Admissions Consultant

  • My approach to admissions consulting goes beyond helping students produce polished application materials. I treat the application process itself as an opportunity for intellectual and professional development.

    I work with students to understand how U.S. admissions processes operate, identify programs that fit their academic and professional goals, and develop a coherent strategy across the different components of an application. A central part of this work is helping applicants recognize what is distinctive about their own trajectories and learn how to communicate it effectively within U.S. academic conventions.

    I help applicants identify the experiences, intellectual habits, cultural perspectives, and forms of knowledge they bring from Latin America and translate them into terms that admissions committees can recognize without flattening what makes those experiences distinctive.

    My background as a teacher of writing is especially important to this process. Rather than simply correcting drafts or rewriting essays for applicants, I give students structures, exercises, and analytical tools that help them understand what they want to say and how to say it themselves. The goal is not only to produce a stronger statement of purpose or personal statement, but also to develop skills in academic writing, self-presentation, narrative construction, and intellectual communication that will continue to matter long after the application has been submitted.

    I also see admissions as a moment in which students can build greater confidence in their own intellectual identities. A strong application should not merely help someone gain entry into a university. It should help them recognize, articulate, and foreground what they already bring with them when they enter.

    Through ADMITTO, my aim is to make the graduate admissions process more transparent, strategic, and intellectually meaningful for Latin American applicants—and to help students approach U.S. universities not simply as institutions whose approval they are seeking, but as intellectual communities to which they themselves have something substantial to contribute.

  • I write a bi-weekly newsletter in Spanish where I escape the constraints of academic writing, return to the comfort of writing in my mother tongue, and experience the joy of creative critical writing.

    I co-founded the Colombian feminist platform SietePolas where, for six years, I wrote a blog and produced content for Instagram and Twitter. This platform, a pioneer in digital feminist activism in Colombia, disseminated feminist analyses and debates to its audience of more than 50,000 followers. I and my fellow writers at this collective also offered our expertise in critical gender analyses to multiple print and digital publications in Colombia. We became actively involved in legal and political activism for reproductive rights, particularly as part of the Causa Justa movement, which achieved the decriminalization of abortion in Colombia in 2022.

Public Writer & Digital Activist

Ph.D. in Literature, Educator, Researcher

  • Within this interdisciplinary framework, my dissertation studies the figure of the international student in the United States. I study novels where border-crossing for study becomes a path toward apprehending the overlap between U.S.-specific racial regimes and the classed and geopolitical dimensions of transnational U.S. empire. I argue that protagonists trained within institutions of U.S. hegemony acquire intimate knowledge of them, while embodied experiences of racialization, legal precarity, and shifting class position reveal contradictions their training cannot contain. Each protagonist appropriates literary, institutional, and bureaucratic forms and redirects them toward other ends. I call these appropriations counter-forms, locating resistance not in exteriority but in overtraining, inhabitation, mimicry, and redirection.

    Before attending UCSB, I received an undergraduate degree in Literature at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, and an M.A in English from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Before joining UCSB I was an English instructor at Howard University.

    I was the 2020-21 Graduate Student Fellow at UCSB’s American Cultures and Global Contexts Center, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center 2021-22 Public Humanities Fellow, and 2021-22 Graduate Research Assistant for Las Maestras Center.

    I was part of the Editorial Team of the Research + Activism Bibliography, a digital bibliography of scholarship that involves social justice activism or discusses what engaged scholarship means.

    As a Public Humanities Fellow from UC Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and in collaboration with SillónEstudios, I designed, produced and hosted SietePolas: El Podcast, a podcast that documents the lives, joys, and struggles of feminists in their day to day lives, their work, and their activism.