Rooted between two worlds

Growing up between two countries, navigating two languages, loving a family spread across an ocean — that doesn't leave you. It becomes a lens. And for me, it became a hunger: to keep learning, keep listening, keep showing up somewhere new and finding out what I have in common with the people there. In high school, that hunger started taking shape. I fell in love with political science and environmental science, and I started connecting the dots between the local and the global — between the deforestation happening near where my grandmother lives and the policy conversations happening nowhere near her. Real progress requires collective thinking. And collective thinking requires being willing to understand perspectives that aren't your own.

THE LANGUAGE OF CONNECTION

Language was the first door. Spanish didn't feel like a gift when I was young — it was as natural to me as English was, nothing special really. Now I know: it's not just how I speak to my family, it's how I learned to see the world from inside another frame entirely. A language isn't just vocabulary and grammar. It's a way of organizing thought, of expressing things that don't translate, of signaling to someone that you're willing to meet them more than halfway.

That belief is what led me to French — first as a college minor, eventually as something I couldn't put down. I've been studying it consistently for years now, not because fluency is a credential but because every level of a language opens something new: a song that finally makes sense, a conversation that goes deeper than it could have before, a small proof that the distance between people is mostly just unfamiliarity. I'm still learning. I hope I always am. And if you have recommendations — French or Spanish podcasts, films, music, anything — I genuinely want to know.

THE WORLD AS MY CLASSROOM

This appreciation for language and culture sent me places. A summer in Havana — a city that asks you to hold contradiction carefully, where the politics are complicated and the people are extraordinary. A semester in Prague, where history isn't background; it's in the architecture, the humor, the way people talk about their parents' lives. A semester in Paris, taking classes at Sciences Po surrounded by students from over 150 countries. Where very seminar made it clearer that the problems we care most about — climate, inequality, governance — don't stop at borders. I arrived as a student and left as someone who understood, in a way I hadn't before, that showing up somewhere with genuine curiosity is its own kind of politics.

See my full professional and global experience →

Havana

Pinar del Río

Prague

Karlovy Vary

Paris

Versailles

Annecy

Strasbourg

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WHERE I'VE BEEN

At the heart of all of it — the studying abroad, the language learning, the summers in the Amazon — is a pretty simple thing: I love people. I love the way a place carries its own logic, its own rhythm, its own way of being in the world. I love arriving somewhere new and realizing, again, that the gap between us is mostly just distance and circumstance.

This map is my own — built by me, for me, because I'm also someone who needs to see things to feel them. Every dot is a place that left something behind. I made it partly as a creative project, partly as a coding exercise, and mostly because I wanted a living record of everywhere that's shaped how I think. A reminder that there is always somewhere new to go, someone new to understand.

Almost as exciting as discovering a new place is helping someone else find their way there. Inspired by my time as an exchange student in Paris, I put together a guide to the city — part travel recommendations, part things I wish I'd known going in. I'm working on one for Peru next, with more to come after that. If Paris is on your radar, feel free to browse my tips or reach out with questions and recommendations of your own!