How Zicklin Students Benefit from Baruch’s Tools for Clear Speech Program

Like thousands of Zicklin School alumni, Andrea Pelaez-Martinez (PhD, ’24) was born outside the United States. The Colombian native moved to New York from Medellin in 2015 when her husband got accepted into a graduate program at CUNY.  

Alumni Pelaez-Martinez and Cho (shown left to right) benefited from the program as Zicklin graduate students.

Three years later, Andrea herself was accepted into the Zicklin School’s doctoral program in business, and as a multilingual learner of English (the preferred terminology for people whose first language is not English), she sought out the services of Baruch’s Tools for Clear Speech (TfCS) program to prepare her for work as a teaching assistant in undergraduate classes.   

Baruch’s student body is famously diverse, speaking at least 100 languages and representing more than 150 countries. About 25 to 30 percent of new students speak a language other than English as their first language, says TfCS’s director, DJ Dolack.  

Unique to Baruch College, the TfCS program serves hundreds of English language learners annually. In 2023, the program provided 4,500 hours of instruction to 700 students throughout the College. Its distance-learning website, Tools To-Go, is accessed by hundreds of thousands of users from around the world.  

After an initial evaluation, Andrea scheduled regular one-to-one sessions with TfCS’s professional speech consultants, who guided her to improve her intelligibility, challenged her with customized homework assignments, and provided materials specifically for native Spanish speakers. Everything was geared toward helping her communicate better with students and deliver effective presentations at academic conferences.  

“It was really targeted for my needs,” Andrea says. TfCS helped her become more conscious of her speaking mistakes and therefore better able to correct them, leading to better connections in the classroom with her students—whose classroom evaluations reflected her improvement over time. “In the beginning, my evaluations pointed out that sometimes I wasn’t clear. But by the end, no one mentioned it at all,” Andrea says.  

The accommodating nature of the TfCS program was instrumental to her success, Andrea adds.  

“As a doctoral student, you’re under a lot of pressure, and you’re tempted to stop attending the sessions,” she explains. “But Tristan Thorne” —the program’s associate director—“was always willing to adapt sessions to my schedule and let me change my appointments if I had to. Thanks to that flexibility, I was able to keep attending and improving.”  

Isabel Jaeryung Cho (MS, ’22), a South Korean student from Seoul, took a different path to Tools for Clear Speech.  

Unlike Andrea, as a master’s candidate in the Zicklin School’s statistics program Isabel had no teaching responsibilities. But she knew she wanted to apply to doctoral programs in accounting, so as soon as she arrived at Baruch, she sought out programs to improve her English language skills.  

The benefits were myriad. Isabel made good use of the Tools To-Go section on TfCS’s website (“especially Consonants and Vowels”) and attended frequent one-on-one sessions in which she got personalized advice and bonded with the consultants. TfCS also helped Isabel feel more included in the Baruch community, she adds, during a time when it was difficult to meet and talk with other people because of Covid restrictions.  

Now a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California, Isabel says TfCS helped her “a lot” as a newbie PhD student. And once she begins working as a teaching assistant next semester, she’s sure to see even more benefits.  

As for Andrea, she is now an assistant professor of marketing at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, Italy, where she teaches classes in English. But she hasn’t forgotten those early days in the Zicklin doctoral program.  

“As an academic, being able to communicate clearly is crucial,” Andrea concludes. “When I compare the first presentation I gave as a graduate student to my dissertation defense, the progress I made was amazing.” 

Categories: Alumni News, News, Student News