Biography 

 

 

     Travels to Mexico with my family from my early childhood began to pique my interest in Spanish. My mother, who knew just enough Spanish to get by, taught my brother and me some phrases so that we might order ice cream or ask where the restroom was.

     In my small, rural high school, Spanish instruction was hit or miss as we had fairly high turnover of teachers, but I soaked up all I could and continued to augment my sparse language education with family vacations to Mexico and one life-altering trip at the age of 14 to Honduras with a group of doctors and nurses who went to provide medical care to the residents of small mountain communities there.

     Upon graduating high school, I embarked alone on a journey to Guadalajara, Mexico to spend the summer immersed in the language and culture and to take an intensive Spanish course at the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara. Six months later, I decided to enroll at the University of Wyoming, majoring in Journalism, but I continued to take Spanish courses all throughout my undergraduate career to maintain my Spanish.

     In 2007-2008, I studied abroad in a small town in southern Spain called Almería. It is there that I gained the competency and fluency in the language that I had been after by attending a Spanish university, conducting all personal and professional exchanges in Spanish, and forging lifelong friendships exclusively in Spanish.

     Upon returning to UW to finish my undergraduate degree, one of my professors approached me to encourage me to apply to graduate school and the graduate assistantship that would pay my the tuition. I decided this would be a great opportunity, and scrambled to change my Journalism degree into a dual degree to include Spanish. This was easily done as I had taken all but one of the necessary courses for the B.S. in Spanish, which the head of the department was willing to waive since I had completed two studies abroad and had tutored a student in the one class I was missing.

     The following fall, I joined the other graduate assistants in a teaching practicum and began taking on a Master’s student workload as well as teaching four credit hours of beginner Spanish. Over the two years I was taking classes for my M.A., I taught a total of 24 hours of beginner and intermediate Spanish at the University of Wyoming. In 2011, I graduated with honors with my M.A. in Spanish Language and Literature and a Master’s minor in Gender and Women’s Studies.

     I ended up accepting a job in Denver for a private language school based out of Longmont, but after a couple of years working for the school and never getting enough hours to make ends meet, I decided to set out on my own to try to get my own students. I never imagined I would be able to quit the language school and become exclusively self employed, but that is what I did.

     In March of 2020 when the pandemic turned life upside down for so many people, I began to hemorrhage students so badly that I was forced to return to my family’s ranch in northeastern Wyoming. From here, I continue to offer remote classes and will soon offer onsite corporate classes and in-person private lessons or tutoring to adults as well as to college and high school students.

     My other interests are riding and training horses, teaching horsemanship, endurance racing and sometimes playing a little music on my guitar. You can usually find me in my spare time enjoying what Wyoming and the Black Hills have to offer from the back of one of my horses, with my dog Laika by my side!