Elena is my name. I was born in Romania in a small town where the contours of the Western Carpathian Mountains outlined on the blue horizon. As a child I wanted to become a doctor although the smell of blood made me feel sick. It was during my teenage years that I decided to become a teacher, and I chose the field of Philology. In Romania, at that time, in order to be admitted in a University you had to pass a difficult admission test, so I began preparing for it in my third year of high school. The program was imposed and the students had no choice or available combinations whatsoever. Therefore, for four years at the University I had a forty-four hours schedule. I graduated in 1978 as a bachelor in Philology from the University of Timisoara. When the Dean was giving his speech to the graduates I got scared trying to assess my learning because I had the impression that I was not ready for the field. I wanted to learn more.

In 1980 I got married. My husband is from Venezuela, so I had to go through all the tribulations of being considered a traitor by the communist government. It was a time of great change in my life and I decided to deliberately create more change by going aback to school. I was thinking about psychology, but my mentor mentioned that I was good in literature. Thus in 1981 I was accepted at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. It was an individualized Master of Arts program, and in 1982 I graduated as a Master of Arts in Universal and Comparative Literature with a dissertation in Time and Space in the novels of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf.

Living in Venezuela from 1982 to 1988 implied tremendous transformations in my life and my profession. I taught at Simon Rodriguez University, an andragogic School, and attracted by psychology I studied Organizational Development. I designed and wrote a manual of Children Literature for distant learners.

Since 1988 I have been living and teaching in US. Currently I am an instructor and tutor/academic counselor at Audrey Cohen College in New York City. As you can see change has been an ubiquitous aspect of my landscape.

Email: avila@chem.columbia.edu