Whatever descriptive phrases may be applied to Ourania N. Tserotas, you may be fairly sure that "stick-in-the-mud" will not be one of them.

Ourania Tserotas, who stands against a mural in Central Square, has organized the painting of other murals by schoolchildren. Tserotas sees art as one effective way to make statements about diversity and community struggle. Staff photo by Jon Chase

She even picked Harvard (she is the first student from her North Side Chicago high school to go here) not primarily as a landing place, but as a springboard to somewhere else.

"I read somewhere that if you went to Harvard there would be grant money to take time off and do other things," she said. "I thought it would be valuable to use my time here to understand the world outside."

Tserotas has taken full advantage of the travel grants available to undergraduates to educate herself about other cultures as well as about her own Greek heritage.

Between semesters as a Sociology concentrator, she has sandwiched in a Wanderjahr or two of adventures, with extended stays in Puerto Rico, Greece, and an Ojibway reservation in Wisconsin. She has also worked with youth groups in Cambridge and done research for her senior thesis among female graffiti artists in inner city Chicago.

Tserotas took her first major journey in 1996, after her sophomore year. She traveled to a small working class community in Puerto Rico where she taught English and facilitated in the creation of a town mural. Living for seven months with a local family, she immersed herself in the local language and culture and came away with some valuable insights.

"I wanted to understand the differences for Puerto Ricans between living on the island and living in a city like Chicago. These are issues of ethnicity, and as a Greek American, they’re my issues too."

Then, hardly giving herself time to catch her breath, she moved to the White Earth Ojibway reservation in Minnesota to teach elementary school students, many suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome and emotional problems.

Again, it was another seven-month total immersion experience that included not only teaching Ojibway youngsters but also ice fishing, barbecues, powwows, and playing on a softball team.

"To be able to be involved with these people was very precious to me," she said. "It helped me understand the importance of having a humble, curious, thoughtful attitude toward people, to realize that there are people in the world who have a different lifestyle from your own but who are more knowledgeable than you about billions of things. It’s a difficult attitude to maintain at Harvard where you’re constantly told that you’re the smartest, most important person in the world."

Tserotas took another semester off in the fall of 1998, when she traveled to Greece and helped young adults with Down’s syndrome and cerebral palsy to learn arts and crafts and basic life skills.

The trip also provided revelations about her own background. She visited her father’s village near Sparta and met her 94-year-old great uncle. "You can’t date anyone in this village," he told her. "They’re all your family." Exploring the house where her father had grown up, she found an old wooden bowl and brought it back to Chicago. "Hey, where did you get that?" her grandmother exclaimed when she returned. "That’s the bowl I used to chop garlic!"

In addition to traveling the world, Tserotas has pursued learning experiences that brought her into contact with communities in the Boston area.

She worked for four years with the Cambridge Peace and Justice Corps, conducting consciousness-raising sessions with youth groups in Central Square. She has worked as an intern on two faculty research projects, one on female gangs and another on depression in low-income African-American women. She also graduates as a certified teacher, having spent her last semester teaching world history in a Roxbury middle school.

Her own senior thesis research has made her an expert on an area that has rarely been studied academically – the involvement of women in graffiti art and street murals. Most graffiti is a legitimate artistic expression and is unrelated to gangs and violence, she maintains. How do you tell the difference between real graffiti and gang "tags?" The same as with any art: "You have to train your eye."

Now, with her Harvard diploma finally in hand, Tserotas is still looking for the next adventure rather than settling down in a career. "I don’t want to fall into a track," she said. "I believe that the more diverse my experiences are, the better I’ll be at them."