Meet Natalia

By: Natalia Wurst ‘21

Hey guys, my name is Natalia. I’m a (mildly confused) freshman studying psychology but also thinking about double-majoring in neuroscience and minoring in law and public policy and also going to law school after graduation - so who even knows what’s up at this point.

I’ll try to sprinkle in some fun facts into this intro post so it doesn’t sound like I’m just regurgitating my resume at you and hoping you’ll think I’m cool.

(Here’s me finding immense joy in taking pictures with insignificant London train station signs.)

One thing about USC that I’m obsessed with is the amount of opportunities to figure out what it is you really want (crucial for folks like me!). I’m currently an intern at CARECEN, a nonprofit that works with immigrants from all parts of the globe to get their U-Visas approved and does badass things like defend human and civil rights and promote cultural diversity–the usual. My job there is mainly to translate important documents like birth certificates and police reports from English to Spanish (fun fact: I’ve lived in San Diego my whole life, but my entire family is from Peru, so when I went to preschool at age 3, I could understand exactly zero percent of what my friends were saying to me for about two months).

Tutoring and mentorship have always been my big, true loves. In high school, I spent most summers as a camp counselor hours mixing up pink cupcake batter and probably making more of a mess than my campers did. At USC, I work with JEP’s ReadersPLUS as a tutor in Weemes Elementary where I get to construct my own lesson plans for my absolutely precious students. I end up saving everything, even the makeshift masks that are supposed to resemble Goldilocks and Baby Bear from when we acted out different scenes from the book to improve recall. They’re great to pull out at parties.

(How totally fantastic and non-nightmarish are these?!)

(Shameless plug for Theodore the Turkey–he’s your guy if you ever need help with prepositional phrases.)

I’m also really excited to start working with WYSE, a mentorship org on campus where we get to empower young girls and teach them about body love and sexual education.

When I’m not running from class to work to clubs to free food events, you’ll probably find me staring out of windows dramatically while knitting and listening to Taylor Swift, or silently seething in Leavey toward people with bad quality headphones.

I’m very excited to start blogging for Trojans360—before joining, I wrote for Fresh U because I saw a post on Facebook all like “hey, do you want to get published and then look back at your posts and cringe at every other sentence you’ve written? Join us!” and I was like “hell yeah” so I did that for a hot minute and learned how to get over myself a little (and give unqualified advice to incoming freshman). Before that, I mainly stuck to journaling. My favorite pastime is rereading really wholesome entries from third grade. Here’s one of the most exhilarating of the bunch:

It’s safe to say I reached my peak in 2008 and there’s no point in fighting it.

Regardless, I can’t wait to see what this crazy future holds.

xx,

Nat

Trojans 360 is USC’s official student-run blog. Content created by students, for students.

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