BY CHLOE LEO, STAFF WRITER  & DANIELLE BRESLOW, JUNIOR EDITOR

When World History teacher David Heckler was studying business as a rising junior at Georgetown University, he and a buddy did a summer leadership academy in Romania. It was an eye-opening experience for them. The trip helped steer him in the direction of becoming an educator.

“I came back,” he said, “knowing that business wasn’t necessarily for me.  From a standpoint of what I was fascinated in… working with other people, and also the element of being a facilitator of that, is the kind of thing that led me into teaching.”

Heckler spent four and a half weeks just outside of Bucharest in Transylvania, which was great not only from a travel standpoint, but was an excellent reminder that although Eastern Europe seems so far away, “it’s not just some far-off pre-historic place.” The trip was focused on giving the students both cultural takeaways and business experience in entrepreneurship.

“It was really cool as a historian to see people in a region that Ceaușescu, the dictator of Romania, just decimated in the Cold War, and to see those people really resilient,” he said. “Working with people my own age whose parents and grandparents had been born in the regime was really, really fun.”

This trip influenced his decision to look into alternate avenues, and go back to college to get a master’s degree in education.  Although he had originally planned on going into the foreign service, he realized through his trip experience that teaching was something he was seriously interested in and could see himself doing as a long-term profession. •

PHOTO BY ROCHELLE O’BRIAN, PHOTO EDITOR

*This article appeared in the April 2015 issue of the paper