Month: December 2016

Yahaira Rose

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Yahaira Rose

A single visit to Ohio State inspired Yahaira Rose to become a Buckeye. In 1992, after graduating high school, she left her hometown of Yauco, Puerto Rico for Columbus, Ohio – moving to the city without knowing any English. Through ESL classes at Columbus State, she learned the language while working and matriculating to Ohio State. Rose continues to balance work and school as she pursues her PhD in Organizational Psychology and directs the Martin de Porres Center and Proyecto Mariposas [Project Butterfly].

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Meg Zakany

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Meg Zakany (Photo by Ryan Starinsky).

When explaining her experience running Grrrls Rock Columbus – a rock camp that teaches instruments to a group of 12 to 18-year-old girls, trans, and gender variant youths – Meg Zakany is often met with comments like, “I’m sure there’s a lot of fighting.” The assumption exists that an all-girls’ space must be rife with competition and rampant emotions. This isn’t the case. Zakany and others help campers create their own powerful spaces for positive self-expression.

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Nora Hesse

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Nora Hesse

As a land-grant institution, The Ohio State University has a special responsibility to share its scientific-based research with its surrounding communities. To open avenues for community sharing, the university created a system  to address local, national, and global needs through research-based educational programming in 1914 – this is the OSU Extension Program. Nora Hesse is one of the many important people who make up the OSU Extension Program Franklin County.

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Verónica Betancourt

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Veronica stands in front of Ohio State's Wexner Center for the Arts.
Verónica Betancourt

Your typical visitor to the U.S. art museum is more often than not affluent, white, and academically well-educated. As a Latina interested in and inspired by art, Verónica Betancourt  often visits encyclopedic art museums – these are museums that claim a comprehensive representation of art history. Her experiences in these spaces are often rife with feelings of alienation and questions of her acceptance as a Latina in the museum’s narrative. Through her dissertation, Betancourt seeks to open these spaces to a more diverse population.

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Ramona Reyes

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Ramona Reyes
Ramona Reyes

In the small town of Weslaco, Texas, Ramona Reyes grew up sharing a room with grandmother and namesake, Ramona. Her parents and grandmother sought to break the family’s cycle of migrant farmworking by urging Reyes and her eight siblings to earn at least a high school diploma. Reyes surpassed her family’s educational goals by enrolling at Ohio State on scholarship. Now an Ohio State graduate living in Columbus, she seeks to use her education and experience to give back to the city’s Latino community.

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