I spoke with a few prospective volunteers and Peace Corps representative Paul Frisoli. Here is what they had to say. Tom Kennedy, a chinese major at Umass explained, “I wish to become an interpreter for Chinese Japanese Spanish and French, I have no other plans after college so I figured I’d maybe join the peace core and at least go somewhere where they speak Spanish or French and apply my language ability.
I expect to learn more about what the Peace Corps does because I really don’t know that much about it.”
Nelly Stevens is a Kinesiology major at Umass, she said, “I’m interested in Peace Corps because I’ve always wanted to do volunteer work and I want to go abroad. My number one place is Africa and I’d really like to go to South America as well. Health Education would probably be my number one or anything in the health area. I looked at videos of volunteers online and went through the Peace Corps web site. I heard about this meeting about two weeks ago. I’m not 100% now, I want to talk to the representative about it.”
I asked Paul Frisoli, the representative organizing the meeting about how the meetings are held and how he got into the Peace Corps himself .”We have one meeting about once a month, and one at Amherst college so that’s five per semester. Besides Umass I do a lot of information sessions at Amherst college, and sometimes at Hampshire college. This year I have seen a lot of Umass applications. Before I served as a volunteer I just passed by an information table and ran into a recruiter and I talked to him for like two hours and I was like, I want to apply to the Peace Corps. That was 2001, I was 21, it was my senior year. I was a French major and economics minor.
I originally went to Guinea to teach English and when I got there , there weren’t enough Math teachers and they saw I had a certain French level and they asked if I could teach math in French and it was like basic Algebra.”
He talked about how well the information sessions work in getting people informed and even admitted a collegue who for her own personal reasons left the Peace Corps early. There weren’t any penalties.
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December 3, 2008 at 2:04 am
[...] student Wes Rahn snagged interviews with a couple of students attending the meeting, as well as with Frisoli [...]