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Interdisciplinary Studies Alumna Spotlight: Jackelyn Tejada

Jackelyn Tejada (Interdisciplinary, ’21) shares an update on her life journey after Woodbury, and how Woodbury has shaped her experience:

Life after Woodbury has changed so much for me. I’m in a field I never expected to go into, and even more surprising to me, I’m back in school. Even though my life now is very different, I’ve felt well-prepared for these kinds of changes and I know I have Woodbury to thank for a lot of that. Majoring in Interdisciplinary Studies has given me the confidence to go into any type of work and reverse engineer a path to my success.

Shortly after I graduated, I started my own series of monthly events to give nutritious home-cooked meals and care packages to the Skid Row community. While I was attending Woodbury, I completed my internship requirement with a nonprofit called Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN).

I participated in many events with them and became inspired to start my own event, Cruelty-Free Giving. I was lucky to make friends with a local business owner and they allowed me to use their location for my event after closing hours. I posted flyers all over social media and was able to raise enough money to keep these events going for almost a year.

I owe a big thank you to Emily Bills for introducing me to one of the members of LACAN and for her eye-opening classes. Food and the City was a class I kept in mind a lot when organizing this event. I wanted to ensure any meals I cooked were healthy since accessibility to nutritious food can be difficult for our communities. Some of the ingredients I used were actually harvested from my garden which I started as an assignment for that class.

I would have kept going but I ran into a storage issue at home and decided I should give my mother’s once-organized home back to her.

Around the same time, I started doing a side business with my husband and learned a lot about mechanics. It started off just working on cars but it has now led me to be an industrial mechanic. I love being in this field and working with my hands. It is nothing I would have expected to be doing but it feels great to learn something new. It’s led me to pursue my electrical degree which I feel prepared for since Woodbury has given me such a well-rounded education. I’m still using Rhino, which I learned in my architecture classes, but instead of plans and sections, I’m making schematics and wiring diagrams.

Woodbury has prepared me for whatever path I choose to take. I was lucky to have a great advisor, Will McConnell, who helped me shape my experience at Woodbury to get the most out of it. If it wasn’t for him, I would have never even known about Interdisciplinary studies. This major is what enabled me to go into any field and succeed. I’m so grateful to all the faculty and professors I had the pleasure of working with for always encouraging me to pursue my dreams.

 

Last Updated on March 31, 2023.

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