Hilda Gastelum
I am a long time resident of Marin County, California, and a graduate of Covell College and San Francisco State University.
After graduating from Elbert Covell with honors, I entered the Master's program at San Francisco State University in International Business and Finance. This program sent me to Paris, France to work abroad to obtain the basis for my thesis in marketing in the airline industry. It was in Paris that I was exposed to the French culture, and French business environment via my position with Trans International Airlines.
I graduated from San Francisco State University in 1977 and went abroad to work for Reynolds International in Venezuela, providing me exposure to yet another foreign culture and business environment. This was another great experience as the country was in the midst of an explosion of industrialization and business development. The preparation I received at Covell College opened the doors for me to achieve what the founders of Covell dreamed of: Integrating American businesses with Latin American cultures. In the 90's I opened markets and established channels of distribution for a number of American companies in Latin America. This experience brought me closer to the Covell family, as I traveled to many countries and met with Covelianos to bring news back to my contacts at the University Of The Pacific. This was the beginning of our efforts to reunite the Covell family back to UOP, with our first Covell reunion.
While living in Venezuela, I got married and had two beautiful daughters, Thais 27, a Cal-Berkeley graduate in Integrated Biology, and Natalie 23, who is studying film at San Francisco State University.
With the opportunities I was given through my jobs, I've been blessed to travel the world and appreciated the differences and the richness of the many cultures. I have shared this with my daughters as well.
I learned that life is precious and that even if it brings us challenges we must keep our dreams alive in order to achieve them. I had many challenges, many successes, and even some failures in my journey of life, but I always try to remember that, "Life it's not about how to survive the storm, but rather how to dance in the rain".