“The Honors College sets things up so you can get your education with the least amount of stress. They have a good counseling staff who work with you while you hash out what you want to take. When I added my major in sociology to my psychology major, they helped me work it out. I always start with the Honors office — even if they don’t have the answer, they find out, they don’t just pass you on to someone else. UB can seem huge, but the Honors College puts everything you need in one office. And they know who you are.”
“My idea for the future is to establish and run a community service center in a university setting that would bring members of the community to the campus and bring university students to the community.” Wherever she goes from UB — and perhaps that will be to study social work, ideally in a program that will allow her to do some study in a Spanish-speaking country — you can be sure that Rachel will be able to suggest something useful you can do for your community.
“Every college student should study abroad — in Africa, Asia, Europe, wherever in the world you want to go.” Rachel used her Jeremy M. Jacobs International Honors Scholarship to help finance her Spring 2005 semester in Salamanca, Spain, where she took 16 credit hours of Spanish language and cultural studies. She arrived in Spain with what she says was a “beginning level” command of the language, lived with a family that spoke only Spanish, and took courses taught only in Spanish, with a student body from all over the world whose only common language was Spanish. Now her Spanish is well beyond that beginning level. Her goal: “I hope to be bilingual someday.”
Community service is woven throughout Rachel’s life. She’s a two-year Habitat for Humanity veteran, she volunteers time for the organization 10,000 Villages, she’s a volunteer teaching assistant in UB’s Diversity Advocates course, and she volunteered in an after-school program when she was studying in Spain. She was the 2005 holder of the scholarship established in memory of Gino Calvi, a young UB alumnus who died in the attack on the World Trade Center, which is awarded to an Honors College student who, among other things, “shows promise of benefitting humanity.”