French Studies | German

CHRISTINA DENOVIO Sports Editor

Laia Vancells Lopez is a French major from Terrassa, Spain. While her outstanding performance in her French classes has gained her recognition as a distinguished French major, Vancells also excelled in her second major, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (BMB). Furthermore, Vancells was a key asset to the women’s field hockey team over her four years at Wake Forest, as she was recently named to the 2021 All-ACC Academic Team, the 202021 Second Team NFHCA All-Region and the 2020-21 Second Team All-ACC.

Vancells speaks a total of four languages, including Catalan, her native language. Though at home and in her local community she speaks Catalan, Vancells took classes in Spanish and French in school. She had not intended on majoring in French when she arrived at Wake Forest but soon decided that she wanted to continue studying the language.

“I’ve always liked French. I had learned in high school, and I didn’t want to lose it,” Vancells said. “I took a French class just for fun at first and I loved it. I took another one for fun, and I loved it, too.”

Vancells declared French as her second major during the spring of her junior year, over a year after declaring her BEM major. She proved that it’s never too late to follow an academic passion, as she took all of her advanced French classes during the spring of her junior year and throughout senior year.

With two majors and a commitment to the field hockey team, Vancells had lots of responsibilities to juggle as a college student.

“It was hard.” said Vancells. “But, the professors are really understanding and they help you out. So even though it’s hard, they make it possible for you to work hard too.”

Vancells praised her professors for making her Wake Forest classroom experience the best it could be. The admiration appears to be mutual. Dr. Stephen Murphy applauded Vancells for her stellar performance in his class.

“She combines a quiet sense of humor with a tenacious work ethic. She has juggled several demanding commitments (biochemistry, field hockey) while making it seem that her work in French Studies has her exclusive attention,” Murphy said. “At the end of a course on French and Francophone poetry (and despite the pandemic!), Laia illuminated much of what we read and discussed by writing compellingly about ‘The Paradox of Melancholy.’”

When asked what distinguishes Vancells from other French students, Murphy said, “Her excellent French, both spoken and written; her dependability, her intellectual curiosity, her resilience and a sensitivity to the nuances of literary language that I think comes from her polyglot experience (Catalan, Spanish, English, French).”

At the moment, Vancells plans on pursuing a Master’s in data science. Apart from this, Vancells is not certain of what her future holds, but she plans to use French and other languages she has mastered as an asset in any career path she follows.

“I want to do something that requires me to use different languages. I like a lot of things — I like science, but I also like law. Maybe something related to the European Union organization in Belgium, so I could use my English, French and Spanish.”

After receiving several job offers in the United States, Vancells is unsure of when her opportunity to live in France will come, but her proximity to France will make it easy for her to travel there.

“Maybe in a couple of years I will go to France — I live an hour and a half away from France, so it’s easy for me to go short-term or long-term.”

Thursday, April 28, 2022 | Page 17 FRENCH STUDIES LAIA VANCELLS LOPEZ

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KATIE FOX Photography Editor

Born in London and raised in Charleston, SC, Eliot Leadem has never considered one single place home other than where his family is. Leadem became a world traveler early in life, and he and his siblings have always shared a love for languages. Although he took French throughout middle school and high school, he took his first German class the second semester of his freshman year with Dr. Alyssa Howards, who inspired him to pursue it further.

Leadem jumped right into the department through a study abroad program in Jena, Germany the summer after his freshman year. Full immersion was challenging when his host parents were native Russian speakers, with German as their second language and English as their third.

“I grew a really great relationship with them,” he said. “Though there was quite the language barrier.”

He described how he drank coffee and ate German bread each morning with his host ‘father’, with whom Leadem bonded over their shared interest in history and learning about familial past.

While his plans for going abroad to the Vienna Flow house during a fall or spring semester were canceled due by the pandemic, Leadem returned to Germany the summer before his senior year through the Sanders Scholarship, designed to support promising German students in their ventures abroad. While studying in Berlin, Leadem’s brothers visited him in Europe and he reunited with his original host parents in Jena, who he said made him feel like their own son even years later.

In Berlin, Leadem collected data for his German honors thesis, which he successfully defended in April. His research looked at marketing disparities in the German Ubahn, comparing inner and outer city advertisements which he measured through a coded map he designed with a colleague from the University of Virginia. His experiences abroad solidified his decision to primarily pursue German and relegate his other academic pursuits, such as his political science major and minor in global trade & commerce studies, to lower importance. He described how proud he was to claim the German department, especially for their efforts to host in-person classes during his junior year when the pandemic forced many on-campus interactions online.

“While everyone else was doing online classes junior fall, I was coming to kind of an empty campus every single day to take classes in person,” Leadem said. “I felt very proud of my major decision at that point because I don’t work nearly as well online to do in person and having that ability was something that I don’t think really any other people in North Carolina did.”

During this time, he took some of his favorite literature classes with Dr. Tina Boyer.

“Elliot is without a doubt, one of the nicest and most genuine people I have met.” said Boyer. “I have wonderful conversations with him in and outside of the classroom. It will be a shame to see him graduate because we will all miss him, but at the same time, I am absolutely thrilled because his future looks so bright.”

In addition to his coursework, Leadem is the president of Delta Phi Alpha, a senior member of Chi Psi and was actively involved in various campus events and traditions such as Hit the Bricks and Wake N’ Shake. He is also an avid sports fan and player and has run an active Twitter account about Wake sports since 2013. Reflecting on some of his favorite memories in college, Leadem said that he never missed a soccer, football, or basketball home game, and he couldn’t decide between going to the ACC championship in Charlotte, beating Duke in basketball last year, or beating UNC this year as a favorite memory.

After graduation in May, Leadem plans to move to New York, NY where he will begin work as a client management associate at Coleman Research.

GERMAN ELLIOT LEADEM