Barry Fellowship Alum Spotlight
Emma Sokoloff-Rubin, 2008 Barry Fellow
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Emma Sokoloff-Rubin, TD '11, is an associate editor at The Yale Globalist, a Master's Aide, and a clarinetist in the Davenport Pops Orchestra. Her summer on the Barry Fellowship: I chose to do ethnographic research because I love talking to people, and I wanted to use my time abroad to better understand what was going on the ground of Brazil through the stories of individuals. I ended up working with one domestic violence center because that gave me the chance to get to know a set of women over time, and because it is always hard for me to just do research - I want to be participating in whatever I'm learning about as well. None of my days were typical. I usually went running in the morning, got on a public bus to the domestic violence center or city hall. Then, I'd talk to people in the waiting room or accompany women to police stations or hospitals. If I wanted to learn more about the history of domestic violence in the city, I went to the NGO that had been tracking violence in the media for several years. Some days, I was daring and if I wanted to talk to the mayor or the head of the local hospital, I found my way to their workplace on the bus and tried to get them to talk to me. In the evenings, I often went out with people I worked with at the center or with a group of international students I met who lived near me. Every other weekend or so, I traveled, so I got to visit several major cities in the northeast. I loved living in Portuguese - doing interviews in Portuguese, dancing to Brazilian music, even eventually living in Portuguese. I shopped at the local grocery store and learned to look out for events happening in the evenings. |
Meet Past Barry Fellows
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When I first arrived, the NGO that I had arranged to work at was doing more policy analysis than the kind of on-the-ground work I wanted to be doing, so one challenge was finding work that would be meaningful and engaging for eight weeks. Once I found this incredible domestic violence center and got settled in the city, the challenge for me was not so much finding fun things to do, but learning to feel okay about doing intense, often heartbreaking work during the day, and still making time to explore the fun parts of the city at night and on the weekends.
The most important thing that I learned was that I can make things work - and have an intense, engaging, exciting, and life-changing summer - even when not everything is perfectly in place when I first arrive.
Recommedations for students applying to the Barry Fellowship:
Start with an issue or place you care about and want to understand. Then figure out how you can get right to the heart of what's going on. What school, organization, or project will put you in daily contact with people on the ground? What unique perspectives can you bring to the research? Who can you best learn from? It's rarely the government officials or policy analysts you want to travel overseas to reach - more often, I think, it's the people whose lives are impacted daily by the issues you're studying from whom you have the most to learn.
What makes the Barry Fellowship unique:
The Barry Fellowship doesn't just give you money for the summer - it offers a warm, thoughtful, and supportive community that lasts well beyond your first summer. My favorite thing about the Barry Fellowship is that at our first dinner, instead of saying "now make sure you do exactly what you wrote in your applications," Mr. Barry told us all to go and do the very best we could when we got there. He said that doing the best we could would mean taking on new opportunities as they came; learning from what was in front of us and what we had to dig deeper to find; and being flexible and friendly throughout the summer.
