I got to see Grinnell for the first time in the spring of my junior year of high school. When I visited campus, it just felt like home!
During my visit, I was able to attend classes, hear an information session, and see student panelists answer questions. I came from a medium-sized rural high school of around 1,200 students, and I really liked that Grinnell was a small liberal arts school with great accessibility to professors and other resources on campus. I would say this was definitely the deciding factor when I chose Grinnell.
I wanted a fresh new start in college. In high school, I had been part of my high school’s band program (marching and concert). While I absolutely loved the experience, I realized that it wasn’t something I was driven to pursue in college.
So, I put myself out of my comfort zone to make new friends and do new things in college. I did something during orientation I normally would never do: randomly walked up to a group of people and introduced myself. Turns out one of them would become my closest friend and later roommate!
Sometimes, putting yourself out there really does work!
I took a gap year before coming to Grinnell, so I was really excited to take classes related to disciplines and topics that I wasn’t able to study in high school. With the flexibility that Grinnell’s curriculum offers, I was able to freely explore subjects that were of interest to me.
At first, I thought that I should become a psychology major because I'm very interested in people and human behavior. So I reached out to my soon-to-be sociology adviser, Ross Haenfler (who studied psychology as an undergrad and sociology in grad school), for advice on what I should do.
Here’s the Humanities and Social Sciences Center (HSSC, or, as we call it, “the husk”), where I take most of my sociology classes!
After talking with Ross, I realized that labs weren’t for me and that the research process didn’t play to my strengths. Second semester, I took his Social Movements class and learned how society is influenced by big societal institutions and capitalism. That was a big lightbulb moment for me. I started to understand why people act the ways they do, and this helped me understand people better! With Ross’s course and guidance, I realized that research in sociology was more suited for me than research in psychology.
After taking many sociology classes at Grinnell, I developed a strong interest in social justice and nonprofit organizations specifically related to the power and importance of education. I was looking for an internship after my second year, and I wanted to explore my interest in social justice and education. After having lived in Chile during my gap year, I also wanted to maintain my Spanish proficiency.
I knew that I wanted to spend as much time in Grinnell as I could, but I still wanted to pursue off-campus studies. Even though the pandemic had left me wanting to interact with friends more, I still wanted to experience firsthand the things I had read and studied about. I also never want to turn down the opportunity to travel somewhere cool.
So, I made a great decision to take a Grinnell course-embedded travel class that allowed me to travel internationally for two weeks over spring break in my third year! My classmates, professor, and I all went to the sites of Ancient Olympia together, which was an unforgettable experience.
