#PostGradService
Rochester Institute of Technology professor Kristoffer Whitney has a passion for environmental sustainability and community relations. It’s a unique field that was highlighted by a two-year adventure across the world with the Peace Corps.
In 1998, the then-environmental management major at RIT was searching for something more, and so three days after graduating he jumped on a flight across the world.
“I was initially intimidated because I was at RIT doing this very technical major and I thought that if I volunteered for the Peace Corps I’d be doing something similar. When I got there, I found out that what volunteers do in Kazakhstan is teach. There were no NGO placements,” Whitney said. “I had never taught before. It was really terrifying.”
After three months of language training and learning about cultural differences, the real work began.
“I requested to be placed somewhere I could teach older kids. They placed me at a university. For the first year, they took a student who was learning English and made them my interpreter,” Whitney added.
Kristoffer (right) poses for a picture with students at a summer camp near the border of China.
“The Peace Corps was really great in that sense because I learned that I actually loved teaching,” he continued. “When I came back in 2000, rather than go back to what I was trained to do, I started looking for other jobs. After the Peace Corps, I did environmental education for about five years before deciding to go to graduate school.”
In 2005, Whitney started graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania where he studied the history and sociology of science.
“Rather than the real technical engineering-like stuff I was taught at RIT, I went into the humanities. So now, I mostly teach history and sociology, and my department is Science, Technology and Society,” the professor added.
Some 20 years later, Whitney says he still considers taking a trip back to Kazakhstan to see just how much things have changed. He also encourages more students to explore post graduate service programs as an opportunity to learn something new about themselves and the world around them.