Coryn Shiflet grew up in New York and was first bit by the travel bug after travelling to England, Scotland and Wales with the Northport High School Tour Choir. During her undergraduate studies at Penn State University, where she received her BA Sociology and Women’s Studies, she traveled with the University Choir to Italy and Austria and participated in a London Theater Study Tour. Coryn also studied Brazilian Art and Culture and fell in love with Brazil after her trip to Rio de Janeiro and Salvador. She traveled to Israel before starting her Master’s degree in Human Geography at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During graduate school she focused on Brazilian studies, began studying Brazilian Portuguese and spent a summer in Salvador, Bahia. Coryn began working at the International Office at Northwestern University in September 2008 and has since had the opportunity to travel again to the United Kingdom to visit her husband’s family and participated in the Baden-Württemberg Seminar in Germany in November 2011.
Coryn Shiflet International Student & Scholar Advisor
Debbie Kaltman was born and raised in the Chicago area and first traveled outside the US at the age of 14, when she went to the UK for a family wedding. She received her BA in Performance Studies and History from Northwestern and studied abroad in the Czech Republic and Ireland during her undergraduate years. After graduation, Debbie worked at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and then returned to the Czech Republic for another year, teaching ESL in Prague and traveling throughout Europe. She is very proud of all of her passport stamps, especially those from her travels to Costa Rica, Peru, Israel and Italy. Debbie returned to Northwestern for her Master’s degree in Higher Education Administration, focusing on international education. She began working at the International Office in October 2011, making her the newest member of the team. In her free time, Debbie enjoys cheering on the Wildcats, spending time with friends and family, exercising, exploring Chicago and planning future travels!
Debbie Kaltman International Student & Scholar Advisor
Theresa was born in Kansas, moved to Illinois, and grew up in Arkansas before heading east to attend college in Washington, DC. She has a B.A. in International Studies from American University and an M.Ed. in International Education from George Washington University. During her time at AU she studied abroad spending a semester in Brussels and a semester in Paris. Although she has a minor in French, her language skills have become quite rusty. She is trying to fix this by taking classes at the Alliance Francaise here in Chicago! Theresa moved to the Windy City in August of 2011 to start working at the International Office. Before that she worked at the Institute of International Education with the Fulbright Scholar Program. Theresa loves that the IO is so close to the tennis courts since she loves to watch and play tennis! She also enjoys travelling, especially exploring new places on her bicycle!
Theresa Johnson International Scholar Advisor
Emlyn Torres Program Assistant
Emlyn grew up in Los Angeles, California. Her childhood travel involved ambitious road trips staged by her parents, traversing the lonely highways of the American Southwest and Pacific Northwest. Besides the whopping 2.5 hour trek across the border into Mexico, and a few trips to British Columbia, her first international experience was as a People to People Student Ambassador in the UK and Ireland when she was 13. In high school she had the opportunity to spend a summer living and volunteering in Kenya and Ethiopia, which has, one way or another, influenced most everything she has done since. While studying at Northwestern University (go ‘cats!) she lived in a garbage village in Cairo, Egypt, pitifully attempting to string together sentences in Arabic all the while, and working with a number of organizations in that community. Emlyn has a passion for service-learning and global education. She has volunteered with homeless shelters, disaster relief services, and Native American reservations all over the U.S. including Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and Oklahoma and worked on five different AIDS Walk campaigns in three American cities before finding her way into the field of international education where she loves having the opportunity to work with students from all over the world on a daily basis!
Despite having been born in Evanston, Cara has managed to maintain her impressive Australian lilt, which she acquired through living 12 years on the beautiful shores of Sydney. It was also on those beautiful shores that she taught ESL for Cambridge University Sydney, finished her Masters in Linguistics at Macquarie University, became a mother and spouse, and attempted to learn how to surf like someone not born with natural surfing abilities. Prior to living in the land of Sunshine, Cara acquired another accent, this one from the Alsace region in France, while studying at Strasbourg University. It was here that she learned to drink her coffee black, while pontification over poems by Baudelaire, and traipsing across Europe with nothing but a map and a Eurail ticket. Currently, she can be found digging around her garden, tending to both children and plants, and plotting her next overseas adventure…
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Cara Lawson Program Assistant