Tatiana Martínez, Bachelor of Arts in English Linguistics and Literature

The 23-year-old studied with the Cristóbal Conde Scholarship, awarded by the donor of the same name with Friends UC. Thanks to this scholarship, she was able to dedicate herself completely to her education, and today, after graduating, she is about to graduate from the Master’s Degree in Translation UC.

In 2016, at the age of 18, Tatiana was about to sign the CAE (crédito con aval del Estado or State-guaranteed loan) when she received an email from the Catholic University. It notified her that she had obtained the Cristóbal Conde Scholarship -given by the donor of the same name that is part of Friends UC- which covered the gap in tuition fees that remained to be paid after receiving a benefit from the State. At that moment, she threw away her pencil and was able to begin her studies of Linguistics and English Literature in the Faculty of Letters.

The Martínez Beroitza family consists of three siblings; her father is retired and her mother works in a supermarket. The family income was not enough to finance the almost one million pesos that Tatiana still had to pay after getting the State scholarship. «I think it was an incredible relief for my family and for me too, because I no longer had to worry, so young, being 18 years old, about asking for a loan and how I was going to pay it back in four more years», says today the young woman, who works as a translation project assistant at Take 1, a well-known translation company.

For Tatiana, graduating without having such a heavy backpack gave her wings. In fact, shortly after finishing her degree, she began studying for a master’s degree in Translation at the same higher education institution: «If I had had this CAE debt, I probably wouldn’t have started studying for a master’s degree, because there was no way I could pay for both. It is incredible how this idea of not being tied to a debt allows you to keep moving forward.