Dr. Jan Padios — associate professor and director of graduate studies within the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland (UMD) — holds a personal connection to her career research, which analyzes the historical and anticolonial aspects of the Philippines.
Her mother, who was a nurse, immigrated to the United States from the Philippines in the early 1970s. While conducting research in the Philippines, Padios became interested in the structure of the global Filipino labor market and experiences of workers. This led to her publishing A Nation on the Line: Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines in 2018.
Alongside her older sister, Padios was the first in her family to attend college in the U.S. She attended Columbia University to originally pursue architecture, which she found both “exciting and isolating at the same time.”
“It can be overwhelming to go to an elite institution without the kind of life experiences or cultural capital that a lot of other students have,” she says.
In her first year, Padios found herself anxious and struggling.
“College is a really dynamic time and there are a lot of cognitive changes, a lot of emotional changes and a lot of thinking and trying to process what the previous [experiences] have been,” she adds.
School served as an outlet for Padios to discover answers to critical political, social and cultural questions. However, Padios says that, at that time, the architecture field did not offer such opportunities.
