As an Eastman Leader, senior Emma Rodriguez received $10,000 from Eckerd to support completion of an individualized discovery plan—which included participation in at least one study abroad course, an internship and a service learning project.
Lily Schwartz, a senior political science student at Eckerd College, couldn’t quite process the Peace Corps acceptance email as she was leaving the dentist.
“I was on the phone with my dad and I just told him, ‘Oh, by the way, I just got into the Peace Corps,’” she recalls. “I don’t think either of us quite realized it at that moment.”
Lily is one of three Eckerd Tritons to earn a coveted Peace Corps volunteer position for 2025. Senior Emma Rodriguez, an international relations and global affairs student from Hillsborough, New Jersey, and recent psychology graduate Robyn Bull ’24, originally from Johannesburg, South Africa, also were selected for service assignments that will last for two years outside the U.S. in areas of need for those populations.
Peace Corps volunteers, according to the organization’s website, work in six sectors in more than 60 countries to “build relationships, exchange cultures and knowledge, and help transform lives for generations.”
Since 2017, Eckerd’s Peace Corps Prep program has combined targeted coursework with service-oriented fieldwork and professional development training designed to make participants more competitive when applying for postgraduate Peace Corps volunteer positions, Fulbright U.S. Scholarships, and other international development and intercultural fieldwork opportunities.
Lily, a sailing team member and Eastman Leader from Sandusky, Ohio, will leave in August to serve two years in Cambodia teaching English.
Emma leveraged her Spanish education and passion for service to land a Youth in Development position in the Dominican Republic. Both started in Peace Corps Prep as sophomores and were selected for the Donald and Christine Eastman Citizenship and Leadership Program. They each received $10,000 to support completion of an individualized discovery plan, which included participation in at least one study abroad course, an internship, a service learning project, and additional activities that correspond with the student’s academic and professional goals.
Emma hopes her Peace Corps volunteer assignment will help her with Spanish language immersion, because her Cuban father decided not to speak two languages at home due to her brother’s special needs. Classmate and Dominican Republic native Jesus Feris celebrated Emma’s placement on his island and promised to welcome her into his family. As an added bonus, she’ll be working with young people—something she’s done through Metro Inclusive Health, a local nonprofit that provides sexual health information and resources.
“I could be in a school nurse’s office. I could be doing sex education in high schools. I could be doing gender-based violence prevention with young adults,” Emma explains of her assignment. “It’s such a wide range of what I could be doing.”
She’s thankful for how well the Peace Corps Prep curriculum prepared her for the interview process and provided additional help once she knew which country they were considering her for. “I would definitely say if you get a posting suggestion, research the hell out of it, and look up every YouTube video that a Peace Corps volunteer has posted,” Emma implores. “Don’t just read what’s on the Peace Corps website.”
Senior Lily Schwartz leaves for a two-year stint in Cambodia this August.
Emma will head to the Dominican Republic for her assignment.
Psychology graduate Robyn Bull ’24
Lily always knew she would go into the Peace Corps, so when she found Eckerd—a small liberal arts college with a sailing team and Peace Corps Prep—she signed up right away.
“That was kind of like just an avenue I always wanted to go down. I didn’t stress myself out to follow that path if it changed, but it didn’t change,” Lily says. “And I always wanted to go to the two-year service after I graduate. And now that I’ve done the four years [of college], I’m really ready for a good two-year service break where I have a sort of whole different life than I’ve been living now.”
A natural teacher, Lily has been instructing young sailors since she was in high school sailing out of a barn on Lake Erie. Her Eastman Leadership service has been focused on expanding access to the sport and its recreational benefits to marginalized communities, which included a summer job at Courageous Sailing in Boston to work with hundreds of youth learning the sport for the first time and getting trained to teach others as future counselors.
The Phi Beta Kappa inductee—with French and Arabic language interests—hopes her teaching experience will translate smoothly into her English-language classroom in Cambodia.
“I think Eckerd itself is kind of centered similarly to the Peace Corps Prep program,” she says. “It obviously helps you take certain classes and makes you do certain languages and a little bit of extra volunteer and service. It helps you get resources, and those are all really important, and I kind of just did all that stuff because I wanted to do it,” she adds.
The cultural humility learned in humanities classes also makes Eckerd students strong candidates for the Peace Corps, Emma says.
“I think the humanities classes and the health classes I’ve taken here at Eckerd have taught me to slow down and just listen,” she explains. “These people have full lives outside of me showing up on their doorstep. Learning the way of life and the customs and the norms and how to best communicate something that can be as sensitive as sex education to kids. If I were just to do it how it’s done here, that wouldn’t be taken well.”
