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Global, Civic & Cross-Disciplinary Opportunities Advisor, Academic Advising Center

Carmella's excitement to support Duke students interested in global opportunities and civic engagement stems from her own experiences living, traveling, and volunteering abroad. She spent part of her childhood in England and studied for several years in Germany. This served as a springboard to travel to several other places around the globe. She learned how to forgo the map, talk to strangers, and question her assumptions as her travels took her to Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe and China. Much of her civic engagement has been in voter registration and supporting older adults, something she has been able to do both in the U.S. and in Germany.

After getting her B.A. in German Literature from Bard College, she went to Germany as a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow to provide language instruction support to a technical university in eastern Germany. She later returned to Germany to get her master’s degree in German literature from the Freie Universitaet in Berlin and then moved to New York City where she worked at an international internship exchange organization and as an international student advisor at The New School. Immediately preceding her work at the AAC, she was associate director of the career center at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy where she advised students on global opportunities in public policy and forged partnerships with organizations around the world.

As a first-gen low-income college student herself, Carmella wasn’t aware of all the resources she could have taken advantage of and relied on a few helpful professors and friends to guide her through academic and co-curricular decisions. She is thrilled to be in a position that works alongside students as they shape and determine (and redetermine) their academic goals while learning to become civically engaged and thoughtful global citizens.