"I remember my education at San Silvestre with such fondness and thankfulness that thinking about it is sometimes a little overwhelming. Traversing Lima's complex and many times contradictory society is not easy for a culturally aware, socially awkward, and moderately smart girl such as myself. Yet San Silvestre made me feel comfortable and confident that I could shine both in Peru and abroad, and kindled in me an unbelievable love for my country and its people that has shaped every aspect of who I am.
I would like you to know that I have been incredibly and surprisingly successful here at Yale. Please understand that I do not say this because I wish to flatter myself; on the contrary, I am pretty embarrassed to tell you these things. But I genuinely believe that my success here is more of a testament to the incredible academic and emotional preparation that the San Silvestre community which you led blessed me with, than a result of my own personal qualities.
Since I got to Yale, I've achieved the maximum grade of A in all my classes with the exception of two (they were really complex, math-based classes, and numbers have always been my intellectual Achilles heel). As a result, I have a nearly perfect grade point average, and receive commendations from my professors every semester, especially on the strength of my writing (which says a lot about the English department at San Silvestre). In fact, a paper I wrote on the Yale-Machu Picchu controversy my freshman year won an award given by Yale's International Studies Review. Last year, I was admitted into the Yale Jackson Center's program in Global Affairs, an extremely competitive undergraduate major which I was interested in because of its specialized track on international development. Coupled with my double major in Latin American Studies, I hope to pursue a career in poverty alleviation and development policy in Peru. I owe my interest in this career track to San Silvestre's amazing community service projects. My involvement in the Techo project was particularly inspiring. I am also interning at the World Bank next summer, conducting research on the negative effects of certain development aid schemes in Uganda and Kosovo.
This year, I became Editor-in-Chief of The Yale Globalist, the undergraduate international affairs review which I became involved in since my second semester here. Our first issue of the year is always based on a reporting trip that takes place during the first two weeks of summer, and this year, I led a group of 16 student journalists to Peru. The articles in our Peru issue are on the website (http://tyglobalist.org/) in case you're interested in looking at some of them. I am incredibly happy here in college, and I know the same is true for my friends who also made the choice to go abroad. We visit each other as much as time allows."
