Hi all! My name is Nina Cervantes and I’m a senior economics major at Duke also pursuing a certificate in markets and management studies and a minor in history. I’m from a town about 30 minutes away from San Diego, California and am blessed to say only about 20 minutes away from the beach!
Something that really defines me is my desire to challenge many sides of myself in the hopes of developing into a well-rounded individual. Whether it be challenging my creative side by writing (for both school and on the personal blog that I recently started), or by challenging my quantitative side by participating as a research assistant in the Duke Environmental Justice lab leveraging data to reveal environmental injustices, I love to bolster as many facets of myself as possible.
Nina Cervantes playing volleyball at the beach.
This desire led me to working a Marketing Communications internship this past summer at RTI International, the original research institute in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. During the course of my internship, part of my role was communicating sometimes dense research into digestible content marketing pieces for potential clients and the general public that might be perusing RTI’s work. This included connecting with subject matter experts who had actually conducted the studies and working through the material to be able to understand it well enough to communicate its power and potential to the world. This aspect of my internship was definitely one of the most rewarding parts, so blogging for Duke Research seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to transfer the skills I learned at RTI International, while also continuing to build my communication and analytical skills.
In addition to writing for the Duke Research Blog, I am also heavily involved with the Duke Women’s Basketball program and this is the 3rd year I have participated as a student manager. Like I said previously, I also started working on the research team for Duke’s Environmental Justice Lab last year and am very excited to start seeing some results of my first research experience at Duke!
Looking forward, I’m excited to have the opportunity to meet some really influential leaders in the research world, connect to the power and potential of their research, and then share it with you all in the best way I can. To me, there are few things more rewarding than sharing the power of a new discovery!
Post by Nina Cervantes