Spanish Department Alumni News

My name is Angela Smith Kirkman, and I am a CC alum from 1995. I graduated as a Romance Languages Major, along with my husband Jason Kirkman who graduated in the same year as a Bio-Chemistry Major.

We recently returned to the US after traveling for two years around the world and homeschooling our three children. We just unveiled our new web site (www.TheBigFieldTrip.com) in which we are posting travelogues and recipes from around the world. A number of our friends from CC have been following the blog and urged us to share it with you so that the CC community might be able to follow our adventure.

I still don’t know what foolish notion possessed us to drop everything and drag our act to a dozen countries across five continents on a two-year, around-the-world journey. Despite the irrational notions that originally motivated the expedition, we somehow survived to tell the tale. We’ve had two years back in the States now to regroup and re-acclimate to life as normal people. During the time since our return, my husband, Jason, and I have both been working feverishly to document everything we learned along the journey. Jason has been perfecting the recipes he learned in each country, and I have had a chance to edit all of my photographs, videos, and travelogues. We’re finally ready to share anew what we learned on the road, and we hope you’ll come along with us for the ride.

Before we originally set off on the journey, Jason received a grant from a non‑profit in Santa Fe that had caught wind of our harebrained scheme and funded the creation of a website, which our children used throughout the adventure to post homeschool reports, photos, and videos. Though I’m rather partial to the idea of recounting our story in the format of a Rockumentary (ala The Partridge Family), we’ve decided that (for now at least) perhaps the web site is the most appropriate format to share our tale.

Hence, without further ado (drum roll, please), I am very excited to introduce The (new and improved) Big Field Trip: www.TheBigFieldTrip.com  

We plan to use the web site to highlight a different country each month and post a new recipe and travelogue from that country each week until we make our way through the material from the two years we spent on the road. We will be posting material from our new travels as well (such as our trip to Istanbul later this month) and would love to share it with you.

Here’s how you can help!

• Web site: Check out and Like our website: www.TheBigFieldTrip.com. On the web site you can enter your email address to subscribe to our mailing list and receive a new recipe each week from Jason. (Or just return this email and tell me to get you subscribed if that’s easier for you.)
• Facebook: Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheBigFieldTrip Get involved in the conversations and spread the word by re-posting our posts. Recommend our site to all your Facebook friends.
• Recipes: Try out Jason’s recipes that are posted on the web site, and enter your comments about how they turn out.
• Spread the word: Send this email or a link to our web site to all the arm-chair travelers and epicureans you know.(And, of course, it wouldn’t hurt to share it with any big-wig publishers you find yourself hob-knobbing with in the elevator.)

Listen, I figure that our friends are influential enough that, even if each of you visits our site only once, our traffic will skyrocket, and we’ll go viral in no time, so help us make it happen!

We’ll see you there… Angela

Angela Cobian ’11 has become the third Colorado College recipient of a 2013-14 Fulbright award. Cobian, a political science major with a concentration in political theory and comparative politics of Latin America and Spanish minor, will serve as a teaching assistant at a university in Mexico during the upcoming academic year.

Cobian selected Mexico for a variety of reasons. “My parents are Mexican immigrants, and I’ve never experienced what it’s like to be a Mexican in Mexico. I did my best to study its history, politics, philosophy, and language at Colorado College. This is an opportunity to explore my Mexican heritage in an academic context,” she said.

Since graduation, Cobian, from Denver, Colo., has been employed by Teach for America as a second and third grade teacher in an English-language acquisition-Spanish classroom at Cole Arts and Sciences Academy in Denver Public Schools. She also has been earning her master’s degree through the Teach for America/University of Colorado-Denver partnership. She will complete her degree in Curriculum and Instruction soon, with an emphasis on linguistically diverse education, which corresponds with the work she will be doing in Mexico.

She also volunteers as a Big Sister through the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program, and serves as the young alumni trustee on Colorado College’s board of trustees.