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Carlos Suarez receives from Menjiwe Winfield, YMCA Program Director, the John Price Award at the 20th Annual International Dinner, April 6, 2003 |
Carlos understands thoroughly the value of diversity in a community. He will be involved in all the activities that he knows and is always ready to help, especially with International events. As the President of the Ecuadorian Students Association he has built a network with many international organizations around campus.
Whenever help is needed, he will encourage the Ecuadorians to participate. This involvement has led the Association to co-sponsor and participate in a great variety of events on and off campus, from the Taste of Ecuador to the International week; from giving talks to elementary school kids to talking to students interested in study abroad.
In the Fall of 2001, Carlos and a small group of Ecuadorians living here at U-C started the Ecuadorian Students Association. The idea was to have a channel to expose our culture and customs to the community, and to build a small community to support one another and revive some of our traditions here. Carlos has been serving as the President of the Association since it started. The group has now over 40 members living here, and many more who have left the University but who are still in contact with us.
It is incredible how close the Association has brought us. For most of us, it feels like our family away from home. As an association, we have participated in many activities. We held three Coffee Hours at the Cosmo Club that were rated as "outstanding" by members of the club. We have tried to give the attendees a taste of our food, our music, and our country through presentations. In order to present different aspects of Ecuador we have given different presentations each time.
The most important, challenging, and rewarding project that we have participated in, with the Cosmopolitan Club and the Association of Scandinavian Women, in Quito, Ecuador was a fundraiser to help a group of Ecuadorian girls continue their elementary education. The project was a big success, surpassing our expectations.
Carlos's role in the project was crucial for its success. His leadership, involvement and motivation brought the best out of each of us. Not only was he the bond to the co-sponsors of the project; he was also extremely committed and involved in all the activities of the project, devoting a lot of time to it from the beginning to the end. The project was very rewarding for those of us who had the opportunity to visit the house where the girls live and see their smiles and their eyes full with joy and hope.
Despite the time that Carlos devotes to extra-curricular activities, he is an excellent and very responsible student. He is very close to completing his Master's degree in General Engineering and he has maintained a very high GPA throughout the entire program. He has been involved in many academic organizations as well, such as the Illinois Society of General Engineers (ISGE), the Society for Business and Management in Engineering (SBME), and the Office for Technical Consulting Resources (OTCR). He has participated actively in many of these organizations' projects. In Ecuador, he had the highest GPA in his graduating class, a fact that allowed him to obtain the scholarship that helped him start his studies here at the University of Illinois.
I have had the privilege of knowing Carlos on a professional level and as a roommate and close friend. I met him a long time ago. We went to high school together an extremely long time ago, and we have been roommates since I came to the University in the Fall of 2001. He is a very good person, a person that I feel lucky to have as a friend. He is the kind of friend that you can count on. That might sound like the standard line to describe a friend, but in this case it is true. For example, I have seen him spend entire nights awake just to drive his friends to the airport, even though each of them departed at different times.
He will sacrifice anything to lend a helping hand to his friends or to anybody who needs his help. He will always have time to talk, even if it means that he will not sleep well for the rest of the week trying to catch up on his class work. I hope that this award is only the first on a long series of recognitions for his work and his quality as a human being. Carlos' footsteps here in U-C and the effect he has had will linger for a long time in the heart of the International Community at the University.