Senior Reflections: The Holy Cross Impact

By spending a year in Spain and four years studying performance, Mikaele Rashad Porter saw his two passions come alive


Mikaele Rashad Porter

 

Mikaele Rashad Porter
Double major in Spanish and theatre
Hometown: Baltimore


 

  1. A whole new world … Mikaele spent his junior year studying on Palma de Mallorca, the Mediterranean island located off the coast of Spain. He made the most of this unique experience traveling widely, including Ireland and Africa. He’s also proved that you can take Mikaele out of Spain but you can’t take Spain out of Mikaele; he loved it so much that he visited his host family over spring break earlier this year.
  2. Despite living and studying on a faraway island for a year, Mikaele remained focused on helping students acclimate to campus life. As a member of Allies and the Foreign Language Assistant liaison program, he lived out the Holy Cross call to be “men and women for others” by using his personal experiences to help others.
  3. Mikaele has enjoyed his work in the theatre department, especially the Shakespeare Through Performance class taught by Edward Isser, associate professor and chair of the theatre department. Isser’s class goal — to make his students “professional Shakespearean actors in one semester” — is the type of challenge that Mikaele thrives on.
  4. To be or not to be … that’s not the question for Mikaele, who recently played Hamlet in the presentation of Hamlet Machine, a short play performed as part of a course in the theatre department. As a theater major, Mikaele was in a number of Holy Cross theater productions, yet he confesses that this role presented the greatest challenge, as it included obstacles such as verbalizing the character’s stream of consciousness.
  5. Off stage, Mikaele enjoys taking the spotlight in the kitchen. “I like to bring people together over a good meal, with good conversation,” he says. Not only did homemade meals make his friends and roommates feel at home, but his extensive knowledge of Spanish cuisine transported them to the exotic locales that he so enjoyed on his year abroad.


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This Senior Spotlight was written by Jennifer Robert ’08 of Worcester. A chemistry and Spanish double major and member of the premedical program, Jen has served as the chair of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) at Holy Cross, and was the pioneering first-year blogger on the College’s Web site. Her organic chemistry research project was recently published in the Journal of Chemical Education. She has worked in the Office of Public Affairs for four years, and plans to do research in Boston following graduation.

Photography by John Buckingham.