Following her four years at Hamilton College, Anaidys “Andy” Uribe ’19 plans on going back to high school.
Uribe, a psychology and Africana studies double major, plans on working with Teach For America (TFA) at KIPP Academy Lynn Collegiate for the next two years. An alumna of KIPP Academy, Uribe will teach geometry at the school she attended before coming to Hamilton.
Uribe explained the impact that TFA teachers had on her education and that she was anxious to have a similar impact on others’ lives. She said during her eight years at Kipp, “the majority of my teachers were part of a TFA corps. “I wouldn’t have made it to Hamilton without all of their support, so I decided that upon graduation I wanted to help pay it forward and give back to a community that has given me so much.”
Majors: Africana studies and psychology
Hometown: Lynn, Mass.
High School: Kipp Academy Lynn Collegiate
“I think the fact that they serve a lot of underprivileged communities, and I came from a community like that, I think it’s really fulfilling,” Uribe elaborated. “I like being able to work with students who otherwise wouldn’t have the support that they need if they wanted to go to college ...”
Uribe said another reason she applied to work with TFA was because in her experience, “not a lot of [teachers from TFA] were people of color,” and she wanted to be someone with whom students might better relate. She said, “I think that it’s really big and important to have someone in a higher role that you can see yourself in. . . . There’s this idea of being a mirror versus a window. If you’re a window to someone then yes, you can see through it, but that’s not you. And then if you’re a mirror, you can see yourself reflected through that person. That’s kind of my hope.”
Having worked with organizations like Generation Teach, which provides summer advancement courses to lower-income students, Uribe has experience teaching younger students. She has likewise found time between running cross-country and indoor and outdoor track to tutor for the Clinton ABC program which prepares talented students of color for positions of responsibility and leadership in American society while enrolled at Clinton High School. Uribe hopes to attend graduate school for social psychology after her two years with TFA. There, she will continue her commitment to understanding and helping others.
