My name is Sophia Kwong. In 2007, I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with dual degrees in English and Spanish and a minor in Linguistics. My senior thesis was on superhero comic books, so I also consider myself a pre-eminent scholar in that area. I'm your typical liberal arts student: a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, curious about everything! Some of my current hobbies include scuba diving, yoga and pilates, hula hooping, cooking, and now travel blogging.
Although the technology/blogging part is new, traveling has always been a part of me. My first overseas adventure was a short language immersion program in Salamanca, Spain during my sophomore year of college. After graduating, I spent a month in San Jose, Costa Rica getting trained for a CELTA certificate. When I returned to the US, I started working as a student advisor at an international school. While I wasn’t traveling during that time, I was lucky enough to have a job that gave me exposure to clientele from different countries and cultures. Hearing their stories and learning about their lives only made me want to see more of the world. In January 2010, I quit my job of 2.5 years and jetted off to Central America, where I visited Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras. I had an amazing three weeks, but that was just the precursor for what was to come.
Through the Fulbright program, I had the special opportunity to live and work in Argentina as an English Teaching Assistant. From March – December 2010, I taught English students at the Universidad Nacional de Tucuman Facultad de Filosofia y Letras. In my spare time, I drank in as much of South American experience as humanly possible, hitting Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru.
My current adventure is completing my Master's Degree at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Appropriately, my program is International Education Policy, in which I am surrounded by an international cohort of charismatic, colorful individuals with a passion for improving education opportunities worldwide. Interestingly, the more I learn about education, the more I realize that there is plenty of work to be done in my own backyard, so I am focusing my studies on reducing educational inequity in American schools. My research interests are multiculturalism, diversity, and achievement gaps.
For more information about me, please see my complete Blogger profile or Google profile. As mentioned in one of my first entries, my hope with this blog is to establish a dialogue with the readers. As someone actively pursuing a professional career in travel writing, I thrive on feedback that can improve my writing style or this site. I welcome all comments, questions, and criticism. In order to make myself as accessible as possible, I have included links to my other sites in the sidebar. You can also reach me by e-mail. Thanks for taking the time to visit, and I hope you come back!
Posts
