Holiday Availability: All IES Abroad offices will be closed on Dec 24, Dec 25, Dec 31, and Jan 1 as we take some time to celebrate. During the weeks of 12/22 and 12/29, our team will be smaller, so responses may take longer than usual. Thanks for your understanding—and happy holidays!
Going abroad for my education was always in the cards for me. And now that it's official, I have to face my fears, or more specifically, the primary fear that has plagued me since I started learning languages: How am I going to navigate life on my own in my target language?
For the last few weeks, in my ongoing endeavor to learn Spanish, something I committed to in my Freshman year, I’ve been holding weekly zoom meetings with my mother’s colleague—Magdalena. Magdalena is a kindly woman, originally from Spain but now living here in England (where my family lives), who works with my mother at one of the nearby town libraries. I guess my upcoming study abroad semester in Barcelona, as well as my goal of learning Spanish, came up in conversation one day and my mother told me one evening that Magdalena had extended an offer to help me out with my speaking skills.
It's almost surreal. This thing that I have been working on for months through rounds of applications, it's finally materializing. It didn't feel real when I wrote my essays, or when I got the acceptance package, or when I was browsing the course catalogue for classes I'll be taking abroad, or when I was saying goodbye to my friends at the end of the school year saying, "See you next year!" Like, what do you mean I'm going to school on the other side of the world for four months? What for? Sure...
Liat is a service designer and expert in social innovation, and she is passionate about creative processes and developing new tools for design thinking and innovative strategies towards sustainability. Liat coordinates and manages local and European projects to improve the urban lifestyle from an environmental and social point of view. She is currently the project manager for the Municipality of Milan of the Pilot action of the H2020 project Centrinno, promoting circular economy. As founder of HousingLab and the Director of the Impact Housing Foundation, she is facilitating and coaching processes of urban housing renewal and exploring how private investments may be used to generate more housing options. Liat holds a PhD in design from Politecnico di Milano and teaches social innovation In IES abroad Milan.
Alejandra Calleros-Islas graduated as an Economist. She has a Master's degree in Sustainability with a specialty in policy design and evaluation from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Barcelona. She wrote her PhD on integrated assessment tools at the UPC, where she developed and tested a methodology to evaluate performance of agroecosystems to support the transition towards organic farming in Mexico. She is an expert in the field of sustainability with over 12 years of experience in research and project development and evaluation, both in European and Latin American contexts. She has taught the "Sustainability: Challenges and Responses" course at IES Barcelona since 2018 and the Global Pillars course "Designing the Sustainable City" since the Spring 2022 pilot. Her interests include the Circular Economy, the Nexus -food, energy, water- approach, biomimicry, and socio-agroecosystems. What she likes the most about her professional field is its flexible, transversal, and multidisciplinary nature, so everyone has a part to play. IES course taught: ES352 Sustainability: Challenges and Responses; ES/SO360 Designing the Sustainable City.
Christine Alfsen has been teaching at IES ABROAD NICE campus courses on the Governance of Global Environmental Risks and Cities and Water in the Mediterranean region since 2015 while also teaching at Sciences Po Paris. Christine was born and educated in Paris, graduating from Sciences Po Paris and INALCO (Russian and Romanian languages), and a postgraduate degree in development economics. Christine spent 32 years (1980-2012) working at the United Nations in Bangkok (ESCAP), Phnom Penh, and the United Nations in New York City. Her career focused on natural resources management: Law of the Sea and marine resources management. She was in charge of Cambodia's forestry and mining sector at the United Nations Peace Keeping force 1992-1993. At the United Nations In New York City, she created a sciences policy network between UNESCO and Columbia University (CUBES, URBIS), leveraging partner universities' scientific networks (Columbia U, Cornell, Yale, University of Stockholm) to inform UN policies on urban sustainability. She worked in the UN Secretary General cabinet (2011), contributing to the UN Secretary General’s High -Level Panel on Global Sustainability report: “Resilient People Resilient Planet- Sustainable Development Goals” and in that context, was part of the team crafting with stakeholders around the world, the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) especially SDG 11: Sustainable Cities.