Elaine Vilorio ’17 is an Associate Director of Research & Evaluation for Year Up United, a national workforce development nonprofit that offers free job training programs to young adults as alternatives to a college education. Previously, Elaine evaluated homeless programs and policies as a Learning and Evaluation Analyst at Community Solutions. At Amherst College, Elaine double majored in Black Studies and Latin American and Latinx Studies, an interdisciplinary major she designed (during her time at Amherst, there was no Latinx & Latin American Studies major). She later completed a fully-funded two-year post-baccalaureate program, the Research Scholar Initiative, at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she split her time between economics and sociology coursework and serving as a research assistant to faculty. Elaine immigrated from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. in the second grade and grew up in Section 8 housing in northern New Jersey. These experiences of poverty and immigration have significantly shaped her career decisions. Based in New York City, Elaine practices the belief that time outside of work is just as critical as time at work, and enjoys reading and writing fiction, weightlifting and sprinting, dancing bachata, cooking, getting enough sleep, and laughing with people who are precious to her.
Was there an “aha” or “eureka” moment at Amherst after which you knew the career to pursue?
I wouldn’t say there was a moment, but an accumulation of them. When I was at Amherst, we had a mentorship program, thanks to the Career Center, that matched students and alumni, based on shared interests, every semester. I had a different alumnus mentor every semester for about two years – they spanned academia, government, and nonprofits, but a commonality among them was that they all worked on programs or policies that aimed to empower low-income people and/or eliminate conditions that make people poor. It was clear to me from that experience, in combination with some Amherst courses that truly changed my life, that what mattered to me for a career was poverty, specifically eliminating it. Those courses, by the way, spanned Black Studies, Sociology, Economics, History, American Studies, Political Science, Statistics, and Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies.