My name is Maria Clara Albuquerque. I’m from northeastern Brazil, from the city of Maceió in the state of Alagoas. Last year I graduated in pedagogy from the Federal University of Alagoas where I investigated the interferences of social class and gender on students’ choices for the pedagogy course. And this year, on my master’s, I am continuing this investigation, in which I want to understand how the system of domination – social class oppression, sexism and racism – reflects on pedagogy students at the Federal University of Bahia using intersectionality as a framework.

On my master’s break, I decided to reach out to QualLab because I felt an enormous interest in their work. (QualLab is a research center that fosters capacity building of Ohio State’s Education and Human Ecology faculty, post-docs, researchers and graduate students and strives to be an inter/national in person and online destination location for advancing qualitative inquiry toward innovation, equity, diversity and justice.) So, I sent an email to Penny Pasque, founding director of QualLab, who very kindly accepted me and proposed an internship at The Review of Higher Education (RHE) as a social media intern. The internship stepped up my expectations as a student because I had full access to all the articles and worked with both of my mentors: Pasque and Monica Quezada, a PhD student.

As an international student, I thought this experience could be hard because of the cultural and language barriers, but they made it so amazing with their kindness, generosity and humanity. I can only say thank you. Thank you, RHE team. Thank you for lifting me up.