 Thank you for coming tonight. Thank you for my colleagues in the Department of Modern Languages for helping organize this event and for the students for attending this wonderful event, and most importantly to our panelists who have graciously accepted our invitation to come speak to you about some of the exciting career options that are available to students who pursue degrees in modern languages and literatures. I'd also like to thank Kim Nikolenko from Career Planning Services, who has had a great hand in putting this panel together. So I'd like to thank you all for coming, and I'd like to tell you briefly about the format for the evening. It's going to be fairly informal. I will introduce each panelist individually, and then I'll turn the mic over to them. You guys can speak for as long as you'd like about your career path, share your insights about how your time spent at Fairfield University prepared you for your careers, your professional lives after Fairfield University, and how your experiences perhaps studying abroad, or your skills have made you competitive in today's increasingly global marketplaces. So I'm sure we're all looking forward to hearing from you. After the end, after you have spoken, we'll open the floor up to questions from the audience. I'm sure you all have questions about how you can use some of the skills that you're acquiring now in your core language classes or in your upper-level classes when you get out there into the workforce. So we're all looking forward to hearing from you. We have Zac Gross, and Zac is program manager for Simply Smiles. We have Alexander Pusciolo, who is a business analyst at GE Capital. We have our old friend, Carol Pciolo, who was taught for us at Fairfield in the past, who is at Yale University. We have James Goldstein, who teaches at Xavier High School. We have Jennifer Rawlinson, who is a registered nurse and works at St. Vincent's Medical Center. And we have Dave Guzman, who I'm very interested to hear about your personal interests and hobbies. So without further ado, we can begin with Zac Gross. And if you don't mind, I'm taking this floor, and thank you for being here. So thank you very much for inviting me here. You said I could talk for as long as I wanted, so. I think we seem like a fun group. We'll try to make this fun for everyone. I graduated from Fairfield in 2012, along with Allie. And I majored in Spanish while I was here. And I kind of feel like I cheated in terms of my career path, because I was involved with the not-for-profit organization that I currently work for, Simply Smiles, since I was in high school, actually. And so I volunteered with them for a week in 2008 after I graduated high school, became an intern throughout my summers when I was at Fairfield, and fortunately was offered a job once I graduated. But going on that experience to Mexico as a volunteer at our project locations down in Oaxaca in southern Mexico, I guess it validated my decision to be a language major. I came in as an English major and a Spanish minor and flip-flopped those when I was here during my freshman year. I just thought that studying a language would be really fun, and I already knew English pretty well, so I figured I should study something that I had a real passion for and that just really fascinated me. So I loved my time when I was here. I had great professors. The language department is really great here at Fairfield. I studied abroad in Nicaragua through the Fairfield program that we have with our sister university down there, Uca, and that was another wonderful experience. It really taught me a lot to just be comfortable in my own skin. I had never really been away from my family and friends for that period of time, especially taking courses in another language was a little intimidating for me, but all my classes were in Spanish. It was a great opportunity to be forced to speak a language. I had spent time in Mexico a few weeks over the summers practicing my Spanish, but really when I was in Nicaragua, I had to really practice my language skills and it taught me to just kind of go for things and not think as much about how people would judge me or it just really taught me how to be more self-confident. It was also a lot of fun. So I would encourage you all to study abroad and consider the program in Nicaragua, especially. Currently, during my job at Simply Smiles, I do a lot. My title is Senior Program Manager. That is just a catch-all term that means that I do a lot of things. If you read my, that's usually how managerial positions go. You can read in my bio that I have been trained in how to test fecal samples. It's not something I expected to do after I graduated, but we do medical clinics down in southern Mexico. So that's something that I learned. I now have my bus driver's license because we drive a bus out to South Dakota on the Native American Reservation where we work. I just do a lot of diverse things, not things that I weren't necessarily thinking about when I was studying at Fairfield, but I think the curriculum here and especially in the Modern Language Department just made me a more well-rounded person, someone who was able to more ably think on their feet and just kind of, I don't know. Just have fun. So that is it for now, I think, but I will pass it along to Allie. Can everyone hear me now? Is anyone out there a business, also sitting, studying in the School of Business at all? Okay. So, I was a finance major and I minored in Spanish and environmental studies and I'm currently a business analyst at GE Capital. I've been there for about one and a half years and before that I was in a rotational program also at GE in the Energy Financial Services business. So, I'll get into a little bit about what I do later, but as a junior I received an email from the Donal School of Business and it said apply for this internship at Energy Financial Services at GE and I thought, wow, that's perfect. It combines my fields of study with finance and environmental and when I chose my major and minors I just did what I was passionate about and never thought that I could find something that would combine them, so that was awesome. I went for it, got the internship and I really, I do think that maybe having the language experiences that I had at Fairfield on my resume may have helped me to get that initial interview, just being a Spanish minor and then my study abroad in Seville, Spain and then also just a funny story side note, I came in as a freshman at Fairfield, went to the activity fair, I was all excited to sign up for all the clubs and activities and I went around and I said, where's the Spanish club? And people said, oh, I don't think we have a Spanish club, so I decided to start a Spanish club and it was just a low key fun thing to to keep Spanish culture and speaking alive on campus. So just having that on my resume, I think maybe have differentiated me from other candidates applying to the internship. So at the end of the summer, I received a full-time offer for after graduation, which I was very excited about. I loved my time there, so after graduation I started the program, which was two years and you rotate between different types of energy and different types of business within the company. So you're able to choose your top three choices and for my second rotation, I chose the international portfolio team and I basically sought out opportunities to use my Spanish because I'm so passionate about it and I didn't want to lose it. So I basically made it known that I wanted to work on any deal that was in a Spanish-speaking country or any opportunity I had to do anything in all of Spanish, so some examples of things I got to do, I got to translate some legal documents from Spanish to English, which was really fun for me. I also was, like I said, put on deals in Spanish-speaking countries, so I worked on a cogeneration plant in Mexico, I worked on Solar Farm in Spain, amongst others, and for example, one of the deals we had to do a negotiation with a Spanish-speaking team and my team, we were negotiating English, but they would have the team we were negotiating with would have side conversations in Spanish, so my team kind of looked to me to ask what they were saying or kind of get an idea of what was going on in their little side conversation, so just things like that have been really fun opportunities for me and I feel like adding those to my daily work, it's something that I'm passionate about, something that I'm really interested in, so it really helps me to commit and succeed more in the workplace, so I encourage you all, whatever field you go into, to really find something you're passionate about and work towards that, so I mentioned I studied abroad in Seville, Spain, and that's where I really worked on my fluency, I lived with a host family, I also was on the swim team at Fairfield here, so going abroad, my first priority was to find a team to train with, so I found a team to train with in Seville and that was one of the most intimidating experiences of my life and one of the most incredible experiences. I walked into the team, they really didn't speak English at all and I didn't know any swimming terms, obviously, and the team was all the swimmers my age were like, who is this American butterfly girl coming to take our spot? And I tried to tell them no, I'm just here to stay in shape, I'm not trying to take anyone's spot, and they really, it was hard for me to fit in, but they ended up being lifelong friends and I was just talking to one of them yesterday, so really if you do get the chance to study abroad, really go out of your comfort zone, it will be worth it, I promise, and you may have an amazing experience. And as far as career is, if you have that on your resume or you bring it up in an interview, you never know who may be the hiring manager that may have studied abroad and is really impressed with your ability to step out of your comfort zone and try new things. And then just some tips, I really, really can't stress enough, networking, networking, networking, I'm sure you guys have all heard that a million times, but once I was in GE, that's how I continued to go to the next rotation that I wanted, was through networking, hey, can I just grab a coffee with you here about what you do? That's how I was able to get my first choice for the next rotation and then, ultimately, my current job, I switched from energy financial services to GE Capital Americas, it's all through networking, so can't stress that enough and take advantage of all Fairfield has to offer, the Career Planning Center, any clubs and activities within the Modern Languages area and career fairs, things like that, so, thanks. Okay, can you hear me all right? So just for curiosity, what's the breakdown here? How many seniors do we have in the room? Okay, yeah, so you're kind of staring this down in the face, it's crunch time. How many of you have a good idea of what you wanna be when you grow up? Excellent, all right, that's one, hey, that's good too, maybe, all right, that's great, yeah? Michelle, yeah, you have, yeah. Well, the reason I asked this is because I came to Fairfield in the midst of a career change and I really, I thought for a while I knew what I wanted to be and then I realized, nah, I didn't really think, nah, that wasn't gonna work. I was gonna do something else and so the opportunities that I had here, I think were really shaped me in significant ways. Today, when I was getting ready, I work in a digital humanities lab at Yale University. It's an experimental sort of thing. We're trying to do something for research in the humanities that's done a lot in the sciences and it means that I spend my days asking questions in the humanities using, and answering those questions using computers in some way. And so I was asking around the room and one of the advantages is I get to work with a ton of talented, amazing people and so I said I was coming here this evening and I was speaking and I said, you know, how many languages do we know? There are about five of us right now who postdocs in the lab and we have a designer user experience person and so we started going through the list and I wrote it down just so that I wouldn't forget. We have working in the lab, Hebrew, people, there are people who know Hebrew, French, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Italian, German, Chinese, Mandarin, and I don't know the difference like how that works but they were keen to point that out and Spanish and also Portuguese. And so that already, not to mention then C++, Ruby on Rails, all the artificial, right, all the programming languages which I thought was really interesting that there was this compatibility, right, between people that are accustomed to learning human languages, how easily they take that also to programming languages, actually are pretty much a cinch because computers are really stupid so it's not nearly as difficult as learning a human language. The other thing that struck me though was study abroad. I asked my colleagues and three of us were rotary exchange students in high school. One of the students was an Erasmus fellow that's the European equivalent. And then there was another one who had done, she did study abroad in Japan. Oh, that's right, I didn't put Japanese in there. She did study abroad in Japan while she was in college. So it's just to give you an idea that this is not, we're not talking about a part of a university that is focused necessarily on foreign languages and in fact, we bring to bear though all of that knowledge that we've all brought with ourselves on our own work and I think it's really important. I know that that was important for us when we were hiring our most recent developer. We were hiring someone, we needed someone who knew how to speak to humans and to machines. And so one of the criteria that we established was, well, he's got to know at least a couple languages because otherwise it'd be kind of embarrassing for him too, right? And that was really, it wasn't just about the knowledge of the language, it was also the idea of a worldview. This is the field that I'm working in right now is sort of an experimental field. My PhD is in Italian language and literature but I'm now working in a field that really has yet to be defined. And so I like to think that we're kind of making it up as we go along, but by the same token, you also need a very high tolerance for being able to communicate clearly, being able to tolerate a certain amount of risk, take a little bit of risk in your work, being able to tolerate a certain amount of ambiguity. And these are all things that I think have come along with me as a result of both my language learning and my time spent abroad. I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that the support that I received from my language professors and then colleagues here at Fairfield was absolutely transformative for me. It really gave me sort of the idea that this is something that I can do, that this is something that I can reach for. And I think that that's something that is established within a language classroom many times. You see your language instructors far more often. You're forced to embarrass yourself far more often in front of your language professors. They come to know you as you start out speaking like a two-year-old Spanish, actually no two-year-old Spanish children speak better than you were speaking, but still you start to learn and you're in a space where you're allowed to grow and stretch yourself in really significant ways. And I think that that too also when it comes time and your instructors may not like this or not, but when it comes time for a letter of recommendation, I would definitely hit up a language instructor because I think that they can speak to your cross-cultural competence. They can speak to your communicative skills and they can speak to your hardworking ethos because you know after having gone through your language requirements for the major or for the minor that you definitely have a certain level of hardworking, initiative within yourself. So I'll stop at that if you'd like to ask questions afterwards. I'd be more than happy to answer them both on digital humanities and on changing careers. I think that many of you may find yourselves 10 years, 15 years down the line in a similar position, but for now I'll cede it to my ex-classmate James. Thank you, can you hear me? Yes? All right, well, yeah, thank you for having me. As Carol mentioned in a few months, it'll be our 10-year reunion from graduating. Sorry, can you phone the microphone? Yeah, okay, so soon we'll have our 10-year reunion. So this is my first time back on campus in a while and I was just reminded of the initial tour I took when I came to Fairfield. And I remember the tour guide in a really awkward moment asking us to look around the group and then telling us this stat that a certain percentage of alumni at Fairfield end up getting married by the time they graduate. Do you guys remember this stat? Well, I didn't marry an alumnus from Fairfield. However, I think by the end of this discussion you'll realize that I think my decision and my major here at Fairfield did lead me to my future wife. So we'll get there at the end. I came to Fairfield very much interested in being a history major. History was always what I think I did very well and what I liked doing the research, the archival work, the essay writing. But what I liked to read about and what I liked to research was Italian history, culture. You name it. So the double major in history Italian turned out to be a blessing. I didn't intend to be a double major. In fact, I thought I would place out of Italian when I came here because I took Italian in high school and I'm so happy that I didn't because it brought me into this room now, but also as you'll see it really did shape my future. The year abroad was key for me. I went abroad as a junior. I did my first semester in Syracusa and my second semester in Florence. Syracusa really immersed me in Italian, particularly Southern Italian culture. And then Florence really taught me how to really work the libraries and work the research aspect of my studies here at Fairfield. So it was very different going from Syracusa to Florence but one that ended up being very rewarding, particularly when I graduated because I was looking at history and PhD programs, but I was also contacted by Fairfield, which encouraged me to apply for a Fulbright grant to go to Italy to study. And I don't know whether or not any of you are interested in the Fulbright program, but Fairfield is excellent in not only encouraging you to apply, but walking you through the whole application process. One very key component of the application process is that you need to show somehow your competence in the language of the country that you plan to study. So had I not been a major in Italian here, that would have pretty much destroyed my application because the dialect that my grandparents spoke was not gonna get me entirely for that. So like I said, during that year, as a Fulbrighter, I really learned how to work the archival bureaucracy that you might encounter if you go this route. But I also learned to teach. I spent a few hours a week teaching at an Italian high school, and that's when I started to question whether or not I wanted to be a full-time scholar or a scholar teacher or just a teacher. I ended up applying to grad school, I ended up at SUNY Binghamton where I worked with a wonderful Italian historian, of Venice in particular, and he even said it when I applied that he was excited to take me in simply because of my Italian competence, because so many students who do go this route, go to grad school, spend the first few years just learning the language of the country that they plan to study. And that can probably talk to Carol more about this, but the idea of not knowing the language when you enter into a PhD program could be detrimental, so that was wonderful. Within the first year of grad school, I realized that as much as I liked the research, I did like the teaching aspect a lot, so I knew that I also had an apartment that was empty in the West Village waiting for me because my mom had moved, so that also was a bit of a reason to think about going back to New York, but I didn't know what I would do other than teach. I am a graduate of a Jesuit high school, that's also, recently I came to Fairfield, so I looked at Jesuit schools in the Tri-State area, and there's a Jesuit school in Jersey City called St. Peter's Prep that had an opening for a history teacher and an English teacher, and it was both. You could not apply to do one or the other, you had to do both. And so I figured I just might as well apply and I might as well go into the interview. At the interview, I didn't spend much time talking about my non-English qualification. I hardly talked about my history qualification. The headmaster, the principal at the school, was a foreign language teacher himself. He taught German, and he just wanted to talk to me about Dr. Goldfield here at Fairfield. They were acquaintances, not so much friends, but he knew him, he knew him well, and just we spoke about the Rossias Goldfield method and being a TA here, and I got the job, and I didn't really, he didn't even know watch my demo lesson, which was for an English class. So the history class was fine, I knew what I was doing. Just to explain, if I imagine some of you were planning on going in the field of teaching. So for the English class, I was teaching seniors, and it was my first year teaching, high school seniors. And they had four options for English. You could have done AP English. You could have done honors English. They could have done elective English. And then there was English four, and English four was for the guys who didn't choose anything. That's the class that I was given, English four. The least motivated. The bonus, what was excellent for me was that there was no set book list. The department chair just said I could choose, I think it was 10 texts, or nine, nine. And the only real literature classes I had ever taken were the ones at Fairfield. They were just Italian literature. So that became the syllabus for these kids. I started with bocaccio because teenage boys, they loved it. They ended up recreating cycles of detention based on Dante's cycles of the inferno. When it was a nice day, I took them out to the quad and they read each other, Petrarchan sonnets. At one point a student questioned my qualification for being an English teacher. He said, is this just what you learned as a student in Italian? I said, yes. I think that kid actually went to Fairfield. I know he applied. And I liked that class so much more than I did the history class. It was lovely, it was great. I ended up leaving St. Peter's Prep for my alma mater, Xavier High School, which is in the city, a bit closer to home. And now I teach AP European history to seniors where, again, the first part of the curriculum is all renaissance Italy, early modern Italy, which is great. I'm active in the Italian club there. I help the Italian teachers on trips to Italy or other great cultural venues in New York. I'm working on an Italian exchange with students from the school in Calabria where I did work. And in the faculty lounge, I realized very quickly that the coolest, most cultured, hippest teachers in the building were the foreign language teachers. And that's where I noticed Colleen and we're getting married in May. So thank you. Hi, how's that? Okay. Are there any nurses here? Nurses to be? Oh, there are. Okay, okay. I think I recognized some people. Okay, so my name's Jennifer. I graduated from Fairfield in 2001. And I think I do need to say that Dr. Farrell and I have been friends since we were 12 years old. And we tend to giggle like school children when we're together. So I'm just not gonna look her way. So when I came to Fairfield and definitely, you know, early on, I really had no idea what I wanted to do. You know, I was really envious of my peers who had a much clearer path than I did. I just didn't know what I wanted to do. And I think like a lot of my colleagues here have mentioned, they just sort of did what they loved and just sort of immersed themselves in what they enjoyed and let the path kind of be created from that. And that's pretty much what I did. I majored in international studies and Spanish. I love Spanish. I always did. I thought it was really interesting. You could talk to other people in front of other people and they wouldn't know what you were talking about. I'm trying to instill that in my children, but it's a work in progress. So while I was here, I was heavily involved in the Head Start program over on Bridgeport. I really have to say that it changed my thinking and my path and my way of life in many ways. Seeing so much poverty, so close to affluence, really boggled my mind. It was my first exposure, I think, to that much diversity. Let's see, I also studied abroad in Sevilla, Spain. I loved it. I think it was a great immersion. I met up with Dr. Farrell in Spain. We had some good times. But I would have to say, I would agree, being immersed in living with the family really forces you to be uncomfortable. And I think sometimes being uncomfortable really helps you get that foot forward and really change it in many ways. And of course, the university there, the classes were in Spanish, so that was, of course, incredibly helpful with improving in language. I also did a mission trip with the chapel, not the chapel, the campus ministry. Thank you. I did a trip to Tijuana, Mexico. And I didn't consider myself the group translator, but anytime we were together and we needed to have a conversation with people, they just pushed me in the front and they were like, yeah, yeah, Jen, you go talk to them. So again, I was kind of uncomfortable, but it all worked out, it was fine. And I also have to credit Fairfield as a Jesuit university. The whole idea of giving back and working with your community, I don't know if I knew that I was embracing it at the time I was here, but I really was and I have ever since. So when I left Fairfield, I still didn't really know what I wanted to do. And so I was looking in New York City to start working and I saw a job for a foster care agency and I thought, okay, I used to work with kids. I could probably do that. And it really, it changed my life forever. When they hired me, they said, oh, I see you speak Spanish. You're our bilingual case worker now. And I thought, oh my God, what am I doing? And I'll never forget on my first day, here I am from Connecticut. They said, okay, here are the trains you need to take to Brooklyn and you're gonna go to the low-income housing. And you need to go do some translating and intervention and interviewing with the Spanish-speaking family. Call us if you need any help. And I was just horrified. But I rose to the occasion like I think we all do. Made my way there. I think it was like three hours late. I kept getting on the express. I kept seeing my stop and I kept going by and I'm like, why isn't stopping? I don't understand. It was pitch black, I'm sure. Anyways, it all worked out just fine. And I'd have to say that my colleagues at the foster care agency that I worked at, they were incredibly supportive. If you need help, let me know. I'm so glad to help you. You can do this, you got this. At no point did I really feel like I was put on the spot or I was asked to do anything that really I couldn't do. It's just, I really needed to feel confident and comfortable just doing it. So that was a big turning point, I think. So while I was working there, I went to grad school to get my master's in social work. I loved what I was doing and I wanted to be better at it. So I did that for a few years while I was working and got my master's. And when I got my master's, I went to work for a children's law firm called Lawyers for Children. And there we represented children in foster care, adoption, visitation and custody cases. And if you were a social worker in New York City, that's where you wanted to be. So I was like, I felt very honored to be there. As you can imagine, the need for the Spanish language continued there. I did a lot more interviewing, custody, people that were there for custody cases. I did a lot of interviewing of parents of, you know, infants who of course could not be interviewed. I did a lot of home visits, a lot of home assessments, interviewing a lot of foster parents, pre-adoptive parents and even, you know, older young people who were coming from another country, you know, to see what it is that they wanted for their plans. So you can imagine the need for Spanish, you know, continued. And so while I was there, I sort of started thinking about career changing. Not that I was unhappy, but you know, I was starting, you know, starting a family and I knew that that was gonna be hard for me to continue with, you know, a family living out in Connecticut. So I started taking some classes in nursing. So I would leave work in the city and I would come back to Bridgeport and I would go to school until midnight and just do the same thing over and over again while I was pregnant. So, you know, and that all started with this conversation with some great coworkers. You know, well, what would you do if you had to do it all over? You know, and, you know, my father had recently passed away. I spent a lot of time in the hospitals in Boston and I thought, you know, these people really did a lot and they really helped me, you know, my family, myself. You know, I really respected their work and I would love to do that. And my coworkers said, well, why don't you? I said, it's too late. I already have my master's. Like, this is just, it's just not gonna happen. But then when I sat down and really looked at it, I realized it was a reality. So I, that's what I did. I went back to school full time. At Yukon in Stanford and then I graduated from nursing school. And then I thought, okay, well, what am I gonna do now? So there were a few stops along the way, but I ended up in family birthing. I worked at Bridgeport Hospital, I now work at St. Vincent's. And as you can imagine, being in an urban center, there's a great need for other languages, especially Spanish. So I currently am one of two Spanish speaking staff on the floor. And in addition to the patients that I have, I do a lot of translation for doctors. I do a lot of translation in the NICU because there's a credible amount of teaching, new parents. And I kind of help translate for other patients. In the hospitals, they do have a lot of resources for other languages. And most common is a Marty. I don't know if anyone's familiar with that. It's essentially like a FaceTime sort of live person on a computer that you interact with. So you hear them, you see them and you talk to them. And that's what the nurses typically use as their resource for other languages. It is a great resource, but nothing can replace the person-to-person contact. With that being said, as a social worker, if you're doing an interview, you want to interview your client. You don't want to turn to another person and have a three-way conversation. So back to nursing. So it is a resource, but it can't replace the one-on-one interaction. So when I had the pleasure of visiting Dr. Ferrell's class, I gave a couple of examples of recent interactions I've had with some patients. So one was, I was getting ready to leave for the day and a patient came in in precipitous labor, meaning she was having her baby immediately, like immediately. She came to the desk, was speaking in Spanish, was hysterical, incredibly uncomfortable. And my co-workers said, I don't understand, who are you, what's going on? And I just happened to be walking by and they said, get the Marty, get the Marty. Well, the Marty was broken. And they said, can you come here for a minute? So what's your name? She was not known to the hospital. She hadn't been coming to our clinic, she just walked in. So they had absolutely no knowledge of her. Important things, what's your name? Have you done this before? Do you want something for pain and do you have allergies? I mean, these are like the basic things that we need to know. So I was able to get those from her and I stayed with her through her delivery. Now, certainly she would have been able to deliver her baby, not speaking any language. The nurses could have imitated, I'm sure they could have figured it out and it would have been fine, but it wouldn't have been ideal and it wouldn't have been the best situation it could have been. So I felt very proud and helpful that I could help her manage her delivery. Another example is I had a patient who had just had a caesarean section. She was a very young teenager who only spoke Spanish and had a lot of other difficult issues associated with the birth. And when I came to meet with her, she was lying in bed, she hadn't stood up, she had lots of lines, she was uncomfortable, she couldn't speak to anybody and she had a newborn baby in a bassinet laying right next to her. And it was so moving to be able to communicate with her. She was so vulnerable and I think we all understand that feeling of being uncomfortable. And I couldn't imagine being in her situation and I was so happy that I could help her through it, not only instruct her but support her and educate her, not only to take care of herself, but to take care of her baby. Those are just a couple of examples. So just to get back to what I was saying, I followed my heart, I did what I loved, I love what I do and if you follow what you love, you'll never work a day in your life, so. Thank you. I'm just getting over a little cold, so apologize. Yeah, sure. Quick side note actually before we get dive in, we actually just hired a student to be graduated from Fairfield over at Kayak and super exciting to have a stag on board, but also super depressing to hear about all the fun she's having in her senior year, so it's very nostalgic. So as the sheet says, my name is Daniel Guzman. I graduated in 2008 and I'm currently an account manager at Kayak, we're based in Stamford. So take it even a step further. My mom is Colombian, my dad's Chilean. In my family, I was the first one to go to college. So super exciting, no pressure. I have no older siblings who I can rely on, so my dad always had this dream of me being a doctor. So seeing as how he was probably going to be fronting my whole school course, I was like, sure dad, I'll give her a shot just for you. So my freshman year, come in pre-med and I spent seven days in the library studying biology and doing labs and I realized this is just not for me. So I tell dad, I hate dad, I gave it a shot. This is just not gonna work, so I'm gonna switch. And before I keep going, there's three points that I really wanna touch on that Fairfield really helped me and I think they can help you and those three points are and hopefully I touch on them throughout my talking is discovery, people networking and passion. So now I've told my dad that I'm not gonna be pre-med. He's heartbroken, but we move forward. I decided to go into economics, give it a shot. I realized I'm not really good with numbers. So I'm like, all right, this is not gonna work out. So then I say, all right, I'm really good at writing papers. Maybe I like reading, let's do literature. I realized I'm a sophomore and a junior, I don't like reading, I'd rather just go to the beach and hang out with my friends. So I'm like, all right, this is not working. So I go and find my advisor and I literally, we have like a two hour heart to heart. We're talking about what you love, who are you and we're diving in and we kind of just ties back to my mom being Colombian and my dad being Chilean. And I like their cultures and the way Colombia works, Chile works and different economies. So we land on, maybe international studies is for you. I'm like, yeah, sounds interesting. We give it a shot and I fall in love. I believe the teacher right then was Tarianne Jones. I don't know if she's still here. So we connected really well as a teaching student. Her class was great. I remember writing my capstone and I did it on Columbia and I did, Columbia back in the nineties, I don't know if any of you know it was terrible, drug trade, violence. It was probably the most dangerous place you can go to at a certain point in time. But in 2008, it was completely different, but everyone had that stigma of Colombia's terrible. It's terrible, it's terrible. So my capstone paper was progress in Colombia through leadership and highlighted how Colombia's different. It's worth going to check out. It's actually a big tourist destination and loved everything about it, great class and it was a great ending to my Fairfield career. And then I graduate and in 2008, that's when the economic collapse happened. So again, not having any really resources at home, like how do I network? How do I get here and there? I didn't really have any luck finding a good job opportunity. It kind of stroke out left and right. So I ended up managing a restaurant for a year back in my hometown of Tarotown in Washington County. As a 22, 23 year old working 70, 80 hours a week, Friday, Saturdays when your friends are out having fun, not ideal. It is what it is. You kind of just make the best of any situation and you learn, you adapt, you take in everything that you can. Our head cook was from El Salvador, so my Spanish skills came very much in handy when there was issues with customers not happy or the staff and understanding what he's saying. I definitely was a godsend to the restaurant. Did that for a year. I kept in touch with the Fairfield Career Center, Kathleen Borgman, if any of you know her, love her, send my best to her. She always, we always emailed, we always kept in touch and she put me into my next job opportunity, which was in South Norwalk for a satire publication. I was doing some e-commerce, I was doing some social media, kind of a jack of all trades. Two years there, wouldn't say it was my passion. I took the next step and I became a recruiter. So essentially being in sales. I never thought I'd be in sales, gave it a shot. You know, it just wasn't for me. So at that point, I was 20 years old. I'm like, I need to find something that I love, I'm passionate about. Through my contacts at the recruiting firm, I landed at Kayak. In two weeks, I'm gonna reach my four year anniversary at Kayak and as of recently, I've been asked to lead the LADAM team for Kayak. Latin America is a really big focus for Kayak right now. We started with Brazil, now we have Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Chile. So in the course of a year and a half, two year, you know, we've grown 10-fold in Latin America. The team went from one to about six and Kayak's only 400 people. So to go from one to six in a year, it's pretty big growth for just one specific team in Kayak. So that kind of takes my whole journey full circle where, yeah, I got a minor in Spanish, my mom and dad, Chilean, Colombian. I did a great major international studies where I got to write in Colombia, but didn't really actually apply my language skills and then just through networking, discovering what I love and chasing a passion, I landed at Kayak and it was a great opportunity, a great company, great people, and really a company that wants to make the travel industry better, not just here in the US, but globally. All those pieces really came together and now spearheading the growth of Latin America, really engaging with clients in Spanish, from the era of Mexico to the LADAMs, to all the major travel players in that region, it kind of, like I said, brings a full circle where, if you apply yourself, your network, you discover what you're really passionate about and work towards getting that passion fulfilled. It's some of those things that Fairfield really taught me and helped me to land where I was. There were some bumps in the road, some hearts broken in the case of my dad, but seeing what I'm doing now, it's an opportunity that I'm really thankful for. Fairfield was an amazing four years in my life. It flew by, I feel like, and I hope that all of you are really taking it in as much as you can, expose yourself to different opportunities, meet new people. We're all gonna make our inner circle of great friends, but reach out to a new group. You never know who you might meet four or five years down the road that you guys can reconnect. They can land you the next opportunity or your next love interest or anything in between. Yeah, that's to me, so thank you. It was wonderful, thank you for sharing your stories. I found them very engaging and inspiring, even, and I'm sure that our students have a lot of questions. You've touched on a lot of similar points. I heard the word passion being mentioned quite a few times. People talking about uncertainty, not knowing what you wanted to do, and then finding your way, changing careers while in Fairfield and in after Fairfield, and I'm sure that these touch on a lot of questions that the students currently have as they face the future. So, I'm opening it up to you and I hope to hear your voice. Hi, thank you so much for being here today. It was extraordinarily helpful to listen to your advice. I'm a senior, I'm graduating today, so it's so helpful to hear everything on your wisdom and I was just wondering as language majors and minors, how would you specifically leverage your language, like the job process, like was that? It definitely came up. It sounds like it was a very common thing throughout whether it was in your current position or moving it into the application. Do you think something like writing your cover letter in that language that you speak, that could be advantageous? Like, how did you specifically distinguish yourself with the language skills? I didn't really leverage it, I was the only one on my team that spoke Spanish, so it was kind of just like it's you or no one. But we have hired for positions that need the language skills and it's definitely, we have an internal recruiter and she doesn't speak Spanish or Portuguese or the language that we need, so it's definitely paramount to understand that the candidate that we're interviewing understands the language fully. So I think that's actually a great idea. If you're reaching out to a position that specifically requires a language skill, why not leverage that you are fluent in that language because you need to be able to demonstrate it both written and verbally. And just reach out, network. LinkedIn should be for all you senior somewhere where you're on every day. If you see someone in a position that you're interested in, reach out maybe in Spanish and maybe try and schedule a call, a couple of coffee. I mean, if they're willing. I mean, a lot of people love to meet new people and if you catch the right person, it would never hurt. Can I just follow up on that? I would, again, when I spoke with the letter of recommendation, that would also address that. I think it's important also to be very clear as to your level of expertise. If you have sort of a working knowledge of a language as opposed to being fluent in a language and I think your language instructors can help you peg exactly where you are and what you should be declaring as your competence. And then I think also in the cover letter, it's important to point out that it's not just about the language. That it is something that this is part of sort of cross-cultural expertise that you've developed and whether that's through study abroad or whether it's even working in a multi-legal environment such as a restaurant. That's something I think that's really important to point out. You're unable to study abroad in a Spanish-speaking country. Are there any other things that you did maybe that you think would help to further your Spanish-speaking practice or language practice that wouldn't require going to another country that you could do in the US? So is there still a Spanish club? Yes. Okay, well I know when I was here, one thing we did was, we invited all of the students, I don't know if they're probably still our students here from universities in Spain or Spanish-speaking countries. So we invited them to all of our Spanish club meetings and we would have, when I was abroad, we had intercombios, so you'd be assigned someone and they wanted to practice their English just as much as you wanted to practice your Spanish. So I kind of tried to bring that back to campus and whether it be just at a meeting or a couple of times we went out to dinner and just spoke with them and that really helped. So if you're not in Spanish club, get there and try to make that happen because I think that would be great. That is a great question. So Simply Smiles is a not-for-profit organization. We're based in Norwalk, but we do community development work with indigenous populations in Oaxaca, Mexico. So Southern Mexico and on the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation in South Dakota working with the Lakota people out there. And Simply Smiles is based on a philosophy that we all have the power to help someone else. We all have the power to make someone smile and that's the first building block towards putting kids, adults, anyone on the path to a brighter future, which sounds super cheesy, but I went on the first trip just as a high school senior not really expecting much out of it and I really just felt and believe so fully in the philosophy that you could connect with someone even if you didn't speak Spanish, even if I didn't take Spanish in high school that you can connect the people on that level and then really work together to find a solution to the problems that they face. So we do a lot of work in both communities to provide food aid, to provide medical care. We build homes and schools, provide college scholarships. We just recently offered a student from the reservation a scholarship to Fairfield University. So she just found out on Saturday that she was accepted. So that will be pretty exciting. No pressure on her, she can decide not to come but I would really love for her to come and be a fellow stag. So we do a lot, I am never bored at my job which is really great. We do a service trip through the university to the reservation every year the last week of August to your question about what you can do if you don't study abroad. Service trips are a great opportunity to do that. I was involved with Simply Smiles and so never went on a university specific trip throughout my time here. But even if you aren't fortunate enough to be able to afford to go to another country there are lots of service opportunities here in Connecticut working with communities in Bridgeport and just across the country. So that's a great way to connect. Could you tell us a little bit about your full right experience? How do you distinguish yourself and the application that was supposed to be incredibly competitive particularly for Italy and what kind of work did you do? Okay, I don't necessarily know how I distinguish myself. In fact, this would kind of answer the first question. I didn't know that I was fluent in Italian until I wrote that application. That's where I first put the words fluent. And that was on the advice of professors here. I think that would help me with the application was a focus on what I wanted to do when I got there. It also didn't hurt that there was this three or four year period where Italy in particular was offering more Fulbright. Italy's actually the first country that had the Fulbright grant. So it was an anniversary. But I was really focused on what I wanted to do. I wanted to research a, this is where I get boring. I wanted to research a particular religious persecution that took place in Calabria in like 1560 and then kind of tie that to the larger counter reformation movement that was going on. Usually when you read about that or hear about it in a class in high school or college it's Northern Italy or Central Italy. And I was really focused on the South. I think they liked that. I think a lot of the applications probably are for Florence or Bologna, Rome. And then the experience there was wonderful. Like I said, I spent most of my days in either a library or going to Cosenza, which is in the Northern part of Calabria and a few hours during the week I was in two different Italian high schools. Italian high schools, the state schools, they're supposed to be a mother tongue teacher in the room for English classes. So that was technically my task there. I was the mother tongue English teacher. I learned in a lot of the schools in Southern Italy there is no mother tongue English teacher. That doesn't mean there aren't two teachers in the room but neither one speaks English, usually. And so that experience, not so much the study one but that really made me feel competent in researching and living in Italy. And just understanding the way down there, especially in the south. And you just asked if in social work there seems to be a need for other languages in addition to Spanish. I mean, during my time as a social worker I would say Spanish was the primary language that we desperately needed. I can say as a nurse in Bridgeport I'm seeing a lot more Muslim patients. Also Portuguese speaking patients. No, Portuguese is not Spanish. They tell me a lot. She speaks Spanish but it sounds weird. Cause it's not. So in New York City Spanish in my experience was the most common here as well but I'm seeing other languages up here. So it's not to say it's not existing in New York. It just wasn't my experience. That's helpful. Dr. Carrell. Hi, hi everybody. Now my question was about internships because that's definitely something that seems like a reoccurring thread and opportunities during the summertime. How were you finding most of your internships? Sounds like you had yours that came from, you also had a great connection from the high school. From that internship, everybody else, how were you finding internships in the summertime? The Career Center here, Fairfield. The Career Center? If you haven't stopped in yet, I highly recommend you go to their ASAP. I think it's only grown since I've been there. I think when I was in 2008, it was only Kathleen. From what I hear, it's a lot bigger. I think that's an opportunity that should be leveraged tenfold. They have incredible resources, incredible connections, contacts to get you an internship. Whether it's something that you might love or not, it's still exposure to a different area that maybe you might love down the road, but the Career Center, I think, in Fairfield is somewhere where you should go ASAP. I found my internship through an email from Dillon School of Business straight to my inbox, so it was the only one I applied to and I was very lucky, but I did use the Career Planning Center a lot, just practicing interviews with Kath and when I was looking at other opportunities as well. So you're recommending to open your professor's emails. I heard that too. And if anyone is interested in GE, feel free to talk to us. That's great. So that's wonderful. With that invitation to come speak with you on the mention of the Career Planning Center, perhaps we could conclude the evening. If anybody has any questions for our panelists, come up. Let's speak to them one-on-one, maybe do a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bão-bon maybe do a little bit of networking? Maybe do a little bit of networking? Grab a cookie, have some coffee, and then thank you for all for coming.