Alumni Testimonials
Tekesha Brown '03
I am in my second year of law school at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. I will be working for a law firm here in Atlanta this summer and then moving back to Florida after graduation (hopefully clerking for a federal judge and then going to work at a firm). I definitely remember thinking about what I was going to do with my Italian degree! It's actually been quite helpful. I've gotten a lot of interviews because it makes my resume stand out and people are always very interested in hearing about what I studied since it is so unusual - typically the first question they ask! I've also met a lot of attorneys who majored in foreign languages and it's good preparation for law school which is very much like having to learn a foreign language. Additionally, it's very valuable to any company if you can translate documents since this is such a global economy. Majoring in any language also makes you a stronger writer because you pay such close attention to grammar and word choice and you read much more literature than other majors. I'm currently on the Emory Law Journal (our version of law review) and I know the foundation I got as an Italian major is part of the reason.
Marjorana Karathanasis '01
Sto lavorando a Roma in una scuola bilingue, insegno inglese, scienze e geografia italiana alla quarta e quinta elementare. Insegno piuttosto in inglese ma sicuramente aiuta la mia conoscenza della lingua italiana per spiegare delle cose difficile a loro, ed interagire con l'amministrazione e vivere in questo paese.
Laura Brito '00
I graduated in May of 2000. I had spent my junior year in Bologna studying Italian literature after the Holocaust in depth. It was then that I fell in love with the works of Primo Levi. To this day, he is one of my heroes.
After graduation, I worked as a Process Analyst for Andersen Consulting (now known as Accenture). I then moved to Japan for a few years to raise my son. Upon returning to the U.S., I worked briefly for a newspaper in Clovis, NM as the manager of the newsroom. After Clovis, I was Managing Editor of the Annals of Biomedical Engineering (offices at Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, GA. I am currently a Library Associate for the Gwinnett County Public Library. As you can see, I have yet to choose a set career path. However, my Italian has helped me connect with colleagues and strangers alike. It is as if we belong to a special club when we realize that we speak the same language.
Samantha Godbey '99
I have spent time in Russia as a Peace Corps Volunteer, worked as a marketing analyst for an insurance brokerage, and have since returned to grad school to get my teaching credential and Master's in Education. I am now in my third year as a high school English teacher. The literature and language study I did in the Italian department has been beneficial to each of these experiences.
Nicholas Camerlenghi '98
After graduating from Yale in 1998 (where incidentally, I was president of the Yale College Italian Society), I went to MIT to complete a Master's Degree in the History of Architecture. Thirsting for more school, I enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Princeton still in Art and Architectural History. In the spring of 2007, I completed that degree and I am now happily teaching Art History at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. My research is focused on Italy and in particular on Rome. During my Ph.D. studies I spent three years living in Rome researching the architecture of one of its most impressive buildings: the Basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura.
Katherine Gronberg Hennessey '97
I did a Fulbright in Italy in the area of comparative politics two years after I graduated from Yale. Obviously, my Italian language skills came in handy then! I later went to work on Capitol Hill, as a staff member on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and worked there for the bulk of my Washington, D.C. career. One of my responsibilities was overseeing the budget of the State Department. I made a few trips to Italy for my job, two of which were focused on funding for U.S. Diplomatic facilities there. My Italian skills allowed me to engage directly with Italian contractors working on the different project, which permitted a much more frank and informative interchange with them.
I should say too that my Italian language skills also allowed me to reconnect with my Italian relatives after 20 years of silence due to my parents’ generation not being able to speak the language. They have become a regular and very important part of my life! I really have no doubt that I will continue to find ways to incorporate my Italian skills into my work life, as well as my personal life.
Troy Grady '94
I've worked in the recruiting industry since graduation, first for a firm which would become the parent of HotJobs.com, and for the last nine years, for a firm of my own foundation. Our expertise is executive search in the finance and technology sectors, with a client list that includes banks, hedge funds, and software companies. In my spare time I enjoy rainy nights, piña coladas, and conjugating in the congiuntivo trapassato.
Jennifer Mazzon '93
I am currently employed as a Senior Product Manager at Google. The only time I've used my Italian professionally was when I was working at a small start-up that got acquired by Google. At that start-up, I communicated with customers and journalists in Italy via email. On the personal side, I met my husband because I was reading La Repubblica in a library in my home town. We got married in 1996 and have 3 children: Beatrice, Leonardo & Sebastiano.
Samantha Conti '89
It's Sam Conti here (SM '89), and I want you to tell all of those majors that Italian is a powerful secret weapon in the world of fashion and luxury goods. I am the London bureau chief of the fashion and lifestyle title, W Magazine, and its sister publication Women's Wear Daily, the fashion retail trade paper. Both are based in New York.
Before running the W/WWD office in London, I was head of the office in Milan, reporting in Italian and writing in English about the fashion industry as well as doing feature stories for the magazine on wine makers, luxury hotels and the far-flung vacation homes of Giorgio Armani and Dolce & Gabbana.
When I was a major at Yale so long ago, my peers didn't take my choice of major very seriously. They though it was sort of cute, and that I'd probably end up marrying an Italian prince, and fiddling around in a Tuscan castle with a band of suntanned bambini.
But let me tell you, my coursework has served me well on countless occasions when I had to interview designers like Armani (who speaks no English) and the late Gianni Versace and Gianfranco Ferre (whose English was spotty at best) and countless other fashion and luxury movers and shakers.
While my competitors from Time Magazine, the New York Times, Forbes, Fortune and Business Week would struggle to do a decent interview - with the help of translators - I'd be happily chattering away in Italian. Although I am based in London now, I speak Italian almost every day - many of my sources are still based in Italy, and a lot of London's fashion designers manufacture there around Florence and in northern Italy.
I even help my husband with translations and with schmoozing key Italian clients. My husband is editorial director of the London-based design magazine Wallpaper, and the bulk of that magazine's ad revenue comes from Italian furniture, kitchen, design and fashion companies.
Tell those students that language is power, and that right now Italians are leaders in countless fields - fashion, luxury, industrial design, wine, food, private equity, even property (there is one Milanese developer who is practically taking over all the commercial real estate in central London!).
Please let me know if I can be of further help. I feel so strongly about the education I got at Yale and would not have traded that major for all the castles and princes in Tuscany.
Jonathan Nighswander '88
La mia storia in due parole - lavoro come consulente gestionale nella divisione Corporate Finance di FTI Consulting. Purtroppo, sebbene io viaggia abbastanza spesso in Europa per affari, non ho mai lavorato in Italia, e non ho mai usato l’italiano in una capacità professionale. Oggi per esempio mi trovo a Parigi e sono costretto a parlare francese. Forse l'anno prossimo...Però, nondimeno sono molto contento di aver scelto letteratura italiana come il mio major. La verità è che ci sono già tanti "history majors" nel mondo, non c'è bisogno di farne di più.
Carlo Codato '85
It was great to hear from the Italian Dept. I was disappointed to miss your conference last year when you invited former dept. alumni back to Yale, so I welcome contact from you again! It's a great idea.
I graduated in 1985 with a BA. I have done nothing specifically "Italian" with my degree but that's true of many liberal arts majors. First I worked in journalism, then in real estate and now I'm a psychotherapist. Since I live in CT, I come across Italians all the time and have used my language in all my various professional incarnations and private life. If you can talk to an Italian stone mason in his language, he'll give you a good price and fuss over you!
As far as how employers view an Italian major, my experience is that it stops people in their tracks, they don't gloss over it. More and more, employers are looking for people who think outside the box, and it did make me stand out in that way. They are looking for people with a broader perspective than just narrow professional training, which is what they told me at Yale as well. My experience has shown it to be true!
What I liked about the dept. when I was there was that it was small, I knew everyone - professors, staff, grad students. It really felt like a home. I could have done comp. lit. but that was a big department and didn't feel like a family - like my Italian dept! It also helped me deepen my engagement with my culture of origin, which has left me with a sense of rootedness in Italian culture that remains at the core of who I am.
