Mickey Donovan-Kaloust
International Relations and Spanish double-major / Gardiner, ME
Mickey Donovan-Kaloust came to Goucher with a variety of passions and a good bit of international experience. She left with even more.
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Dance
Latin American Studies
Political Science & International Relations
"I went from micro to macro," Donovan-Kaloust says, describing her academic interests. "I knew that I wanted to be in a discipline that deals with people, so I started with psychology. That dealt too much with the individual, so I tried sociology. That seemed too theoretical to me, so I moved on to women’s studies. But I didn’t want to focus just on women, and it didn’t have as much of an international focus. I realized that what I was really interested in was looking at the world in general and how it works."
Donovan-Kaloust came to Goucher after a year studying in Chile. That got her interested in the Spanish language and Latin American studies, which would become her minor. She’s also a dancer with a keen appreciation for the different styles to be found around the world. At Goucher, she found a place where she could explore the full range of her interests -- both on campus and on location.
"I was a person with a lot of different interests and loves, but not necessarily a focus," she says. "Goucher is great because it gives you so much space to experiment and explore, and so many great courses in which you can start to find out the truth behind your ideals."
Donovan-Kaloust’s explorations led her first to Ghana, where, as a first-year student, she participated in a three-week Intensive Course Abroad on the culture and arts of West Africa. In her sophomore year, she went to Brazil on another ICA to study dance. She spent the second semester of her junior year in Quito, Ecuador, studying at the Universidad San Francisco and teaching math to kids who had grown up on the streets of the city. As a senior, she studied women’s resistance groups on yet another ICA in Argentina and Uruguay.
In some ways, Donovan-Kaloust says, her experiences abroad taught her more than she feels she could have ever learned in class. "You spend a lot of time in international relations classes talking about globalization, poverty, and the gap between the rich and the poor," she says. "But then you get to these places and witness these things firsthand, and that takes you to a whole other level of understanding."
At the same time, her classes enabled her to place what she was seeing at the local level into a global context. And she says her experiences abroad enriched the discussions in which she took part when she returned to Goucher. "I felt like I had something to share that perhaps not everyone had seen for themselves, but that they could relate to because of what we were all learning together in class," she says.
Furthermore, says Donovan-Kaloust, her experiences as a Goucher student helped her focus on the issues she cares about -- and articulate why she believes they are important.
“Through all of the experiences I’ve had at Goucher, I’ve come to realize that problems are more complex than they seem on the face of them,"she says. "I’ve been able to dig in and discover why women’s rights are so important, and why globalization is such a big issue --and not necessarily just bad.
“I’ve made things more complex for myself -- which is good, even though it makes it more difficult just to hold up your placard and yell. It’s given me a deeper understanding of the issues, and that’s the only way that you can start to solve them."