Meeting with Milla 5

     I just met with Milla for the fifth time. She was very excited today, because she just took her ACCUPLACER test for Tarrant County College. The TCC professors told her she got the highest score on the reading and writing section of any international student that had ever taken the exam: a 90/100.

     Milla feels as though a big weight has been lifted off her shoulders. All she has to do is straighten out her finances and finish some paperwork, and then she can enroll in TCC. Since she worked as a lawyer in Venezuela, she thinks that she wants to try paralegal studies here in America. Her second option is to study government, like she did in Venezuela (her undergraduate degree was in political science). Her third option is to study education and become an elementary teacher. She used to teach at a university in Venezuela (in addition to working as a lawyer), and she says she likes to work with people on the extreme ends of their education—either early childhood or college.

     She currently doesn’t know what she’ll end up studying, but her plan is to stay at TCC and get her associate’s degree. After that, she may transfer back to TCU and get a bachelor’s degree. The last time I met with her, she told me how much she loved the Austin area, so I asked her if she’d ever consider moving south and studying at UT. For now, she said, she’s content to stay at TCC. After that, who knows? The main thing is that she needs to stay in school to stay in America.

     I told Milla that I’m looking at doing a law internship this summer, and she was very confused. The educational system works differently in Venezuela, apparently, so she didn’t understand that we don’t have to profess in what we major in in America. She knew that I was previously majoring in journalism, so she didn’t understand why I wanted to explore law as a job opportunity. She figured I was just going to work as a journalist.

     After I straightened her out on the educational system here, I told her that I had my first oral Spanish exam this morning. She was excited to hear about it and we started discussing the Spanish language.

     She asked what we study in Spanish at TCU and I told her we always do vocabulary, grammar, and culture in each chapter we study in Spanish class. I told her that in Spanish I and II, we had to listen to people from different Spanish-speaking countries talk about their lives for the culture sections. That got Milla and I into talking about the different Hispanic accents. I told her I can only recognize the difference between somebody from Spain and somebody from Latin America; I can’t recognize different accents between individual Latin American countries.

     Milla explained basic differences between Latin American accents: Mexicans have a very sing-songy way of speaking, people from Paraguay are very aggressive with their syllables, Venezuelans are very calm and even in their accents, etc. She then asked me about how I speak in Spanish. I told her I wasn’t an expert and that TCU is teaching us weird things. For example, I’m in Spanish III and they haven’t taught me to say body parts, but I’ve had a lesson on bargaining and heckling. What body parts I do remember, I told her, are the ones I learned in high school.

     I went through the body and named everything I could remember (which were the basic names for everything) and then we got to talking about grammar. I told her about my difficulty with Spanish prepositions, specifically how to know when to use “a” and when to use “para.” She gave me a lesson and cleared that up for me, which I greatly appreciated. We then talked about how useful it is to know a second language and by the time we got done discussing that, our time was up and we both had to leave.

     I’m grateful to have Milla to help out with my Spanish troubles, and I’m glad that I can help her work through using English fluently in return. We’ll meet again later this week, and I’m looking forward to talking with her again.