Communications Lead, Cybercrime Enforcement Attorney, Registrar. What do these professions have in common?
On 26 March, COL alumni Heather Teixeira ‘08, Chris Kaltsas ‘11, and Emma Graham ‘19 returned as panelists to talk–among other things–about how their education informed their work, at the Gordon Career Center (GCC). The talk was co-sponsored by the Classical Studies Department and the GCC, with three of four panelists also having majored in the COL. The panelists’ experiences exemplified how a COL education doesn’t lead into a single-stream career path, but truly a ‘gateway to everything’.
Heather Teixeira ‘08 leads communications on HIV and tuberculosis vaccine development for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). She spoke about how studying classics and history informed what she would want to do. On a practical level, she is often confronted with scientific language past her level, at work. She carries with her skills she learned in her undergraduate years: looking at dense language, unfamiliar terms, and finding what’s really important to communicate to a wider audience.
“I learned to not feel intimidated by something that isn’t immediately intelligible, and to work it through.”
Check out heather’s thesis, published in 2008: Poetry, Politics, Persuasion: The Rhetoric of Demosthenes and George W. Bush
Chris Kaltsas ‘11 is an attorney practicing at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP (DWT) in San Francisco, California. Prior to Chris’s practice at DWT on cybercrime enforcement and litigation, he served as an attorney at the U.S Department of Justice for 7 years. He remarked that when you think of working for the federal government, you don’t immediately think of a classical background. But in his role as crime coordinator, his interest in artefacts of any variety allowed him to work on interesting cases, including in art crime.
CHECK OUT CHRIS’ THESIS, PUBLISHED IN 2011: Spartacus Mythistoricus: Winning Spartacus into the Mythical
Emma Graham ‘19 is Registrar at David Zwirner Gallery, a global contemporary art gallery. Emma focuses on managing the art inventory of the gallery – including coordinating shipments of artwork, condition checking artwork, and installing large scale exhibitions. She shared that her work requires thinking through puzzles and how different moving parts can fit into a space, which doesn’t necessarily seem like it connects to her educational background. But when she thinks about what the process of learning an ancient language or translation was like at university, it involved the same process of logistically thinking through a problem, as it does at her work. She further related how she found community in her industry with people who have studied classics, history, and literature.
“My first boss took a chance on me, because we shared that (studied) past together.”
CHECK OUT EMMA’S THESIS, PUBLISHED IN 2019: Work at the Ancient Roman Villa: Representations of the Self, the Patron, and Productivity Outside of the City
Written by Janhavi Munde, COL Class of 2027