September 2–6, 2024 · Puerto Rico
In September 2024, I traveled to Puerto Rico with student researchers from Hostos Community College for the HETS Student Passport: Connect, Learn & Lead — Puerto Rico Edition. I participated as a Career Services representative and as an advisor to students whose work extended beyond the classroom into research, presentation, and professional development.
The week brought together students from HETS member institutions in Puerto Rico, the mainland United States, and Latin America. Across five days, participants moved among academic experiences, student presentations, workshops, cultural activities, and leadership programming designed to make higher education more collaborative and more mobile across institutions.
Supporting student researchers beyond campus
Career services work is often described in terms of resumes, interviews, internships, and employment outcomes. That is part of the work, but it can also mean helping students understand how research, presentation, travel, academic networking, and professional identity fit together.
For the students I advised, the HETS experience created a chance to present work in a new setting, meet peers and faculty from other institutions, and see research as something that could travel beyond a single course or campus. My role was partly logistical and partly developmental: accompanying students, helping them prepare for the experience, supporting their research and presentation work, and connecting what they were doing to longer-term academic and career goals.
Academic exchange at Ana G. Méndez University
One of the program’s academic experiences took place at Ana G. Méndez University’s Gurabo campus. HETS’s program included welcome remarks, student presentations, a conversation with UAGM students, and time for participants to learn from one another across institutions.
That format mattered. Students were not simply attending a conference as audience members. They were part of the intellectual and professional activity of the week: presenting, asking questions, exchanging ideas, and seeing how their own work fit into a larger network of students and institutions.
Research, career development, and belonging
The trip reinforced something I had seen repeatedly in Career Services: students build confidence when they have opportunities to do meaningful work in public, receive feedback, and recognize themselves as people who belong in academic and professional spaces.
HETS also made the overlap between research advising and career development especially visible. Presenting research requires many of the same skills students later use in professional settings—synthesizing information, explaining complex ideas clearly, responding to questions, adapting to an audience, and building relationships with people outside their immediate institution.
The week concluded alongside broader student-leadership programming, including The Summ: Student Experience Summit and the HETS Student Leadership Showcase. For me, the value of the experience was not simply that students traveled to Puerto Rico. It was that they had a structured opportunity to see their research, academic interests, and emerging professional identities as connected.
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