Undergraduate Alums

Class of 2018

Anna Caruso, a 2018 French Minor at Vanderbilt, will be working at Goldman Sachs in San Francisco in the Private Wealth Management division.

Class of 2016

Veronica Fulton graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Vanderbilt University in 2016. She triple majored in French, Economics, and Political Science. In the summer of 2016, Veronica participated in the State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship for Korean in Gwangju, South Korea. Later that year, Veronica began her legal studies at Harvard Law School. On campus, she serves as a teaching assistant and is involved in organizations like the Journal of Law and Technology, the Women’s Law Association, and the Federalist Society. Veronica aims to focus her legal career in corporate law, with particular interest in AI & technology. In the summer of 2017, Veronica worked at the legal tech start-up “Lex Check.” She will join Ropes & Gray in San Francisco as a summer associate in 2018. Continuing in her love of language, beginning with French, Veronica has gone on to pursue Spanish and Italian.

Ana Luquerna graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Vanderbilt University in 2016. She double majored in Human and Organizational Development and Political Science and minored in French. In pursuance of her love of French, Ana was granted a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship after graduation. Ana lived in Perpignan and taught English to high-school students. In her spare time in France, Ana volunteered at La Cimade as a Refugee and Immigration Case Assistant. She visited Calais to meet with refugees participating in integration programs, and she also helped translate a video with refugee narratives from the camp. After Fulbright, Ana became an SEO Fellow and worked at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell in New York City. During the summer at S&C, Ana gained insight into corporate law and focused on the Latin America practice group. Ana is attending The University of Oxford in the fall in order to pursue a Master’s in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. She will be attending The University of Chicago Law School in the Fall of 2018.

Emmett McKinney graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2016. He currently works at the Environmental Law Institute, an environmental think tank in Washington D.C., whose mission is ” to foster innovative, just, and practical law and policy solutions to enable leaders across borders and sectors to make environmental, economic, and social progress.” ELI accomplishes this by researching emerging fields in environmental law, educating the public on recent developments, training professionals and other officials on the practice of environmental law, and producing numerous publications.  As a Research Associate at ELI, Emmett supports projects both in the U.S. and abroad through both original research and assisting with planning and logistics. His French has been useful many times, including when helping organize a training for customs officials in West Africa who are responsible for managing hazardous waste shipments.

Stephen Zakwewicz graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2016. He is spending two years working as an English teaching assistant at a high school in the city of Linz, Austria. He says “It’s a tremendous amount of fun trying to make English class interesting, relevant, and enjoyable for all my students, who are so interested in American culture, society, politics, and the language. There, the more apt you are in English and the more aware of the goings-on in the English-speaking world, the cooler you are! So it’s never hard to keep the students interested and motivated. It’s especially enriching to be a sort of cultural ambassador, above all during a political year that has all eyes on America. Besides enjoying and acclimating to Austrian culture, I’ve also come to learn a lot about my own country and the people we are, having to reflect on and present it constantly. And of course I love exploring my Alpine backyard and the rest of Europe in my spare time!”

Class of 2015

Elisabeth Bloom graduated cum laude from Vanderbilt University in 2015, with a Bachelor of Music in Cello Performance (as a student of Felix Wang at the Blair School of Music) and a double major in French Language and Literature. Following her graduation from Vanderbilt, Elisabeth taught high school French at the Greenwich, CT branch of Fusion Academy, a private alternative school with campuses throughout the U.S., where all classes are one-on-one. During this time she assisted Prof. Lynn Ramey with research and translation work for her upcoming book on medieval French poet Jean Bodel. Elisabeth also continued to work actively as a musician, performing in concerts for The Schubert Club of Fairfield County, playing at weekly Sunday services, and teaching cello in the Greenwich community.Elisabeth is currently in her second year of the Ph.D. program in French at Princeton University. In her dissertation work, she will combine her passions for French literature and music by researching 19th- and 20th-century French opera and ballet; specifically, she plans to examine the scores and libretti of works united by the theme of animate toys and dolls (Debussy’s La Boite à joujoux, Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, Respighi’s La boutique fantasque, and Delibes’s Coppélia). A cellist of sixteen years, Elisabeth is continuing her musical studies at Princeton with Prof. Alberto Parrini. She serves as the president of a religious organization on campus, and in May of 2017 she planned a lecture that brought speaker John M. Tyler to the Princeton community. In August of 2017 Elisabeth was featured in the inaugural edition of the “Library Spotlight” series on the university website for her work in Firestone Library’s Pierre Le Brun collection of Montaigne, part of Rare Books and Special Collections. She was one of the co-organizers of the third annual Princeton Graduate Student Conference in French and Francophone literature, titled “The Domestic,” which took place at the university in October of 2017.

Mallory Hope graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 2015.  At Vanderbilt, she majored in Economics and History and in French.  Two summers abroad were some of Mallory’s most significant experiences in college and developed further her interest in French.  She studied in Aix-en-Provence with the Vanderbilt-in-France program and the following summer took an internship with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) based in Geneva, Switzerland. During these travels and in reading Enlightenment authors in class at Vanderbilt, Mallory grew in confidence speaking French and became fascinated with the history, architecture, and ideas of the Ancien Régime.  She was not sure how these interests would fit into a life after graduation, however.  She started working for Wells Fargo immediately after graduation as a financial analyst, but soon made the decision to apply to History PhD programs. Now, Mallory is entering her second year at Yale University. She studies early modern France, specifically economic life and maritime trade.  This summer she spent six weeks working in archives in Paris, Nantes, and Aix/Marseille.  Mallory still continues to work on French conversation, translation, and paleography, even meeting weekly with a tutor during the school year.

Class of 2011

Carmen Hazim graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2011. She is an Epidemiologist  at U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention working with ministries of health to combat antibiotic resistance and establish infection control programs and in international healthcare settings.