LAII Career Retrospective: M. Robyn Côté
April 13, 2020 - M. Robyn Côté
After 25 years of dedicated service to the LAII and 31 years at UNM, Robyn Cote plans to retire from her full-time position at LAII at the end of April 2020. Below, Robyn reflects on her time at UNM.
I'd like to talk a bit about my whole experience at UNM, not just at the LAII. I came as an undergraduate student in 1980, when I double majored in Anthropology and Art History, graduating in 1982. I went on to get my Masters in Pre-Colombian Art History in 1989, studying Maya hieroglyphs. I then worked at the UNM Office of Contract Archaeology between 1983 and 1986, took some time off to have kids, and came back in 1992 to work in the Biology Department as Administrative Assistant with a Howard Hughes Medical Institute undergraduate summer molecular biology laboratory experience grant, then came to the LAII as Program Specialist in Sept. of 1995.
I was hired at the LAII in 1995 to work with the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) secretariat and the El Camino Real Project, Inc., both of which I worked with for several years. BRASA had 600 members at the time and we hosted conferences in Cambridge England; Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil; Washington, DC; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Atlanta, Georgia. The El Camino Real Project, Inc. featured an exhibit and catalog on the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the Royal Road that went from Mexico City to Santa Fe, NM. Another important function of my early career at the LAII was to manage recruitment and marketing for the Guanajuato Summer Law Institute, a consortium between the UNM School of Law, Texas Tech University School of Law, Southwestern University School of Law, and the Universidad de Guanajuato Facultad de Derecho, between 1995 and 2015, when the program was suspended due to both the H1N1 outbreak of 2009 and increased cartel violence in Mexico.
In 2008, I became LAII Program Manager in charge of all of UNM's international agreements with universities in Latin America and Spain (roughly 100) and management of UNM’s Study Abroad Program to Latin America and Spain, sending around 700 students abroad and receiving aroun 300 international exchange students. Over the years, I was fortunate to visit many of our partner universities in Mexico, Central and South America, and also in Spain. To my dismay, management of the agreements and the study abroad program moved to the Global Education Office (GEO) in May of 2013. I'm very proud of the Study Abroad and Intensive Language program that I developed at UNM, offering students a great value in reduced tuition to learn Spanish and Portuguese while living abroad and receiving financial aid at UNM, and created a system for them to seamlessly transfer their credits back to UNM.
"Some of my fondest memories are of students and their parents thanking me for helping them discover their life-changing experiences that made them become who they are today."
But the LAII did more than send individual students abroad. From 2008-2012 UNM partnered with Aderbal Correa of Texas Tech University (TTU) and received a “Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education” (FIPSE) grant in a bi-lateral student exchange program with Brazil, known as the U.S.-Brazil Higher Education Consortia Program. The UNM School of Engineering, under the leadership of Associate Dean Dr. Chuck Fledderman and Professor of civil engineering Dr. Tim Ross, partnered with the LAII and the Universidade de São Paulo, the Universidade de Brasilia, and the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais to recruit engineering students to participate in the student exchange mobility program. From 2010-2014 we partnered with TTU again in another FIPSE grant with the Universidade de São Paulo, the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and the Universidade Federal de Campina Grande in a program led by Dr. Scott Collins of the UNM Department. of Biology. LAII’s involvement included recruiting students for the exchange program, but I was also fortunate to accompany Dr. Collins on a trip to Brazil in January of 2013 when we traveled with two UNM undergraduate biology students to set them up to attend Portuguese intensive language programs in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. During both FIPSE programs, I was gifted the opportunity to accompany Drs. Fledderman, Ross, and Collins at meetings in Brazil where we got to visit the partner universities and got to know our Brazilian counterparts, an important part of the bi-lateral FIPSE exchange program.
From 2007-2011, the LAII partnered with Dr. Ted Jojola of the UNM School of Architecture and Planning on a tri-lateral FIPSE grant with Canada and Mexico through the Program for North American Mobility in Higher Education, known as the Indigenous Planning Student Exchange and Consortium (IPEX) project. The LAII managed the IPEX student exchange program and I helped Dr. Jojola lead two faculty-led programs to Mexico in 2011. We led about 60 students from our partner universities: UNM and Arizona State University in the US, the University of Manitoba and the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, and the Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas and the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in Mexico. The first group attended a conference in San Cristobal de las Casas and the second group attended a conference in the city of Puebla.
"The students learned the basics of Indigenous Planning, visited important archaeological and cultural sites, and made long-lasting personal and professional relationships. It was another life-changing experience for all involved."
During the summers of 2009 and 2015, the LAII began working in earnest on cultural exchanges with the country of Ecuador. Partnering with the US Embassy in Quito and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, the LAII received several indigenous Ecuadorian students at UNM. The LAII partnered with local Pueblo communities and the College of Education to learn about each others’ cultures. I was fortunate to accompany the students to the Pueblo of Acoma and to Chaco Canyon and to the nearby pueblos of Sandia and Cochiti to attend some of our indigenous pueblo feast days. During this time the LAII also helped the Conexiones program develop their current Honors program in Ecuador.
In March of 2014, I accompanied then LAII Director Dr. Susan Tiano on a trip to Ecuador, joined by Drs. Ted Jojola, Dely Alcantara, and Laura Harjo, all of whom were affiliated with Dr. Jojola's Indigenous Design and Planning Institute (ID + PI) at the UNM School of Architecture and Planning. We visited several partner universities in Quito, Cumbayá, and Cuenca. During a visit to the US Embassy in Quito, we learned that the Rector of the Universidad Central del Ecuador was looking for a U.S. university with whom they could work to send their professors to earn PhDs in the US. We invited them to come to UNM in May of 2014 to learn about all that UNM had to offer. What followed was a 5-year program during which 10 professors from the Universidad Central del Ecuador and 2 from the Universidad de Cuenca came to UNM to complete 2 years of residency in PhD coursework then returned home to Ecuador to perform field-work and finish their dissertations. Almost all of them have graduated or will be graduating this coming May 2020.
The 2014 trip also resulted in some exciting cultural exchanges. During the summer of 2014 a group of 3 young Cañari professionals from Quilloac visited UNM. I took them to visit Isleta and Taos Pueblos so they could see how our local indigenous populations and pueblos live. They also visited the roundhouse in Santa Fe and the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque. They gave a spirited presentation at the LAII on their culture and cosmological beliefs which was very well attended.
During the summer of 2015 I accompanied Drs. Ted Jojola and his wife Dely Alcantara, Laura Harjo, and Levi Romero on a faculty-led trip to Quito and Cuenca and to the Andean Quechua village of Quilloac in the Cañar region of Azuay Province as part of Dr. Jojola's iTour course in Indigenous Planning. This was a life-changing experience for the UNM students who got to see first-hand the Andean Quechua culture and made long-lasting relationships with the Quilloac villagers. The iTour course produced an eco-tourism plan for the villagers to help them be more financially sustainable and to develop ways to retain the important parts of their culture while educating foreigners visiting the region.
Between 2012 and 2017 the LAII became heavily involved in sending community members to Cuba through our People-to-People program. We sent 15 groups of 15 or more people to mostly Havana but also to other parts of the island, including Cienfuegos, Santa Clara and Trinidad. I personally led two People-to-People trips, one in 2015 and another in 2016 to attend the Havana International Jazz Festival and to explore Havana's remarkable abundance of Art Deco architecture assisted by professors from the Universidad de la Habana. The LAII also coordinated a few faculty-led trips to Cuba as well.
In May of 2019, Dr. Margaret Jackson of the UNM Dept of Art History and I led a trip of community members to visit Maya archaeology sites in the states of Chiapas, Campeche, and Quintana Roo. The highlight of the trip was visiting the important Maya site of Calakmul near the Guatemalan border. The trip started in San Cristobal de las Casas, passed through the archaeological site of Palenque, and then Calakmul and smaller surrounding sites, and ended at the Caribbean site of Tulum. I would have to say that this trip was the highlight of my years as trip-leader for the LAII (You can read more about this trip here).
I guess you could sum it up to say that I've been involved in international education for the past 25 years of my life, and in international experiences in my personal life from early on, living in Canada, Brazil, Switzerland, and Nigeria. International recruitment has always been a priority to me, and I served as the UNM representative for CONACYT from 2002-2020, which is kind of like Mexico's NSF, an agency who funded Mexican students to come to UNM to receive Masters and PhD degrees. I not only sent several hundred students abroad, but I also worked hard to develop programs to bring international students to UNM. I also served on the Provost's Study Abroad Allocation Committee funding faculty-led programs, and the Provost's Health and Safety Committee for about 10 years.
