LAST 2020 Senior Profile: Jasmine Gloria

Tulane senior Jasmine Gloria graduates in May 2020 as a double major in Anthropology and Latin American Studies with a minor in Art History. Not only has she achieved a stellar academic record at Tulane, but she has also built an impressive CV full of diverse extracurricular accomplishments. In 2018, Jasmine participated in the Andrew W. Mellon Summer Academy for ungraduate curatorial training at the Art Institute of Chicago. That same summer, she received the Changemaker Catalyst Award from the Taylor Center, allowing her to fund museum field trips for students in her community. In 2019, she served as a Native American Scholars Initiative (NASI) intern at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Through this experience, she performed original research that spearheaded her Latin American Studies capstone project. The final product was her paper, entitled “Excavating the Diaries of Sylvanus Morley: Local Labor Use in Maya Archaeology,” which the Stone Center has awarded as the 2020 Best Campus-Wide Undergraduate Paper on a Latin American Topic. This fall, Jasmine enrolls at University of Colorado at Boulder as a Master’s student in Art History and plans to continue working towards a PhD. As a Mexican-American from a predominantly Latinx community, she is proud to be the first person in her family to go to graduate school. Her goal is to become a curator specializing in Pre-Columbian Art so that she can make knowledge of this area more accessible to the public.

Jasmine feels incredibly sad about not being able to say proper goodbye to friends and professors, as well as not having the chance to visit any of the grad schools from which she received offers, but she’s also not missing the humidity of New Orleans at this time of year. She offers the following advice to future LAST majors as well as the general Tulane student body: “Practice your Spanish when you can; even if you don’t feel comfortable speaking, knowing Spanish doubles the amount of information you can digest when it comes to the research you will need to know. For Tulane Students in general, take a class related to Latin America if you can. Knowing about the realities of different areas of the world can help with literally anything you are studying and there is no better area to understand than our own neighbor.”