A teacher points to the blackboard and asks emphatically: “What is an email?”. She wants her students to answer using Jakobson’s communication model, a topic they just learned in class. On the other side of the classroom, four of the eight students who attend La Ciénaga, a rural school on the border between Argentina and Bolivia, were trying to draw the “@” symbol on their notebooks.

Many who are wrapping up their final year of undergrad are uncertain of where life will take them next. Expecting to eventually take over my family’s business, I did not have this uncertainty. Then 2008 happened.