Lupita Ruiz-Tolento '13

Director of Institutional Development, SembraMedia

Majors: Psychology, French, Spanish (Neuroscience Minor) 

"As an undergraduate, I was exposed to the Career Center’s resources from my first semester at UP, when I was hired as a Student Associate. Thanks to the Career Center, I landed a paid internship my senior year. Really, though, it was the cumulative effect of four years of immersion in Career Center resources and staff knowledge that proved invaluable to me. By the time I graduated, I knew how important it was to be highly attuned to your skillset and to develop a personal voice around your career aspirations. 

The most intimidating part of planning for life after graduation was feeling like I needed to do something that was directly tied to my field(s) of study. There is pressure to make sense of your undergraduate career — people will ask you how you plan to apply your major. I coped with this by changing the way I conceived of (and described) my undergraduate career: not strictly as my majors, but as an integration of academic, professional, and life experiences.

My language majors and study abroad experiences are hands down the reason I’m thriving in my career today. During my time at UP, many would question my decision to major in Spanish, given that I’m a native speaker. I’ll just say this — my Spanish major was never about the grammar or mechanics, it was about contextualizing my experience as a Spanish speaker in the U.S. and the world. I was fascinated by Latin America as a region that shared not only languages and borders, but a social and political history. My senior year, I had the opportunity to co-coordinate the Moreau Center’s immersion trip to Nicaragua, an experience that cemented this curiosity and led me to pursue a Masters in Latin American Studies at UC San Diego.

My first job after UP was teaching business English to professionals in Quito, Ecuador for a year. I learned that though I love languages, I wasn’t fulfilled by teaching. I also learned to trust my intuition about “fit”. Sometimes, a job seems right but doesn’t feel right, and that’s okay. You’re allowed to be picky about your career!

Currently, I am the Director of Institutional Development for SembraMedia, an organization dedicated to making digital media in Latin America more sustainable. I manage and maintain SembraMedia’s impact database, and use this data and information to inform our narrative and report to funders. This job is meaningful because it brings together three of my biggest passions: Latin America, journalism, and using information to tell a broader story. I have the privilege of working with a team of incredible journalists from Latin America, the U.S., and Spain, and the collective energy of our team is palpable and contagious."