Maria Diaz ’10

Hometown: Queens, New York
Major: Sociology
Minor: Educational Studies

At the close of her junior year, Maria Diaz ’10 boarded a plane bound for Argentina. Her destination was La Plata, the capital city in the province of Buenos Aires, where she would spend ten weeks. “I found a teaching internship on the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives Web site,” she said. “I applied on a whim and, to my surprise, was accepted.” 

Diaz worked at a private school that teaches English from a multicultural perspective and focuses on intercultural methods of learning. “It's a very different type of school, even within La Plata. I found it a pleasure to work there, both because of its philosophy and the fact that the students ranged in age from five to sixty.”

During her time in La Plata, Diaz interacted mostly with Argentinians. In retrospect, she’s grateful that she didn’t know any other Americans when she first arrived in the city, which has more than half a million residents. “I had to step right in to a new culture; my contact with local residents facilitated that. I also did ethnographic work as part of the internship, which offered an extraordinary opportunity to get to know the community.”

Back on campus for her senior year, Diaz is viewing her future a bit differently after her summer in Argentina. While she has had her sights set on graduate work in educational policy, she now is motivated by what she witnessed in La Plata. “I now know that I want to work with educational policy focusing on English language learners. Even though Argentina is not as racially and culturally mixed as the United States, I saw how a curriculum that is open to many different ideas, perspectives, and cultures can succeed,” Diaz said. “I believe that the intercultural approach could be implemented in the States because there is an intercultural community already living here. That’s my focus going ahead.”