Vanessa’s Journey

Why Grinnell

I'm from a bigger suburban high school with 2,800 students and more arts-oriented students. It was academically rigorous and very competitive, so I was prepared for college. However, I had a long commute to school every day, and I didn't have much of a community around me.

The community at Grinnell is what drew me here. Grinnell has a strong sense of community, and I figured that people don’t come to the middle of Iowa unless they’re passionate about what they’re studying. I definitely don’t feel the competition that I did in high school, and I feel a tight-knit community here. It's very nice.

Three things that made me choose Grinnell:

1. Small, tight-knit, centralized community
2. Individually advised curriculum
3. Social justice and the student-driven element of campus life

Stepping into Support

Because of Covid, I didn’t get to campus until my second year of college. When I set foot on campus, I wanted to be seen and to help people. I wanted to have influence in the community and be a solid contributor to the school’s culture.

Making Waves

Volunteering

I volunteered a lot as an underclassman. For example, I volunteered at a local senior housing center, the Mayflower, to play games with seniors. I also engage with our local schools frequently because my education courses require practicum observation hours where we assist local teachers in a K-12 classroom.

​One of my favorite memories volunteering was when I assisted local elementary school students in making a documentary about a building in town. We helped students engage in research, taught them iMovie, and had fun. We showed the final documentary on the big screen at our own Harris Center! 

Student Educational Policy Committee (SEPC)

I’m on the education Student Educational Policy Committee (SEPC), which serves as the student voice for decisions made in the education concentration. Each department has its own SEPC that shares its student perspectives with the academic community. I’ve been on the education SEPC since my second year.

I love my department, and putting on events is fun. We’ve put on study breaks, and we are currently working on further developing the education concentration curriculum.

In my second year at Grinnell and first year in SEPC, the education studies concentration was not yet a fully approved and developed concentration. Some SEPC members and I sat down with Professor Deborah Michaels to write the curriculum and its intentions. It was the culmination of the education SEPC’s work for the past 6–7 years. 

And now, there are so many people who are in the concentration!

Currently, we are busy conducting three faculty hires and reviews. I think it’s awesome that students are involved in the process of hiring their professors. Professors are there to serve the students, and they are critical to the advising experience students receive at Grinnell. I was featured in a recent S&B (school newspaper) article about faculty reviews. I encourage you to check it out.

And every year, we get dinner from a local restaurant in town and teach students about the teacher’s education program. This year, we had really high turnout for the educational concentration because it was the first year that the concentration became official. I organized the event and it had a great turnout. Everyone was so excited, which gave me a nice sense of fulfillment.

Volleyball and Dance

I played volleyball in high school, and although I didn’t want to compete at the varsity level in college, I wanted to continue playing. I joined an intramural team, took a class, and connected with people who wanted to start a club. While I was studying abroad, my intramural volleyball team combined forces with an unofficial men’s team to make a co-ed team, and I ended up being a co-captain for a semester. 

I was hesitant to join dance at first, since it was improv-heavy. In my second year, I would rent out the studio once a week and work on my own private projects. In my third year, I got into K-pop dancing. But I would soon do improv dance when I joined theatre professor Celeste Miller for her final performance in my third year. In her dance classes, she not only got us to be comfortable with improv, but she also cared about us enough to ask questions like “How are you doing? What is bothering you?”

Below are some images of me dancing in Celeste’s performance:

This semester I’ve mostly been creating my own pieces individually and with friends. I’m also learning choreography from other students in dance club, and I even taught a dance once. I also still do cover dances and put on a show this fall to show off some of these creative works!

Job-Shadowing Alumni

I got to job-shadow two alumni in what we call externships. Supported by Grinnell’s career services office, externships allow a student to shadow an alumni during spring break and learn more about what day-to-day life might look like for someone working in a particular profession.

1) Brooklyn, New York

The first alum I shadowed was a K-8 admission counselor at a Spanish and French international school. When I went with the alumna to her office, I also chatted with her acquaintances for 10–15 minutes and learned more about their roles. I gained better insight into what working in a primary education school could look like.

It was fun to live with an alumna and experience her everyday life. Even going to the grocery store and seeing how she cooked was interesting. She had a baby, too! I enjoyed learning about her experiences, in general. Because she was a Russian major at Grinnell, she also really valued the importance of learning a new language and culture.

Best of all, my ticket to New York was paid for by Grinnell’s career services department!

While in New York, I also visited a Grinnell friend in D.C., a best friend from high school in Boston, and a Grinnellian’s brother in Providence, Rhode Island. It would have been way more expensive if I had to take a plane ride to see all of them from San Diego, but fortunately they were only train rides away. I’ll share more photos of them further down the page.

2) Gdańsk, Poland

The second alumna that I shadowed was a self-employed private language tutor in Gdańsk, Poland. She tutored people 1:1 and went to business administrative buildings to teach business English. While a lot of her tutees were fluent in English, they didn’t have business English fluency words, which I thought was interesting.

​The alumna talked to me about what her life as a self-employed woman in a different country, sharing her favorite parts of the country and culture, along with personal struggles and worries she had personally and professionally.

​We both shared a love for cooking, so we spent a lot of time making food in the kitchen together and made the most delicious pumpkin tofu masala. And again, Grinnell helped pay for a good chunk of the flight to and from Poland.

Grinnellians Around the World!

Throughout my four years, I’ve been to so many parts of the world with my Grinnellian friends. Here are just a few of the places I’ve been to!

United States

Europe

When I went to Poland for my externship, I also took some quick trips around Europe. I met my former roommates Ellen in London, Parker in Spain, and Aiden in Copenhagen.

Off to Seoul, South Korea!

I wanted to experience a completely new culture in a bigger city and decided to study abroad in Seoul, South Korea. I spent a semester there during my third year of college, and I had such a wonderful time.

The program brought us to the Busan International Film Festival! There, I watched a Japanese and Nicaraguan film. I speak Spanish because of my Peruvian mom, so it was really comforting to watch a movie in my heritage language, and to also listen to the filmmaker talk about her all-female crew for the film!

Research in Education

This past year, I have been doing a Mentored Advanced Project (MAP) for education with Professor Paul Hutchison. He has been working on this same project for a while, but the overarching theme is looking at how people interact and learn. Specifically, it’s about how people in small groups influence one another, and how they impact each other’s learning.

Over the summer, as I was looking through the data and solidifying the topic, my adviser gave me some crucial guidance.

There were many times when I felt like I was in over my head with my research. When I shared my adviser how I was feeling, he understood and helped walk me through what the next steps would be. He was extremely helpful and is just a wonderful person to be around. His family often invited me and some other student advisees to their house for dinner! 

This semester, we’re refining the topic and making it presentable. Although in the process I learned independent work isn’t really right for me, I have learned a lot about research strategies. We’re hoping to present our research findings to the National Association for Research in Science Teaching.