Meet
This Year's Global STRIDE Fellows
By
Janie Vanpee, professor of French studies and faculty mentor
for Global STRIDE Fellows, 2011-2013
This
fall, Smith welcomed its fourth cohort of Global STRIDE Fellows.
First-year students Marjorie Amon, Hannah Becker, Kaitlin
Burns, Sara Ottomano, Gloria Lee, Annecca Smith, and Jenny
Wang come to Smith with a passion for studying foreign languages
and cultures and an interest in global issues and transformations.
Global STRIDE (Student Research
in Departments) Fellows meet regularly with faculty mentors
to discuss articles on second-language learning, cross-border
travel and the challenges of intercultural exchanges, in
preparation for studying abroad this coming summer. An intensive
language program during the summer between their first and
second year will enable them to accelerate their mastery
of the foreign language they are studying and to enhance
their future studies in linguistics, international relations,
regional economics, Latin American studies, or international
educational policy, to name some of their fields of interest.
In preparation for their
experiences abroad this summer, the Fellows are interviewing
the foreign exchange students in the American Studies Diploma
Program, asking them for advice on how to adapt to living
in another language and culture. Watch for their interviews
on the Gate in the near future. Later in the year
they will do research, in College Archives, on Smith’s longstanding
commitments to and involvement in international education.
They will post their findings on Smithipedia.
 Annecca
Smith’s experience in Germany, where she spent a
gap year in Dinkelsbühl, a little town in the south of Germany,
clarified for her the importance of studying a language in
its own context. “Languages and/or internationalism are something
I want to pursue further,” she explains. Living with a German
family allowed her “to get an international perspective on
not only big world events (like Osama bin Laden's death,
or Egypt and the Middle East) but also daily life.” At Smith,
Annecca is now refining her study of German grammar and literature,
renewing with French and hoping to start Farsi spring semester
through the Five-College Independent study program.
 Like
Annecca, Marjorie Amon also had the opportunity to spend
a year abroad as a junior in high school. Her year in the
Canary Islands helped perfect her knowledge of colloquial
and more formal Spanish, and initiated her into the delights
of teenage slang. She hopes to put her knowledge of the nuances
of Spanish to use through work in the local Latino community.
English is a second language
for two of this year’s Fellows.
 Jenny Wang’s first language is Chinese, and she often travels
to China to visit her grandmother in Hefei, though “I can’t
understand her Chinese entirely because she speaks a dialect,
and not Mandarin.” This semester, Jenny jumped into Chinese
III and is learning to link sound to character as she tackles
written Mandarin. She hopes to study in China this summer
through the Hampshire College Summer Chinese Language Program
in Hefei.
 Gloria
Lee was born in Korea
and learned English as a young child. Like Jenny, she hopes
that by taking Korean next semester she will be able to link
written Korean to the Korean she continues to speak at home.
For the moment, she is studying Spanish, pursuing her goal
of becoming fluent by the time she graduates so that she
can work on educational policy in Latin American countries. “I became passionate
about education when I saw the amazing benefits and hope
that it provided for families, communities, and nations,” she
says.
 Sara Ottomano’s family heritage is also what motivates
her language study. She studied French in high school but
is starting Italian this year. As she explains, “Part of
my family emigrated from Italy to America in the early 1900s
and I would love to reconnect with the relatives who stayed.” Sara
will be seeking to accelerate her study of Italian on an
intensive language program in Italy this summer in order
to prepare her better for a Junior Year Abroad in Florence
and for conversing with her re-discovered relatives.
 Hannah
Becker has already had the chance to study in an intensive
summer program. She is well aware that her knowledge and
practice of French at the Middlebury-Monterrey Language Academy
two summers ago enabled her to start French at Smith at a
high level. But she also has new ambitions. “My main aspiration
is to learn Arabic,” she notes. “I want to learn a language
with a different alphabet.” She believes that a knowledge
of Arabic and French will serve her well if she decides to
study international relations and politics of the Maghreb
or the Middle East. That said, she also intends to advance
her practice of Spanish, which she learned while volunteering
in Ecuador this past summer. She hopes to study in Argentina
this coming summer.
 Kaitlin
Burns, like most Global
STRIDE Fellows, is multi-lingual, and studies both French
and Spanish. She hopes to add Russian in the future. “My family hosted
12 year-old Ukrainian twin boys this August,” she explains. “It
is possible that my parents will adopt them and it would
be nice to know what they are saying when they jabber on
at the dinner table and I am left without a clue of what
they are talking about. Talk about experiencing language
and culture first hand!”
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