A chance meeting as a first-year student opened the door to a fantastic internship for triple major Christina Martin ’18.

“I decided to go to the Selinsgrove Street Festival because I had heard there would be a petting zoo,” says the public policy, political science and Spanish major from Harrisburg, Pa.

She did get to pet animals—but more importantly, she met Nick Troiano, a 26-year-old independent running for Congress in the fall 2014 election. They stayed in touch and he eventually connected her with an internship with Change.org, where she worked on the Change Politics project.

“It began as a way to encourage a more intimate interaction with presidential candidates,” says Martin, who helped get a question by a 体育买球官网 student before candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in an online town hall.

The project shifted to a voter education tool—allowing users to express their support for candidates—and finally a source of information on down-ballot and local elections.

“While I worked on the project, my knowledge regarding elections in each state and nationwide expanded greatly,” Martin says.

Financing from the Gundaker Enrichment Fund later helped Martin spend a summer living in Washington, D.C., while working for Change.org.

She also studied abroad for a semester in Sevilla, Spain, where her program set her up with a position as an English Language Acquisition Instructor at the Italian Consulate for Sevilla.

“I was able to learn about the inner-workings of consulates and embassies,” Martin says.

She hopes all of these experiences will add up to a public policy job abroad, perhaps in a consulate or embassy.

Martin will be teaching English to children the age of three to five through the CIEE program in Madrid, Spain, until June 2019.

“I can’t wait to combine my knowledge of the Spanish language with my public policy major as I seek jobs in the future,” she says.