The Office of Global Affairs is pleased to feature Sabrina Prestes Oliveira for our January 2025 edition of the Global Visionaries series. The Global Visionaries series highlights the UW’s global impact by featuring innovative, globally-engaged faculty, staff, students and alumni.
Sabrina Prestes Oliveira is currently a senior studying Data Visualization in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the UW Bothell (UWB) campus. Sabrina describes her experience exploring what it means to be a global citizen, learning about international human rights and making the most of global learning opportunities.
UWB’s Global Scholars Program was my way to incorporate international awareness while majoring in Data Visualization. Connecting with the cohort throughout the year, reflecting on our global experiences in class, and having critical discussions about how our personal identities and notions of the world are shaped by international power dynamics, brought me closer to my peers than in most other courses. We also had career-building workshops and the chance to hear from speakers and former Global Scholars about their experiences working in international affairs. Many of us in the program are first-generation students and/or first/second-generation Americans, and it’s rare to find welcoming spaces that provide much-needed insights about networking, the nuances of local and global engagement, and advocacy.
During our week in D.C., as part of the seminar, we met a delegation of Ecuadorian activists and public defenders in partnership with local advocacy organizations as well as Amazon Watch and Amnesty International. The stories they shared about violence, cultural erasure, police brutality, and territorial/environmental rights violations motivated me to focus on Ecuador for my research paper.
Ecuador once stood out in the region for its low homicide rates and progressive human rights legislation (even if it was more on paper than in practice). Now, it has become prized territory for international criminal organizations in the trafficking of drugs. A weakened state and prison system have allowed these organizations to take control. The more I researched, the more I discovered that drug traffickers are by no means independent agents. They are enabled by and benefit from both international and local political and corporate interests.
I was recently selected for UW’s Mary Gates Leadership Scholarship to support a project to pinpoint, assess, and visualize Latino community needs and demographics in WA. The Latino Educational Training Institute (LETI) is expanding their educational and entrepreneurship programs to Everett, and thoughtful data analysis can help guide their upcoming outreach initiatives. While I’ve started my analysis with data from the U.S. Census, with the support of the LETI team, I hope to expand into broader sources and find ways to highlight empowerment and opportunity in our community.
The UWB’s Latino Leadership Initiative (LLI) is truly a game-changing program as a Latino student. I joined in 2024 simply looking to connect with other Latinos on campus but also as the chance to hear many WA leaders’ stories of representing their communities, starting a business, and advocating for change in local politics. The leadership seminars with the Latino Educational Training Institute made me realize that success, unlike what we’re always told, isn’t solely an individual effort. Connecting with UWB’s LLI cohort and organizing our service project, where we hosted college/career mentoring sessions for Latino high schoolers, helped me find a space here in the U.S. where I felt I could contribute meaningfully.
Students attended joint lectures on the basic design principles for accessible interpretive signs and inclusive communication for people with disabilities. They also conducted field work to observe and analyze interpretive signs in their respective cities – The UW Arboretum and the UW Farm in Seattle and several parks in Kaohsiung and Tainan, two major cities in Southern Taiwan. In a survey following the project, students ranked the following as having the strongest impact on their growth: Learning and understanding other ways of seeing the world, growth in self-awareness, greater understanding of different cultures, and understanding how to interact with people from different cultures.
“Studying abroad increases success for everyone,” said Dr. Gayle Christensen, interim vice provost, 
