The freshmen sitting in Pope Lecture Hall on Wednesday had never met Carmen Cusido before that afternoon, but they already had something in common with her: like Cusido, many of them were bilingual.<\/p>\n
As part of the Center for English Acquisition and Culture\u2019s (CELAC) discussion \u201cUsing Multiple Languages in the Workplace,\u201d award-winning journalist Carmen Cusido spoke with the students about how being bilingual served as an asset throughout her successful career. \u00a0Born in Cuban household, Cusido was raised not too far away in Union City, NJ where she made it a point early on to master the English language in hopes of pursuing a writing career.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said \u2018I\u2019m going to be a writer\u2019 and when I overcame the hurdle of learning English, I said \u2018now I\u2019m going to make it a career,\u2019\u201d Cusido added, smiling.<\/p>\n
And she did. With few bilingual journalists in the news industry, Cusido thrived at newspapers in New Jersey and North Carolina and went on to have her work appear on CNN, NBC and The Huffington Post<\/em>. Additionally, she has been interviewed by ABC News, The Guardian<\/em>, The Star-Ledger<\/em>, amNewYork and Univision. Currently, she freelances and works full-time in the communications department of the Wildlife Conservation Society.<\/p>\n \u201cBeing bilingual has been a very big asset for my career,\u201d she told the students.<\/p>\n As a Cuban-American, she expressed great pride of her heritage.\u00a0 However when asked, she said she identifies primarily as simply being American.<\/p>\n \u201cI grew up here; my culture is here, but I am proud of my background because that is who made me who I am,\u201d she added. \u201cYeah, I\u2019ve drawn away from my [Cuban] culture a little bit, but I\u2019ve expanded to include other cultures and voices in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n Cusido went on to encourage the students to make choices and do things that they think is right for them. She also imparted a few pieces of advice she wished she had known when she was pursuing her journalism degree at Rutgers University.<\/p>\n \u201cThe major you have may not be the career you do \u2014 and go out network,\u201d she said. \u201cYou never know when you might find internships and it\u2019s never too early to start looking into that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The freshmen sitting in Pope Lecture Hall on Wednesday had never met Carmen Cusido before that afternoon, but they already had something in common with her: like Cusido, many of them were bilingual. As part of the Center for English Acquisition and Culture\u2019s (CELAC) discussion \u201cUsing Multiple Languages in the Workplace,\u201d award-winning journalist Carmen Cusido […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3,5,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni","category-current-students","category-faculty-staff","category-future-students"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n