Carina Barnett-Loro '09
“I came to college with a much more realistic perspective of the world than those people who only read about economic disparity and the inequalities of academic opportunity.”
Monday, November 27, 2006
Caroline Barnett-Loro
Durham, North Carolina
Double Major: Environmental Science and Policy and International Comparative Relations
Carina Barnett-Loro knows Duke’s home city like few other students.
She’s not a native of Durham -- she was born in Rochester, N.Y. -- but has lived here since the age of three. “I love it,” she says.
The Durham that Barnett-Loro knows includes the Eno River and Durham Central Park -- a park entirely designed and constructed by community members who wanted to create a green space downtown. Then there’s the Farmer’s Market that takes place in the park each Saturday. Adding to that list is the 80-year-old restored Carolina Theater, which shows independent films, plus the new Durham Bulls minor league baseball park.
She knows the city through its citizens, as well. While in high school, she ran the highly praised Volunteer Center of Durham, connecting youthful volunteers with a range of programs and services.
She also appreciates her hometown’s racial and ethnic diversity. “One street over from an Asian market and a German baker is a tienda and a posh four-star restaurant,” she points out.
“Many of my friends at Duke come from relatively homogenous communities in the northern and Midwestern areas of the nation. I feel as though I benefited an incredible amount by attending a high school where I, a white student, was in the minority.”
Broadening educational opportunity is an important social goal for Barnett-Loro. At her high school, she notes, “there was one college counselor for a class of 450 kids. That’s not an equal playing field.”
Today, she is among five student volunteers in the new College Connection project, collaborating with Duke’s Human Resources office to help employee families handle the college admission process. Eight of those families are now learning “how to apply, get fees waived, write a college essay and apply for financial aid, and take advantage of the Duke benefits program,” she says.
She also is vice president of the Environmental Alliance, whose projects include the Eco Olympics, in which housing groups compete to save energy and reduce waste by recycling. (Her older sister, Vanessa ’07, is the organization’s president.)
Her activities bridge the Duke/Durham communities in academic ways, too. She is a trained facilitator in the program called Learning through Experience, Action, Partnership, and Service (LEAPS). It’s student-run and pairs up students and faculty to design and run sessions for service-learning courses. One of her LEAPS groups is mapping invasive plant species at the Eno River. Another project involving Duke and the Durham Public Schools led her back to her high school, where she surveyed students in the English as a Second Language program.
“It was totally weird to be back. I don’t know how many times I was asked, ‘You still here? I thought you graduated.’”
Barnett-Loro will soon be expanding her focus -- to Central and South America. Next fall she will be in Quito, Ecuador, studying environmental issues related to that country’s Cloud Forest and Galapagos Islands. She looks forward to “really learning” the Spanish she studied in high school.
She will miss her friends at Mirecourt, her on-campus house, but notes that many of them will also be away. “About a third of the junior class studies abroad,” she says. Mirecourt, where she plays intramural sports, is something of a coed fraternity and very low key. “I visited and liked the people. It was simple.”
Barnett-Loro says she feels fortunate to have grown up in Durham, noting how the city has affected the person she has become. “I came to college with a much more realistic perspective of the world than those people who only read about economic disparity and the inequalities of academic opportunity.”
