April 25, 2025  | By Gabriela Forte (A27)

It is tempting to emphasize traditional career preparation while highlighting St. John’s alumni and their professional accomplishments. The Career Development Office in Annapolis and Santa Fe’s Office of Personal and Professional Development (OPPD) are, after all, fantastic resources with many internships, fellowships, and vocational workshops at their disposal. But there is also a true sense in which these opportunities for Johnnies would not be so abundant if not for the way that the St. John’s education itself sets its graduates up for success. One of the best skills an individual can cultivate through the Program is curiosity—something that Albuquerque Business First reporter and Fulbright alum Leah March (SF23) believes has been foundational to how she approaches the world. 

Now a reporter at Albuquerque Business First after serving as a Fulbright teaching assistant in the Czech Republic and completing summer coursework at the London School of Economics, the 2023 Santa Fe graduate has been around the world and back again, thanks in part to St. John’s. Before matriculating on the Santa Fe campus in her late twenties, March took time off from school and entered the workforce, managing college partnerships for an education nonprofit in Idaho. By coincidence, she found St. John’s when selling them advertising for admissions. “I sold them advertising,” March says, “but their advertising sold me.”

In the spirit of the Program, March refused to limit herself when it came to her education, opening her mind to the breadth of possibilities a liberal education can provide. She says, “I was drawn to St. John’s purity of emphasis on learning. I loved that grades were minimized, lectures were largely nonexistent, and writing was paramount.” This unorthodox approach motivated March to ask difficult questions: She went headfirst into the philosophical difficulties of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, an endeavor from which she says she still benefits. “To this day, I often argue with Nietzsche in my head about a score of central assumptions,” March says, “a raucous internal dialogue that would have remained silent for me had I not accepted the challenge.”

On the other end of the spectrum, March chose to write her capstone senior essay on Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity, including his papers from 1905, 1911, and 1915. March’s essay inspired original reflections on aesthetics in our day-to-day lives and how they inform the opinions and realities of rational creatures. “In such a corporatized world, in a world where people can so easily be flattened into widgets and units of production, to maintain an aesthetic is uniquely human and, dare I say, divine," March says.

March spent a portion of her summer in 2021 studying at the London School of Economics, an experience supported by the St. John’s College Office of Personal and Professional Development. She studied global wealth and poverty, which she says, “[gave] me a substantial overview of the institutional, geographical, and technological forces that created our current global economic conditions—a framework that I often use now as a journalist to think about the generational implications of specific economic policies.” March’s summer at LSE pushed her Johnnie education beyond the Great Books, reaping benefits in terms of career preparation and experience in a more specialized academic field. That being said, she stresses, not everything gained at St. John’s is—or should be—applicable to the professional world. To her, the most important part of her education was how it “formed my soul in really profound ways,” she says, encouraging her to explore the world from all angles.

Upon graduating, March was the recipient of a Fulbright teaching assistant grant, an achievement facilitated by the support of Santa Fe’s OPPD. March spent a year teaching English in Trutnov, a small town in the Czech Republic near the Polish border. Along with her work as an English teacher, she developed program material on international affairs, history, and politics. This included a discussion series for students, as well as a Model UN manual designed to improve public speaking, research, and critical thinking skills among students.

March’s Fulbright challenged her to step into the ways of life of a different community of people, requiring her to be receptive and adaptive to her new environment to properly serve her students as a teacher. She says of the experience, “When I was confronted with something that I don’t understand, staying the urge to immediately solve or react allowed me to ask questions…there were a lot of things that I did not understand during the year, so I just started asking better and better questions. And in the end, I think it is a really profound experience of cultural diplomacy because of that ability to ask questions instead of rushing to how I [thought] things should be.” At St. John’s, students are encouraged to be “friendly to the author,” and to approach questioning and curiosity with an open mind. In March’s experience, this open-mindedness transcended the classroom, making her a more understanding and curious world citizen.

As part of March’s work at Albuquerque Business First, she covers supply chain development on the New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico borders. Curiosity has taken on a whole new meaning for her, as it is now the foundation of her professional work. Asking and anticipating complex questions “that can elicit illuminating information, that can maybe even lead us to better questions and locate the conversation [to] a more productive and interesting place” is essential to March’s work as a reporter, a skill cultivated by years of inquiry at St. John’s and beyond.

“St. John’s gave me the permission to fully pursue whatever I found interesting,” March says. “There’s a lot of emphasis in most other places about practical results, and that sort of requires you to label yourself or identify yourself. I felt like St. John’s is one of the few places where I could just be a curious person, and that was enough.”