Penn State alumnus translates liberal arts education into global career

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Ben Stewart, a Clarion, Pennsylvania, native and alumnus of the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts, displays a spirit of global service and linguistic excellence through his professional career, which has taken him to Russia and Ukraine. Graduating in 2015 as a Schreyer Scholar with degrees in Russian and Spanish, Stewart said his endeavors have been made possible by the transformative power of learning global languages.

Entering the University with a deep understanding of Spanish, Stewart was able to enter his Spanish major at an accelerated level. This allowed him to dedicate more time to his Russian major and more detailed Spanish language concepts taught by Liberal Arts language faculty whom Stewart regarded as “a small group of very dedicated, successful people.”

“I tested into a certain level of Spanish, which was nice, because I got into the crux of what you can do with the language,” Stewart said. “I got to take literature classes, linguistic classes and translation classes, for example, which spotlighted the difference between translation and interpretation.”

In between his time learning Russian and Spanish in the classroom, Stewart supplemented his learning with conversations he had with native Spanish-speaking students through the Penn State Conversation Partners Program, a University-sponsored community engagement opportunity that connects native English-speaking students with speakers of other languages. By connecting through language, students foster a greater appreciation of their cultural differences while also helping each other develop language skills through interpersonal language immersion. Reflecting on the program, Stewart believes it is one of the many “micro-steps” a student can take to learn a language.

“The best way for you to learn a language is to go to a place that only speaks that language, but that’s not feasible for most people. The little things you can do to help are things like changing your phone’s language to another, spending 10 minutes a day reading foreign language content or going to the Conversation Partners Program and finding someone who can teach you some of their languages and you can teach them some English,” Stewart said. “You have to slip in speaking a foreign language each day so the proportionality of language use builds up over time.”  

In addition to the real-world practice Stewart got from the Conversation Partners Program, he was awarded a Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) grant in 2012 through the Center for Language Science in the College of the Liberal Arts. As an undergraduate researcher in The Brain Tracking Lab, Stewart spent three years helping to investigate the brains of bilingual individuals under the direction of Giuli Dussias, professor of Spanish, linguistics and psychology. Stewart regards Dussias as his “biggest mentor as an undergraduate.”

In 2014, Stewart received a Critical Language Scholarship funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs that allowed him to live in Kazan, Russia, where he aided a project centered in Russian language. The out-of-classroom opportunity gave him “real-world experience that dropped [him] in the middle of intensive study where [he] only had one option for communicating, which was speaking Russian.” 

After graduating from Penn State, Stewart was able to continue doing research with Penn State’s Department of Political Science, where he coded and translated articles from Russian news sources into English, all of which were related to the Russian governmental election cycles and politics. At the same time, Stewart also worked as a teaching assistant for linguistics under Deborah Morton, associate teaching professor of linguistics and African studies. 

Following his time at Penn State, Stewart served in the Peace Corps as a Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) Higher Education Volunteer, teaching English to children, students and teachers in Ukraine. During his service, he took on several long-term projects.

One was Camp EXCITE, a project he designed and for which he won a Peace Corps partnership grant. He described the project as the best part of his Peace Corps experience despite it being a weeklong camp in the woods with no cellphone reception or running water. The trip partnered with a local orphanage and schools from the Sumy, Ukraine, region and provided over 60 children access to English-language summer camps, which were typically inordinately expensive and sparse in the Sumy region.

Another long-term project of Stewart’s was Young Women in Technology, for which he received a Let Girls Learn grant. This project involved a seminar series with presentations from local Ukrainians who had found success in various technical fields, such as software development, design and animation, as well as a weekend workshop with Ukrainian women professionals in backgrounds such as business, psychology and education. The trip culminated in the Ukrainian girls making a capstone video on the theme of gender equality.

Stewart found his service in the Peace Corps very rewarding after his time spent in research and the academic world. It’s an experience and opportunity he suggests for students who are looking into a world service program and aren’t afraid to “go whole hog.”

“In the Peace Corps, you commit yourself to not being in an American bubble. You meet people, learn a lot about them, you learn a lot about yourself, and you learn a lot about your country,” Stewart said. “America looks very different when you're living outside of it.”

During his service in the Peace Corps, Stewart was posted at Sumy State University in Sumy, Ukraine, teaching English in the Foreign Languages Department. After his 26 months of Peace Corps service, Stewart began freelancing as an English, Ukrainian and Russian translator. He said two of the most interesting projects he completed during his time freelancing were translating two books for families who gave him first-source mediums from their ancestors who talked about cultural events and family-related history.

The first book, a memoir, was sourced from “digitized recordings of audiotapes taken in the 1950s of a woman and her son recounting the trials of life in Ukraine after the Communist Revolution — when the son was still a small boy — and up to when they fled after surviving World War II.” The recordings were left to the boy's daughter when he passed away later in life. Stewart’s work allowed the daughter to have a full picture of what happened to her family.

The second book was a translation of a personal diary that came from a man born around the time of the Communist Revolution. His grandchildren, who now live in the United States, recovered the writing and were unable to understand its content due to the last Ukrainian-speaking member of their family passing away. This led them to Stewart, who turned the diary into a book about the man’s life experiences living through the revolution and its repercussions for Ukraine during the first half of the 20th century.

Stewart’s work turning such sources into books highlights how important language and working translators are to our understanding of history.

“AI, like Google Translate, only gets the exact meaning of the words, and the AI normally is not even very good and is very bad most times, as it has a very limited understanding of the language,” Stewart said. “Interpreters build on translations with localizations, cultural understandings or historical contexts that represent the full picture of a story.”

Today, Stewart works as the head of annotation at RedBrick AI, a “medical data annotation platform where AI startups, research institutions and hospitals can build the next generation of radiology AI.” In this role, he “oversees the annotation pipeline that generates the ground truth data necessary for FDA 501(k) and CE-cleared medical devices, deep learning models and other AI solutions in radiology.”

In his free time, Stewart also volunteers as a mentor for the Liberal Arts Alumni Mentor Program.

“My style or way of mentorship is to give mentees the time and space to identify the things they are very passionate about and get them to a point where they can clearly articulate why they enjoy it, as when it comes down to any accomplishment and what you do after college, the common thread is what your interests are and what you want to do,” Stewart said. “My mentorship is a tool. The only reason I exist is to be an informational resource and a surface to bounce ideas off of. The mentee does the work to materialize it, and I direct them to appropriate grant opportunities, help them enhance their applications to programs or introduce them to other people.”

Stewart also advises his mentees to work on their soft skills.

“Things like establishing rapport with someone on a call, active listening, cultural respect and knowing how to remain calm when someone is arguing with you are very important as a professional,” Stewart said. “Being a good writer is also very important because being able to communicate knowledge in a contextually relevant way is essential to success. You need to build yourself to be detail-oriented.”

Next up on this globally minded alumnus’ plate? Moving across the world again to Bengaluru, India, and continuing his podcast where he and another Ukranian Peace Corps volunteer, alongside a Ukrainian mutual friend, discuss Eastern European and Ukrainian geopolitics structured in an immediately digestible form for westerners and individuals who do not have an understanding of Eastern European history over the past 1,000 years.