Tana Jo Bryn was a senior at the University in 2006, and she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do when she graduated. After attending a Teach For America information session, she made up her mind.
Nearly two years later, Bryn teaches seventh grade science in the Rio Grande Valley, the southernmost region in Texas, just across the river from Mexico.
“I knew it wasn’t going to be easy,” Bryn said. “But as hard as it’s been, I’d do it again if I could.”

She said her experience with TFA has been extremely challenging but extremely rewarding, and she’d recommend it to anyone.
Tonight in the Chiles Business Center, TFA will have an information session for current University seniors.
TFA is a national corps of recent college graduates who spend two years teaching at under-resourced public schools in 26 regions across the country that run the gamut from New York City to the Mississippi River Delta to Hawaii. “Teach For America’s mission is to enlist our nation’s most promising future leaders in the movement to eliminate educational inequality,” as it says on the official Web site.
“Where I live, we definitely have an issue with poverty, and a lot of our kids have parents who haven’t been educated, so the attitude toward education is different from where I grew up,” said Bryn, who is originally from Beaverton. “Just the challenges you’re faced with day to day as a teacher in an area like this, you have to be at your best every second of every day… otherwise you’re doing (the students) a disservice and they can’t afford that.”
Last year, senior Priscilla Ann Mendoza went through the application process – which included a 30-minute phone interview and an all-day in-person interview. Now she is one of the University’s three campus campaign coordinators, working to promote TFA by increasing its visibility and recruiting seniors to apply.
“There’s so much I want to do with my life, but all of that can wait,” said Mendoza, a romance languages major. “Teach For America is giving me the opportunity to do something big right out of college.”
After graduating in June, Mendoza will go to seven weeks of training before teaching in a bilingual elementary school class in Phoenix, Ariz.
“I wanted to go somewhere where I can use my language skills and Phoenix, being an immigrant barrier to the United States, seems like the perfect place,” she said.
According to Brendan Rivage-Seul, one of TFA’s two recruitment directors for the Pacific Northwest, the most attractive qualities in a candidate are academic achievement, leadership experience and a strong desire to improve the public education system.
Jocelyn Noonan – a senior double majoring in English and Spanish, and one of the University’s campus campaign coordinators – said, “Regardless of what extracurricular activities you did in college, what it comes down to is how passionate you are about this issue and how committed you can be to it.”
Rivage-Seul graduated from Lafayette College, a small liberal arts school outside Philadelphia, in 2005 with degrees in international affairs and Spanish before teaching in Phoenix, Ariz.
“Without question, it’s the most difficult thing that I’ve done so far in my life, but it was by far the most rewarding,” he said in a phone interview from Portland. “Most things that are worth doing are hard to do.”
Rivage-Seul – who, in addition to the University, recruits applicants at Oregon State University, Willamette University, Lewis & Clark College, and Reed College, while his partner focuses on Washington schools – also interviews potential TFA candidates as a member of the admissions team. He said the students he meets in this area are very refreshing.
“The really great thing about Oregon is that (TFA’s mission) does resonate with people so clearly,” he said. “You don’t have to spend too much time talking to people about why it’s so important. People get that public education is one of our nation’s greatest injustices right now. It’s such a pressing domestic issue and people get it.”
Last year, 33 University seniors went on to do TFA, making it one of the graduating class’ largest employers.
Mendoza said the TFA information session is a good thing for graduating seniors to look into because it’s free, non-binding and open to students in every major.
The overwhelming majority of TFA corps members are not education majors. In addition to becoming public school principals and chancellors, notable TFA alums have gone on to be software engineers at Google, Wall Street analysts and legislative assistants for Hillary Clinton.
Noonan, who will be teaching either middle or high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, is interested in teaching, though she’s not sure if it’s what she wants to do long-term. She thinks TFA will be a great experience for her, regardless.
“I know when I was younger, I had a lot of really great teachers who made me want to be at school,” she said. “I think that’s really important and I wanted to give part of that back.”
Teach For America’s application deadline is Feb. 15. To apply, log onto teachforamerica.org.
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