Over the course of her four years at Grinnell College, Princess Joseph `25 has become closely familiar with the Bucksbaum Center for the Arts and its courtyards.
“After coming out from a difficult lesson or practice or rehearsal or whatever, it was always nice to just look outside and just see fall or spring or summer happening,” said Joseph.
Joseph first learned about Grinnell from the facilitator of a college preparation program in Jamaica. She was 23 when she first came to Grinnell, turning 24 in her first semester. “I never thought of myself as a non-traditional student, but I guess I’m a non-traditional student,” said Joseph.
Joseph said that taking gap years is common in Caribbean culture as a way to gain work experience, and Joseph spent five gap years preparing for college.
Joseph taught at a high school starting from her second gap year. “If not for that experience, I wouldn’t have realized that I like teaching so much, and that’s what I’m going to be doing after I graduate,” she said.
When she started applying to U.S. schools in her fourth gap year, she faced issues with colleges being unable to interpret her Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) transcripts, with some asking her to reapply as a transfer student. According to Joseph, Grinnell was one of the few U.S. colleges that already understood how to translate her CXC grades to the U.S. system.
When Joseph first came to Grinnell, she had planned to major in education. “I found out that the education licensure program is not a major, and that just derailed all my plans,” she said. “I was like, ‘what am I going to do now?’”
“My problem was that none of the majors felt like they spoke to me all the way,” said Joseph.
After spending a semester experimenting with classes, Joseph started to plan an independent major called “Environmental Studies in a Francophone World” in her second year. The major blends environmental studies and French to look at how development, culture, colonization, and the environment interact in developing French-speaking countries outside of Europe. “I wanted my major to be directly related to what I want to do after Grinnell,” she said.
Currently, Joseph is the only student on campus from Saint Lucia, an island country in the Caribbean, and one of fewer than five students from the Caribbean.
“I came to Grinnell knowing that I would not be one of many,” said Joseph. “I came in with the expectation that if I wanted to see my culture reflected or my points of view reflected, I would have to adapt to whatever’s here to fit me to share that.”
In the spring of her third year, Joseph received the Nancy Schmulbach Maly `61 International Student Leadership Award, which is presented to third-year international or U.S. global nomad students for leadership and community engagement on campus and within the wider Grinnell community. Joseph considers one of the factors most likely to have influenced her selection to be Global House, a project house she set up with her friends in her second year.
“Essentially, Global House was a project house that aimed to highlight international experiences and cross-cultural experiences among the residents, and to encourage those kinds of experiences on campus,” said Joseph. The house had 11 residents from 10 different cultures, including students from Vietnam, Japan, Tunisia and an exchange student from the Netherlands.
Along with Global House, Joseph also participated in and led the Middle of Everywhere and Cultural Attaché programs hosted by the Office of International Student Affairs (OISA). “I was just always eager to do stuff for OISA,” said Joseph.
In her third year, Joseph worked as a research assistant for Deborah Michaels, associate professor of education, on the Native History Project, founded in 2016 to help secondary school teachers incorporate Native American history into their American history classes.
During her research, Michaels told Joseph about a Smithsonian exhibit on the Taíno people, an indigenous group of the Caribbean, being displayed at the Drake Community Library. After viewing the exhibit, according to Joseph, Michaels had asked her if she would be interested in creating a ‘mini-unit’ on the Taíno people to add on to a previous unit.
“This is where a lot of my indigenous culture, my indigenous heritage comes from,” said Joseph. “So I started this, and then the mini-unit turned into a full unit.”
“I feel like I got to connect with myself and a lot of my heritage through it, I feel proud that I’m able to share that heritage with others through the Native History Project, and I feel that my mind and senses as an educator have grown,” said Joseph.
Joseph has been taking flute lessons at Grinnell since her first semester, and recently performed her senior recital, “Heritage Echoes.” In the first half, she, along with a group of flutists, performed group pieces that were composed by French, British, Black and indigenous composers, or paid homage to those cultures. In the second half, they performed traditional folk music from Saint Lucia.
“Community is a huge thing in Saint Lucian culture, and music is something that’s done in community almost all of the time,” said Joseph. “Listening to the replay after, I close my eyes and I feel like I’m home.”
Joseph moved to Anguilla, another island in the Caribbean, to live with her husband, whom she married the summer prior. After graduation, Joseph will present her senior thesis paper at a conference before returning to Anguilla to teach French.
Correction: This article has been corrected on May 20, 1:43 p.m. to clarify Joseph’s process of applying to colleges and the gap years that she took.
