Alex Sánchez Rodriguez, who plans to graduate from United in 2026 with an MA in Religion and Theology, was initially drawn to the seminary’s Interreligious Chaplaincy program. Since taking more classes, engaging with his professors, becoming involved in the Student Leadership Collective, and taking on other extracurricular activities, he has settled on a new calling. “I discovered,” Alex shares, “that I have a natural affinity toward academics.” In fact, he admits, “I want to be like my professors.”
Before coming to United, Alex was a substitute teacher in Puerto Rico. Since he moved to Minnesota, he has been working in student development and promoting student success. The priority of student success is the throughline, Alex perceives, from his current role and an academic career. “If I am to go into academia,” he explains, “part of my success as a teacher, professor, and researcher depends on the success of my future students.”
Alex also credits United professors for embodying the kind of academician he hopes to become. Dr. Demian Wheeler and Rev. Dr. Andrew Packman, he notes, “as academics and how they engage with their students…[are] very inspiring to…future academics.” The fact that United faculty are “so accessible and so approachable and so likeable,” Alex continues, made him realize that an academic career does not have to take place in some secluded and inaccessible “ivory tower.”
United’s emphasis on interreligious engagement was another piece of Alex’s transformation. “I grew up in a very Christian environment where everything that wasn’t Christian was considered bad,” Alex recounts. After encountering the diverse faith communities of United’s students and faculty, he suggests, “it made me realize that there’s not just one path toward spirituality and divinity.”
Ultimately, Alex hopes that his future work as a theologian can help fellow Puerto Ricans emerge from the shadow of colonization. “I think doing the work of theology is a way to help ’regular people’ realize that they don’t have to live as colonized individuals anymore. They have the opportunity to define who they want to be.”
As Alex stated earlier this year, “While I could have chosen a different specialty or a different seminary, theology and religious studies have brought a sense of wonder that I have not experienced in any other discipline that I have studied, and United has given me more than I can name.”