Tutor Snapshot: Julia Wollrab

Julia Wollrab is a tutor in Chicago, with extensive and varied teaching experience. She has a B.A. in Latin American Studies and a minor in Art History from the University of Chicago. Julia also had a career as a professional ballet dancer, working as a soloist with companies all over the world.

When asked to pick my favorite travel story, I find it impossible to isolate a single experience. Was it midnight dining on suspicious yet deliciously spicy goat at a roadside restaurant in Ethiopia? Getting lost in the labyrinthine streets of old Cairo, where one is exposed to a range of human activity that fiction usually only approximates? Coping with the "interesting" toilets in a theater in Hangzhou, China in my "Tarantella" tutu? Surviving the crowds in the Mexico City streets and subway trains without dislocating a shoulder? Scaling the Great Pyramid, or the Great Wall? Successfully navigating enormous potholes at high speeds in a 1986 Ford Escort on the Alaskan highway? Exploring the exoticism of Oak Park, Illinois? Which moment has most thrilled and inspired me? It's hard to say.

I've been extremely fortunate in that my former career as a dancer meshed perfectly with another of my passions: travel. Touring with various professional dance companies over the course of 20 years allowed me to indulge my craving for adventure - on stage and off. Many a paycheck went straight to my plane ticket fund, for trips that supplemented the extensive touring I was already doing.

What is clear to me is that this form of experiential learning - exposure to radically diverse spatial and cultural environments, to both tragic poverty and awesome beauty, and confrontation with the unexpected - has provided me with a sort of "feedback loop" of learning. Eventually it inspired me to engage in formal academic study at the University of Chicago. The more I am able to witness, to actually "be" somewhere and absorb information with my senses, the more I become intellectually curious about how things came to be that way. Conversely, the more I learn through research, the more I want to witness how that reality, or that history, is lived out day-to-day.

It's fun to share my love of travel and culture with my students - especially as we work on their history or social studies texts. And sometimes, the only way to really stave off my obsession with travel as learning and learning as travel is, simply, more travel.