary, where I completed a B.A. in Spanish. I became really interested in linguistics during my last two years of college, so I decided to pursue that interest further in graduate school. I went on to earn my M.A. and Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics at Indiana University.

SS: Can you tell us a little bit about the intellectual trajectory that brought you to academia and to Spanish Sociolinguistics and Acoustic Phonetics?

RR: I’ve been interested in words and languages for about as long as I can remember (even though I was never really any good at spelling!). In middle school I took an “Overview of Foreign Language” class, and the following year starting taking Spanish, which I continued all the way through high school. In college I signed up for a class called “Spanish Phonetics and Phonology” (the equivalent of FLS 333) without really knowing what phonetics was at the time, and loved it. For me, learning the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) was like learning another language, and I really enjoyed transcription and studying the sounds of the world’s languages. I then took a course called “The Study of Language” which introduced me to the other areas in linguistics, including sociolinguistics. In graduate school I took a number of specialized classes and seminars, and even spent some time working in a psycholinguistics laboratory. The course assignments never seemed like work to me, and I thoroughly enjoyed the creative process of conducting research. 

As a graduate student, I was also given the chance to teach introductory and intermediate Spanish at the college level. Although I had no prior training and had never really considered teaching as a career until that point, I found that I felt very much at home in front of a classroom. I learned quickly that teaching is really hard work, but it is also one of the most rewarding jobs I’ve ever had. After teaching Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics for the first time, I knew for certain that I wanted to be a professor, and to continue sharing my enthusiasm for Spanish and linguistics with the next crop of potential researchers and teachers.

SS: What does a Spanish Sociolinguist do? What is Acoustic Phonetics?

RR: Very generally speaking, Sociolinguists investigate the relationship between language use and social variables such as age, gender, and socioeconomic class (to name a few). A sociolinguistic study of Spanish, for example, might investigate if male and female speakers differ in terms of how frequently they pronounce or delete “s” in certain linguistic contexts. Sociolinguists also investigate topics such as bilingualism, language and society, new dialect formation, and the connection between language and identity. I’m particularly interested in bilingual pronunciation and how Spanish-English bilinguals might use language as a means to construct a dual or hybrid identity.

Acoustic phonetics is the study of the acoustic properties of speech. Acoustic phoneticians use a variety of tools to examine the fine-grained details of speech sounds that often can’t be perceived by listening alone. An acoustic investigation might allow us to see if second language learners of Spanish and native speakers pronounce the “p” in the word “pato” differently, or determine if the “d” in “hablado” is the same or weaker than the “d” in “lado.” Characterizing a sound or group of sounds in this way has a number of important implications, from accurately describing the sounds of a particular language or dialect, to understanding why a certain group of sounds might be difficult for some speakers to pronounce and/or perceive.

SS: What are you working on right now?

RR: Right now I am continuing to work with some of the data I collected for my dissertation, which deals with the pronunciation of the Spanish vowels by heritage speakers of Spanish. I have begun to extend this work to include vowel production by Spanish-English bilinguals in Raleigh and the surrounding areas, and am in the process of making comparisons between bilingual speakers from the Midwest and those here in the Southeast. Some of these projects are collaborations with Dr. Jim Michnowicz and one of our graduate students, Mary Raudez.

SS: In what ways do you think are your research and your teaching connected?

RR: Since I primarily teach courses in my specialty areas, there is a pretty strong connection between my research and my teaching. In FLS 333 (The Sounds of Spanish) and FLS 402/502 (Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics), I’m able to share my knowledge of phonetics and acoustics with the students, and make a point to discuss some of the findings of my vowel research with them as well. Last year I also taught a seminar on Spanish in the United States, which focused on analyzing the linguistic characteristics of bilingual and immigrant varieties of Spanish spoken in different communities across the US. We spent a good deal of time discussing heritage speakers of Spanish, who are my main population of interest.

Teaching has also allowed me to meet members of the local Spanish-speaking community. In fact, my interest in heritage speakers grew out of my experiences working with them in the classroom. Teaching and getting to know members of the Raleigh bilingual community has helped me identify some of the aspects of their speech that should be investigated further, and provided ideas for future research projects.

SS: What do you enjoy and find most challenging about teaching?

RR: I think what I enjoy most about teaching is witnessing someone’s “Aha! Moment” — when all of a sudden, all of the complex, abstract concepts suddenly make sense and a student notices something we’ve discussed in class in a real-world context. The challenge — but also something I truly enjoy — is coming up with creative and innovative ways to teach the information and present it to the students in a context that is relevant to their lives. This involves getting to know the students and learning about their interests, keeping up with what’s “trending,” and maybe even watching the MTV Video Music Awards.

SS: Anything you are reading right now?

RR: Although I’m always browsing the latest journals and keeping up with research in the field, I try to make time for some fun reading. I just finished Veronica Roth’s “Insurgent”, which is about a dystopian society in a future Chicago.  It is somewhat similar to “The Hunger Games” series, so if you liked those books, I highly recommend it.

SS: Anything else we should know about you?

RR: Let’s see. I love to run, and try to make time for it every day.  I enjoy competing in road races, and hope to complete my first marathon and triathlon this year. All that running makes my feet hurt, so I keep a pair of slippers in my office. You might catch me accidentally wearing them in the mail room. You might also hear me talking about my dog Max, an 11 year-old Pekingese. He is quite charming and adorable, so I hope you’ll all get a chance to meet him. And I can ride a unicycle and juggle, just not at the same time.

SS: What do you look forward to most about your new position?

RR: I’m really looking forward to becoming part of a team and contributing to the teaching and research communities here at State.  Last spring I was given the chance to offer a new senior seminar, and I hope to create new courses in my specialty areas down the line that will strengthen our linguistics track. I’m also really looking forward to the opportunity to grow as a researcher, to learn from my colleagues in FLL and in the Linguistics program, and to collaborate with so many talented researchers — both faculty and graduate students alike. A lot of innovative and important research is underway, so I’m enthusiastic to be able to work on some of the existing projects as well as design new ones of my own.

SS: Do you have any advice for our students and alumni who are on the job market?

RR: My best advice? I think it goes without saying that it is very important to research each position carefully. Before even applying, investigate the school and the position; know who works there, what they do, and how you can contribute. The job market is also a waiting game, so you have to be patient. Sometimes you submit an application and don’t hear anything for months, if at all. Once an application is submitted, move on to other things and don’t dwell; trust that the right job will come along at the right time. Finally, probably the biggest lesson I learned over the past few years is that so much of the search process deals with finding the right “fit.” Even if a particular job sounds great on paper, you might go on an interview and realize that it just isn’t the right place for you. Pay attention to your interactions with the people you meet, think about what it would be like to be one of their colleagues, and try to get a sense of the departmental dynamics. Intuition usually tells you pretty quickly if it will be a good place to start or continue your career.

By Samuel Sotillo, Webmaster/Lecturer, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.

Spring 2013 FLL Diploma Ceremony Guest Speaker: Dr. Dwight Stephens

Dr. Dwight Stephens

Dr. Dwight Stephens, Program Director, Critical Languages Institute and Project GOLD

This year the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures graduated 60 new BAs in French, German Studies, and Spanish and granted 11 MAs in Foreign Languages and Literatures. We wish all our new alumni great success in their future studies and careers. At our spring ceremony, our guest speaker, Dr. Dwight Stephens, Program Director, Critical Languages Institute and Project GOLD (Global Officers Leadership Development, An ROTC Language & Culture Project), spoke about his ideas concerning language learning and its importance, and we are pleased to share his insights with you in this post.

globe image globe image globe image

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Gross, parents, students, faculty, and friends. Since I’m going to talk to you about categories, I’ll mention right away that those categories are not mutually exclusive.

I want first to recognize our foreign language graduates and wish them much success and happiness in their careers and personal lives.

This is the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. The Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures is part of this college. Classes and exams are done, and now that things have settled a bit, Saturday, May 11, 2013 is a good day to reflect on the function and purpose of these two institutions, whose degrees we will confer.

“Humanities and Social Sciences”– I have a particular fondness for this name, and not just because of the administrators, staff, faculty, and students with whom I’ve developed personal relationships. It encapsulates for me the purpose of education, which is the removal of ignorance and the formation of a whole human being. Certainly the university does many other good things, but it has this one purpose.

I was a foreign language major as an undergraduate, but in those delirious first four years I was chasing after ideas as one would butterflies with a net and had no idea what was changing in me. To try to get at what happens to the mind of a student of language, let me tell you the three main awakenings of my personal history as I see them now: My Epiphanies.

The First Illumination: It’s the year nineteen-hundred-and-something. Age 13. Fall, seventh grade. I’ve just been enrolled in my first foreign language class. Latin 1. They’ve handed out the textbooks and I’ve just got back home. I can see the scene even now, after all these years. I’m sitting in an armchair in the living room, by the window, sunlight streaming in. I open the cover, and on the first page I see a brown watercolor of the boot of Italy half surrounded by some aquamarine water. The caption reads:

Italia non est insula.

OK, italia … that’s got to be Italy. (So that’s where Latin came from!) …non must be not. …insula…. insulated. Italy is not insulated…. Italy is not an island! This is great! It’s like secret codes!

I did like Latin, because it was like secret codes, and because I liked it I studied it, and because I studied it I got good at it, and then people gave me pats on the back and so I studied it more.

It was a path of least resistance. But liking something is miraculously important. From that year, I still remember all the verbs in Latin which require the dative case: believe, favor, please, trust, command, obey, pardon, persuade, resist, serve, spare, harm, envy, and threaten. I know what etc., i.e., e.g., a.m., and p.m. mean.

But there was also a cognitive benefit. I had discovered the first layer: language as a symbolic system. Intriguing—no, miraculous—that some things could stand for other things and entirely different kinds of messages about the world could be sent and received. This was an important first step, because the sub-plot of symbolism winds its way through all the labors and all the pleasures of the mind.

Consciousness and conscience are the same thing. Anybody who has one has scruples from time to time. I had several as I was composing this address. The word “scruple” is a good example of the evolution of a symbol. In Latin, scrupulum is a tiny pebble which might accidentally get into your shoe and cause you to have to pause to remove it. As a symbol, it followed the normal course of development from concrete to abstract: from “small rock” to “second thought.” We live among these metaphors, which blossom and die all around us in the ether of our social mind, or culture. As a Star Wars fanatic friend of mine says:

Metaphors be with you!

The Second Illumination: Fast-forward ten years to age 23: graduate school. My goal is to understand how thoughts in one brain become sentences, and then again thoughts in another brain. At this point it’s dawning on me that languages are not just formal systems—algebras—but rather a uniquely human medium requiring more than one participant, a collaborative medium of sharing something. I begin to see language as a communication system. I study several languages and am beginning to see that they categorize the world differently. Other languages seem to have different categories, like boxes for the pieces of the world, but the boxes are not the same size and shape as the boxes of English and things don’t fit.

I remember translating a poem by Rumi, the Persian poet. I was stuck on a certain word. I looked it up in a big Persian dictionary, and it said “friend, lover.” This bothered me. For Westerners, these are definitely two different things which belong in two separate boxes. I asked all the native speakers I knew which one it meant, and they said: Both. So, sometimes it’s not possible to say the same thing in two languages. Our best translators tell us that this is, in fact, the case. But if speakers of different languages are talking about the world in different terms, they must be perceiving the world differently.

Fast-forward another ten years to the present. Still haven’t figured out how thoughts become sentences and how sentences become thoughts. Still working on that one. My third big revelation is that these different ways of seeing the world cause us to construct reality differently. Now, I say “construct reality” because the reality we know as the world is, in fact, an internal construction. This includes the reality of the identity of others and the composition of our own self.

This is the third stage of my initiation into the mystery of meaning. Language as the architecture by which our internal reality is built. How we construct Other-ness and the world. And for me, this is the secret: Another cannot build his self without the collaboration of Another. We cannot know Self without knowing Other. This critical psychological mechanism—essential for the cognitive development of a human being—is conferred principally by the study of language.

I remember hearing Alan Watts on the radio back in the early 70s saying that hippies and corporate businessmen needed each other in order to feel validated and secure in their identities. Language is one way we build the categories we accept and the ones we reject, the groups we join and the ones we vilify.

One thing my father taught me was never ask a guy what he does for a living. When you ask a guy, “What do you do for a living,“ in a way you’re saying “Are you smarter than me? Are you richer than me? Are you playing the same game as me? Should I even bother to listen to what you have to say? Are we in the same club, in which case I can nod approvingly, or in the other club, in which case I can ignore you.”

You may have heard Ambrose Bierce’s famous definition of war as “God’s way of teaching Geography to Americans.” It should be revised to “WAR: God’s way of teaching Americans foreign languages.” NC State is one of only six universities funded by the Department of Defense to provide language and culture training to the military. In our program, we train Special Forces soldiers in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish. As part of an orientation for our soldier-students at Ft. Bragg, I show them a video, which you can find on You Tube, of a Special Forces Lt Colonel cursing in English at a division of Iraqi policemen, calling them wimps and cowards, excoriating them in the worst language imaginable. The reactions of our students watching this video vary widely: some laugh outright, some look blank, some uneasy, and some have their eyes and mouths open in horror. Yet, in spite of its crudeness, it wouldn’t shock any American high school or college football player. It’s the coach’s typical half-time speech.

For our players, in our Power Culture, who after the game go back to the parking lot where their SUVs are waiting with golf clubs in the back, it’s motivating. For Iraqi men, who have few physical possessions and no material security, it is shaming. Their culture is an Honor Culture. The American Lt Colonel stripped them of the thing they value most: their dignity. Now, I’m not arguing for some kind of political correctness, or generic platform of global diversity. I’m onto something deeper: this is a sort of cognitive deficiency, stemming from the inability to conceive of other mentalities and the worlds they make.

This limited bandwidth is the natural condition of most, if not all, humans. We are all to some extent solipsistic, or narcissistic. It’s the nature of having an individual consciousness which is always and exclusively the center of the universe. Think about it: there is no experience you’ve ever had in which you were not at its absolute center. Our natural hard wiring is to be deeply and literally self-absorbed, that is, to perceive and interpret everything through the lens of a solitary consciousness—to build an inner model of reality which is exclusively private. It reminds me of Freud’s joke about the man who told his wife: “If one of us should die, I shall move to Paris.”
In one College Board survey of 830,000 high-school seniors,

  • 0 % rated themselves as below average in ability to get along with others,
  • 60% rated themselves in the top 10%, and
  • 25% rated themselves in the top 1%.

This is not to be attributed to the success of our middle school programs in self-esteem; it’s the nature of isolated consciousness.

Here’s a thought experiment to illustrate the point. Try to imagine what the world is like for a tick. Seems easy enough. It hangs out in the woods, in the luxuriant greenery, listening to the birds singing, relaxing in the sunshine, watching the movement of the leaves in the wind, maybe thinking about philosophy, music, or art, until it gets thirsty… No, wait. That’s the world for us.

Here’s life for the tick: The tick hangs motionless on the tip of a branch in a forest clearing. If she smells butyric acid—which is emitted by the skin glands of all mammals—this stimulus makes her let go of the branch. She falls, who knows where, maybe onto a mammal. When she falls, if she hits a hair, the reactive movement of the hair does two things: it extinguishes the butyric acid response and it causes her to start running around like crazy. She will do that until she encounters heat of approximately 37 degrees Celsius. If she does, this stimulus does two things: it extinguishes the warmth reaction and it causes her to burrow. She’ll drink until she is full, then fall off and die, having given her eggs the nutriment they need.

So, the tick’s entire world—her Umwelt—consists of three perceptions: butyric acid, a bump, and 37 degrees. These three dimensions, which can be perceived only one at a time, rigidly prescribe the course of her actions, and the very poverty of that world guarantees the certainty of her actions and her survival. Her world is perfect for her.

The mere act of classifying other things in our search for essences—dividing up the world linguistically from our centralized point of view—threatens to neglect or negate worth. Probably a tick would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us classify it as an arachnid. “I am no such thing,” she would say. “I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.” We’ve all been put into a box by someone else, and know how nearly impossible it is to get out, and to be seen as we see ourselves.

Imagining the world and its inhabitants as immutable things in fixed boxes gives us the illusion that truth is directly observable and easily accessible. On the other hand, thinking in models reminds us that truth is hypothetical. Thinking in things turns people into the furniture of our lives. The world doesn’t come with labels on it. We do this with language, but it’s a trap. Alan Watts used to say that philosophy was building a cage out of words and then trying to get out of it.
We assume that our world is the same as everybody else’s because each of us has only one reality, the one we have constructed “in here.” A Nobel prize winner in Physics famously remarked at a conference: “Gentlemen, there is no ‘Out There ‘ out there.”

The tick thought experiment helps us understand that there are perceptual dimensions in the culture of the Iraqi policemen which are inaccessible to us. Likewise, the tick would need a broader bandwidth to grasp our human concepts. Even to us our own culture is invisible. It’s like the two young fish swimming along, and an older fish coming the other way greets them: “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” The two young ones continue along their way for some time before one of them turns to the other and says: “What the hell is water?”

The search for truth requires that we constantly consider the possibility that there may be more to a given reality than we are conscious of; that we might be wrong; that our categories are limited and our models out-dated. We construct our truth about others from the templates of our native language and culture, and the refinement of those models takes us closer to what’s true. The disciplines of the humanities: literature, psychology, history, anthropology, foreign languages, and so on, train the mind to make better and better judgments about the categories of humanity and the values we assign to them. If there are cages to get out of, it’s helpful to know words which open doors. If language builds the selves of others and our own, better language will build more authentic relationships.

The greatest unrecognized and unheralded benefit of the study of foreign languages and cultures in the context of a liberal arts education is the refinement of our psychological faculties. It’s not just about jobs; it’s not just resumé padding; it’s not about being able to read the menu when you go abroad. These graduates take with them a unique gift of consciousness: the intense awareness of multiplicity—in nature, in persons, in art, religion, and social behavior. This cognitive faculty—and the spiritually evolved judgment it confers, which resists the facile packaging of others—might facilitate the collaborative hopes of mankind.

Yesterday, I watched on TV as workers put the top spire onto One World Trade Center to bring it to a total height of 1776 feet. I thought about the men and women who worked on it, and their parents, and grandparents, who built the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building. This poem I’m going to read to you now, about building skyscrapers, came to mind as a way of recognizing the parents, the college administrators and staff, the department faculty and instructors, who supplied the intellectual and moral scaffolding for these young men and women to stand on as they build a new world.

“The Cathedral Builders”
by John Ormond
They climbed on sketchy ladders towards God,
with winch and pulley hoisted hewn rock into heaven,
inhabited the sky with hammers,
defied gravity,
deified stone,
took up God’s house to meet him,
and came down to their suppers and small beer,
every night slept, lay with their smelly wives,
quarrelled and cuffed the children,
lied, spat, sang, were happy, or unhappy,
and every day took to the ladders again,
impeded the rights of way of another summer’s swallows,
grew greyer, shakier,
became less inclined to fix a neighbour’s roof of a fine evening,
saw naves sprout arches, clerestories soar,
cursed the loud fancy glaziers for their luck,
somehow escaped the plague,
got rheumatism,
decided it was time to give it up,
to leave the spire to others,
stood in the crowd, well back from the vestments at the consecration,
envied the fat bishop his warm boots,
cocked a squint eye aloft,
and said, “I bloody did that.”

The speech was given during the graduation exercise ceremony on Saturday, May 11, 2013.

Kaitlyn Rogers: FLL Major Extraordinario

FLL Major Kaitlyn Rogers in a traditional Mayan huipil and corte dress (Guatemala).

FLL Major Kaitlyn Rogers in a traditional Mayan huipil and corte dress (Guatemala).

The first impression you get when you meet Kaitlyn Rogers for the first time is that you are in front of a very intelligent and inquisitive person. Her sparkling eyes are particularly memorable: they don’t simply contemplate the world; they also constantly weigh in, inquiring and conversing with everything around her.

Kaitlyn, a double major in Spanish and Biology, is president of the FLL Spanish Club, and an aspiring medical student. As a Jefferson Scholar, she recently participated in an experiential learning trip to Bermuda.

She was my student several  semesters ago, and she was outstanding. The following is the full version of an email interview I conducted with her.

Samuel Sotillo: First, could you tell us a little bit about your background? Where are you from? Where did you go to HS? What are you majoring in at NC State?

Kaitlyn Rogers: I grew up in Chapel Hill, NC about 35 minutes away from the NC State campus. I attended East Chapel Hill High School where, in addition to all the “typical” classes, I also took four years of Spanish. I knew I wanted to continue studying Spanish in college so I declared a double major in Human Biology and Spanish.

SS: Why did you choose your FLL Major?

KR: I started studying Spanish in 5th grade and have been taking Spanish classes ever since. By my senior year of high school I’d gotten to the point where I could hold a (slightly disjointed) conversation in Spanish and I didn’t want to lose that ability. I also knew that studying Spanish would make me more employable. I’m hoping to attend Medical School post graduation and speaking Spanish will not only help my application but, long term, make me a more effective doctor.

SS: What opportunities within your FLL Program have been most beneficial to your education? Of these, which would you recommend to incoming FLL students?

KR: I know that many of the foreign language programs have clubs and would recommend that any foreign language student, whether they’re a beginner or advanced, check those clubs out. I joined the Spanish Club at NC State in the fall of 2011 and I was elected president of the club for the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 school years which has given me a lot of great opportunities to not only make friends but also to learn about Hispanic heritage and culture (the subjects of our group meetings). Spanish Club also hosts conversation groups which have given me the opportunity to practice my speaking skills with other people who are also passionate about learning Spanish. Practice really is the only way to learn a new language and conversation groups, whether they’re part of a class or offered by a club, provide an excellent, low stakes setting for people to make friends and become better, more confident speakers.

The other major opportunity I’ve had (and would recommend for every foreign language student) was to travel abroad. In my case, I studied in Guatemala for seven and a half weeks this past summer with NC State’s Ethnographic Field School. While I was in Guatemala I conducted 21 formal and informal interviews asking about the Guatemalan healthcare system, how and when patients decide to go to the doctor, and some of the obstacles doctors and patients encounter when it comes to providing and receiving quality healthcare. Beyond my actual research project, I learned a lot about Guatemalan and indigenous culture. I wore the traditional Mayan huipil and corte (blouse and skirt), made tortillas on a wood burning stove, watched the Disney Channel dubbed in Spanish and had long conversations with my host mother about school, the cost of eggs in the market, her family, my family and what it means to be Guatemalan, indigenous or American. My trip will be useful from a curricular standpoint, allowing me to get an Anthropology Minor as well as providing me with the material for my Thomas Jefferson Scholars capstone project. Beyond that, however, I learned a great deal about myself and the beauties of a culture that is both similar and different from my own (something which can only be touched on in a classroom setting).

SS: What does it mean to be a Jefferson Scholar? Do you think that being a FLL Major may have helped you to be better prepared as a Jefferson Scholar?

KR: I was invited to join the Thomas Jefferson Scholars Program in my senior year of high school after indicating on my NC State application that I was considering double majoring in Spanish and Biology.  The Jefferson Scholars are a small group of about 40 students all of whom are double majoring in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHASS) and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS). Every student in the group is double majoring in the sciences and humanities and many of us are FLL majors. We meet biweekly to listen to guest speakers and discuss any club business but, more than that, we are involved in several service projects around campus (Shack-A-Thon and The Warming Tree), we just hosted our inaugural Distinguished Lecture Series, and we take two trips each year, one in the fall and one in the spring. This past May the Jefferson Scholars Program introduced a new, international element to the program inviting all the juniors and seniors to travel to Bermuda for a week where we learned about marine biology, ecology, and the island’s culture.

SS: What community engagement opportunities related to your FLL Major have most influenced your professional vision and practice? Was your involvement with any of these community activities based on a faculty/staff recommendation or course requirement?

KR: Last fall I got an email about an internship with the Urban Ministries of Wake County Open Door Clinic. I mentioned in my cover letter that I was a Spanish major who was very comfortable speaking Spanish and, for that reason, was awarded the internship. I spent three months working with English and Spanish speaking applicants in the eligibility department and, in the spring, started working as a nurse. Although the clinic has interpreters who help with Spanish speaking patients (and I often get their help with taking patient histories), it’s great to not be reliant upon their availability to check in a patient or schedule a follow up appointment. Speaking Spanish was what got my foot in the door at the clinic and has been incredibly useful in my work since then.  I’ve had my moments of confusion when patients use unfamiliar words but I’m continuing to learn and this experience has reaffirmed my desire to not only be a doctor, but to be a doctor who is fluent in Spanish.

SS: How has your FLL coursework and research influenced your decision to pursue a particular focus or area within your field?

KR: I’d love to do something like Doctors Without Borders and am definitely interested in the Peace Corps but working at the clinic in Raleigh has also illustrated the need for Spanish speaking doctors locally. I was initially interested in going into pathology or anesthesiology which are fields of medicine with low patient contact. My work in the clinic has made me realize how much I enjoy working with patients, however, which, combined with my Spanish degree, has me more interested in fields where I will not only have more patient contact but contact with Spanish speaking patients.

SS: What is the most challenging aspect of your FLL Major? What’s the most rewarding?

KR: The biggest challenge for me as a Spanish major has always been mastering Spanish grammar. I love being able to speak with native Spanish speakers at my job, in a store, or while I was studying abroad but sometimes find that I don’t have the necessary language skills to understand or be understood. These moments are always frustrating but especially in a classroom when poor grammar and an incorrect conjugation can affect your grade. Fortunately, these moments of absolute confusion are becoming less frequent as I continue my Spanish major and my Spanish language skills improve. It’s incredibly rewarding to reread a short story which I struggled with in high school only to realize that I understand it perfectly now.  All those classroom discussions of literature have also increased my confidence in my spoken ability and having an actual conversation in Spanish has become easier. I still have those moments when I realize my Spanish skills are completely inadequate for the task at hand (I avoid speaking Spanish over the telephone at all costs), but they are less frequent than they were three years ago.

SS: When you think of the future, what gives you a sense of hope? What concerns you?

KR: I won’t graduate until December of 2014 due to my dual degrees but I’m already starting to think about life after college and what that will entail. Like a lot of soon to be graduates I’m looking forward to finishing college and continuing on with the next stage in my life (which will hopefully be Med School) but I’m also worried about studying for the MCAT, the med school application process and creating backup plans. More long term, I look forward to seeing gay marriage legalized in all fifty states. I’m delighted to see healthcare coverage expanding here in the United States and hope that trend will continue until everyone will have access to the medical care they need regardless of their personal finances or citizenship.

SS: What’s next for you after graduation? What are you looking forward to?

KR: I’m planning to graduate from NC State in December of 2014. After that I hope to go to medical school although I’m also considering taking a gap year (or two) to join the Peace Corps or another volunteer organization. I will most definitely miss NC State and all of the friends I’ve made here but I’m also looking forward to being somewhere new.

By Samuel Sotillo, Lecturer/Webmaster, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.