CAITLYN LAMDIN

A native Vermonter, I got my first opportunity to travel abroad as a high school junior when I fundraised to go on my school's spring break trip to France.  Neither of my parents had passports or had left the country, but all of a sudden I was completely enamored with international travel, language learning, U.S. foreign policy.

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As a freshman at Vassar College, I traveled to Breman Essiam, Ghana with a group of my classmates, where I taught French at Heritage Academy. The next year, I started learning Modern Standard Arabic and declared my major in Religion, traveling to Morocco in the summer of 2009 for AMIDEAST's Summer Intensive Arabic Program.  The following summer I procured an internship with AMIDEAST Tunisia in the Advising and Exchange Office, where I worked with Tunisian Masters students applying for the Fulbright International Scholar Program.  In my junior year at Vassar, I declared a second major in Africana Studies.  I started to explore social justice initiatives, particularly related to the prison industrial complex and educational inequity.

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In 2011, I received the Ann Cornelisen Fellowship for Language Study.  I returned to Morocco and studied Modern Standard Arabic at the Arabic Language Institute in Fez for one year.

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Returning to the U.S., I was accepted into the 2012 Teach for America Corps.  I was placed in Greenville, Mississippi, where I taught high school French I, II, and III for three years.

 

In 2012, as a first-year teacher, I started a program called Greenville Goes Global.  For the first time in 20 years, we fundraised to bring 15 students abroad to Paris and Barcelona.  For students who had never left Mississippi let alone the country, who had never been on an escalator let alone a plane, the trip was a transformational and life-changing experience.  We held two more trips in 2015 to London, Paris, and Rome and Oaxaca, Mexico.

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During this time, I discovered the intersection between educational inequity and international exchange.  I saw the power of expanding access to international education to those who had been historically barred from such opportunities, and I was eager to find sustainable ways to make this a reality in Mississippi and other rural communities.

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In 2015, I enrolled at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey to pursue a Masters in International Education Management.  I am currently in my last semester of the program, completing my practicum at OneWorld Now! in Seattle, WA.

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I hope to continue working with low-income students in their pursuit of world language acquisition and international transformational education.