Mauricio Tellez-Sanchez

Mauricio is a rising senior studying IR, History and Human Rights. Mauricio reflects on his academic journey from Chemical Engineering to IR, and shares what he is most looking forward to next year on campus.

"I faced a crossroads the winter quarter of my Freshman year, coming off a hard Chemistry-focused first quarter. Despite having access to the best teachers, minds and resources possible, I wasn't doing particularly well or particularly
enjoying the experience. Never expecting to get into a college,
much less Stanford, I had worked hard during high school in order to jump into whatever service job I could get following graduation. At Stanford however, I could be anything I wanted. This....proved to be a difficult situation to be in. Years of only worrying
about the next day left me not particularly sure about anything past my ability to make ends meet--now confronted with a sea of infinite options, I did what all college Freshman going through an identity crisis; I asked Google. 

Being the money conscious person that I was, I referenced multiple sites to find the major I found to be both most respectable and lucrative: chemical engineering. However, a couple of failed tests here, many study nights there, and now I was faced with a new crisis--I
wasn't doing well. It was at this point that I decided to focus on filling out some WAYS requirements for a quarter. In order to make this more bearable, I opted to only go for classes I deemed "interesting", and it was here I began my journey towards declaring
IR. My intro to IR was the BIOE122 Pandemics and Bioterrorism course. While I found a lot of the science presented by our weekly speakers incredibly fascinating, I soon discovered that the usage of policy to combat plagues was my bigger draw. We focused on
how existing and potential government offices would work together to fend off pandemics, with a heavy emphasis on using historical data and practice to create new solutions for modern problems. A fan of both history and political science, I found a happy medium
for both subjects - IR. With a major in IR, I found that virtually every class I had been interested in counted as credit to an IR degree! 

I've loved the incredible diversity in opinion and backgrounds of our IR majors and prospective majors. It's been one of the greatest pleasures of my life to be able to strike up a conversation with random people about, well, anything, and I am thankful the IR department
is full of weird, strange, striking characters who are always willing to chat. We are a peculiar, thoughtful folk, us IR majors. The best of the best, and I am proud to have studied alongside folks I know will be shaping this world for years to come. That
being said, sitting through a 1 hour court session on Romanian tractor repair law during a BOSP trip to the European Union's Court of Justice was riveting. 

Coming back to campus this fall, I can't wait to eat some TAP mozzarella sticks and get to meet all my new floor Frosh as an RA for Schiff!"