To find out more about my intended program of study and how it applies to interdisciplinary studies, I sat down with Dr. Barbara Lopez-Mayhew to talk about the Spanish program at PSU, and her professional accomplishments. I knew that Dr. Lopez-Mayhew would be a great person to hear from because of her involvement in many different departments.
I began by asking her about her undergraduate career, where she told me that she started out at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
“My entire first year I was an architect major, and then I switched to a double major in Education and Spanish Language and Linguistics, with a minor in French. I then decided that I wanted to go to graduate school right away, so I received an assistant teaching position for a fellowship at UMass Amherst for two years while I studied Spanish Language, Literature, and Linguistics. I taught first year students and intermediate students as well.”
After she received her masters in Spanish Literature and Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Dr. Lopez-Mayhew spent the summers of 1984 and 1986 at the Middlebury Spanish Language School in Vermont in the Doctor of Modern Languages Program where she completed thirty post-master's degree credits. She did her residency for the Middlebury Spanish Program at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where she was able to take three courses.
She received her Doctorate in Spanish Literature and
Culture from Boston College in 2001.
Dr. Lopez-Mayhew always knew that she wanted to teach from the start of her college career. She has many years of experience teaching Spanish in high schools and colleges in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Along with her teaching experiences, she has published multiple books, articles, and reviews under her name. She is bilingual in English and Spanish, and can speak and or understand French, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, Romanian, Chinese, and Galician which is a dialect of Spanish.
We then began to discuss her involvement with people outside of her department for the “interdisciplinary” portion of the interview.
“When I was hired here (PSU) as Assistant Professor of Spanish, I became chair for the Department of Languages and Linguistics within one year and was on for nine and a half years. I did translations for the biology department and coordinated with the education department for supervising student teachers in the teacher certification program. I also have done a lot of work with the ESOL and French programs. Within the non-academic departments I have worked very heavily with administration, and very closely with the Global Education Office. I have been sent all over the world to observe classes, talk to directors of programs and administrations for various study abroad programs as well… Students who come into the Spanish programs often minor in Spanish, and study major programs such as Education, Social Work, Political Sciences, and Communications.”
I have had the pleasure of having Dr. Lopez-Mayhew as a professor three times now, two of those times being abroad in Ireland for the fall semester of 2015, and one of them currently. Although her teaching styles are the same in English and Spanish, I really enjoy how passionate and comfortable she is when teaching in Spanish. I was able to learn a lot of things during this interview that I did not know she has accomplished, that strongly relate to what I want to do with my career.
Photo Provided By Barbara Lopez-Mayhew
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