End of the SPEL 2023 fall semester
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What do our SPEL interns and fellows think about their time at Hola Cultura this fall? Nearly all (88.9%) say they enjoyed interviewing their respective artists and experts, while everyone says they had a very good (44%) or excellent (56%) overall experience as members of our Storytelling Program for Experiential Learning (SPEL), according to the feedback survey taken at the end of the semester.
As we wrap up another successful session, here’s a look at what some of our team members have to say and a glimpse of what we’ve done this fall.
Arts & Humanities Team
“It’s very nice having that diverse experience with interviewing. Seeing how other people react to different questions has been a very valuable experience that SPEL offers,” says Joycelin Salmeron, a senior at D.C.’s Capital City Public Charter School who aspires to become a nurse. She also offered some advice to future SPEL members: “stay on top of your work and don’t be afraid to ask for help and communicate when you need it.”
As an intern who began in the spring semester and returned again for the fall after taking the summer off, Salmeron has participated in two different story teams. This fall, she is part of SPEL’s Arts & Humanities team. In the spring semester, she was on the Afro-Latino Experience story team.
She says she enjoyed the different approaches each team took to the interviewing process. The Afro-Latino team did their interviews as a group, compared to the more independent interviews carried out by the Arts & Humanities team, where each intern typically comes up with a story idea and sees it through to publication on the Hola Cultura website.
SPEL members conduct research and interviews with D.C. artists and other Latino creatives and experts to produce original stories of interest to the community. Hola Cultura launched the SPEL program in January 2020. Since then, it has emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic as a thriving national storytelling platform that brings D.C. high school and college students together with young adult fellows from around the country to work together on story production.
Society & Culture team
“I really liked being able to work with others all over the United States. I thought that was really cool,” says Crista Fiala, an editorial intern on the Society & Culture team. Fiala is a senior at the University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford, Connecticut. She is majoring in English, Spanish and history. In the future, Fiala hopes to attend graduate school and have a career that allows her to write, research and participate in conversations that discuss multiple communities and causes.
She says she learned a lot about speaking and interviewing through her work in SPEL.
“I think that the process of interviewing is really valuable for my career goals,” says Fiala, who added that getting feedback and collaborating with others on her team also helped her learn.
Since Hola Cultura gives interns the opportunity to delve into their own interests, Fiala’s advice to future SPEL members is to stick to what they want to research and create in order to make their experience valuable.
Throughout the fall semester, interns met weekly to listen to guest speakers and participate in story lab sessions, where they met with their team members and fellows to share ideas and updates and collaborate on stories.
Copy Editing Team
Ian Henry, an intern on the Copy Editing team, enjoyed the guest speakers in particular. “It made things so relatable to show that they were in our shoes at one point in time,” he says.
Henry is a senior at Ramapo College of New Jersey majoring in visual arts with a concentration in electronic arts and animation. He hopes to have his own video game and multimedia studio one day. In SPEL, he says he learned a lot of professional skills, such as time management, consistency, as well as rejection.
“That’s another thing about the experience. Not everyone’s going to respond back to you, so it’s always best to have your options open,” Henry says.
We extend a special thanks to our guest speakers, who took the time to chat and answer questions. This fall, they were Gaylord Fields, a copy editor and manager at GQ magazine; Associated Press reporter Luis Andres Henao; Daniel Martínez González, the official photographer and videographer for Johns Hopkins School of Nursing; independent curator Fabiola Delgado; and Washington City Paper’s Camila Bailey. Martínez González was among the guest speakers who have volunteered at Hola Cultura in the past. Other former interns and volunteers who spoke to SPEL’s fall cohort were Rosa Hernandez, who today is a strategic communications specialist at the International Monetary Fund, and Ph.D. candidate Gisell Ramirez, who spoke to the group in October about her journey and life after interning at Hola Cultura in 2018. Thank you all for your time!
– Story by Crystal Lee
– Edited by Jordan Luz
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