Spotlight on Rutgers Peace Corps Alumni: Meet Connor Cullinane
When Rutgers students imagine life after graduation, they might picture graduate school, a new job, or maybe even a gap year abroad. But for some, the path leads to something bigger: two years of service overseas with the Peace Corps. We sat down with Connor Cullinane, a Rutgers alumnus from the class of 2023, who served in Morocco from 2023 to 2025, to hear what the experience was really like.
What inspired you to join the Peace Corps?
I recall sitting down in the second-semester lecture of my time at the Eagleton Institute of Politics, a little anxious about what I would do after I graduated. It was the beginning of my senior year, and I had a few options of what I wanted to pursue and where I wanted to go, but I was still largely undecided and open to whatever opportunities would present themselves. I had heard of both the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps, and the idea of spending some time away from New Jersey--where I had lived my whole life--volunteering and doing good work, and maybe finding myself, appealed to me. Making such a bet on myself, that I could do something so unknown, especially if I was going to live abroad, was honestly scary. I didn’t know if I was ready for such a monumental, life-altering decision yet.
I was in Francine Newsome Pfeiffer’s class on Political Networking, and she had invited a former Eagleton Alumni who was serving as a U.S. Diplomat to join us virtually during one of the dinners, to talk about their life experience after Rutgers. They went in-depth about their time in the Peace Corps: what volunteering and service abroad looked like, the challenges they faced, the accomplishments they achieved, and the experience they earned by taking those risks, going abroad, serving a community, and volunteering abroad. From that night, this idea of joining the Peace Corps and seeing where it could take me latched on to my brain, and I decided if I was going to live life, I would live by being active, taking risks, and experiencing all the complexities life could throw at me.
How did you decide on your country of service?
I had heard that Morocco was one of the historic programs of the Peace Corps. It was one of the first countries Peace Corps volunteers were sent to in the 1960s. There was a legacy of hard, good work and of facing challenges not alone but with a team of fellow volunteers and Moroccan counterparts. I liked the work they were asking volunteers to pursue: youth development. It was described as a mixture of English teaching, camp counseling, and developing your own independent programs and activities that you felt benefited your community. There was a lot of independence and navigating difficulties on your own, as well as taking your own initiative, while also having one of the largest Peace Corps volunteer cohorts to fall back on for support, guidance, and partnership if you needed it.
Morocco was, and is, a beautiful, historied, and complex country. I had read about its culture and its positioning as a crossroads between Europe, the Arab world, and sub-Saharan Africa. It is a place of layered blended histories, dreams, and civilizations. Morocco is extremely unique, as the last standing kingdom of North Africa. There is a mix of Arab and Amazigh culture, past colonialization by both the French and the Spanish, as well as its own historic control and influence over large swaths of the Maghrib and the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. I wanted to experience such a complex, culturally rich, and long-lasting society.
Can you describe a “day in the life” as a volunteer?
Morocco has an incredibly relaxed and laid-back work-life balance compared to the States. Your daily activities, routine, and work can depend on the season and the weather. My town can reach up to 115 degrees in the summer (and there are other volunteers who experience even higher average temperatures). So, my “day in the life” changes a lot throughout the year. That said, I usually get up around 8 am each day and make myself a traditional Moroccan breakfast (tea, coffee, bread with jams, cheese, and olive oil), and exercise before it gets too hot. I’ll complete morning online work at the café, or run errands, shop for home goods, or prepare lesson plans, all before lunch. If it’s the weekend, I’ll go to the local market called Souk to buy my week’s worth of fruits and vegetables, all super fresh and locally grown.
Lunch is always served after midday prayer, at around 12:30 in the winter and 1:30 in the summer. For me, the Call to Prayer is like a big clock that guides the whole community through the motions and times of the day. The most important meal of the day in Morocco is lunch. On Friday, it is customary to eat Moroccan couscous with your community or family, and so I always find myself before a big communal bowl of couscous either at my host family’s or at my friends’ houses. During the rest of the week, I either prepare something for myself or I am invited to eat with my neighbors. Moroccans are extremely generous and hospitable, and sharing a meal is a deeply-rooted tradition, so invitations are never hard to come by.
After lunch, my work at the local youth center called Dar Chabab begins, usually around 3pm. I’m joined by my Moroccan counterparts, and together we teach the children of the community English lessons, life skill workshops, and organize games, sports, and art activities. I particularly enjoy playing and teaching chess, so our town’s chess club has seen a lot of love and action over the two years I have lived on site. This work in the Dar Chabab includes multiple classes a day in a range of topics and subjects, and tends to wrap up around 7 pm. This is perfect timing as Moroccan tea time, called Kaskrout, tends to be right before sundown. I’ll travel to back to cafés with my counterparts and my boss, enjoy some fresh hot Moroccan mint tea, or some coffee. There will be snacks like breads, cookies, assorted nuts, and olives, that we’ll dine on. After sunset, if the Moroccan national football team is on the TV, I know I’ll be watching and cheering them on through their match. Barcelona and Real Madrid are also extremely popular in Morocco, a bitter rivalry between the Moroccan fans, so I’ll find myself watching their games as well.
Afterwards, I’ll head home, prepare a light dinner, and spend the rest of my night either reading, watching a movie, or doomscrolling. Bedtime is late in Morocco, and people, including kids of all ages, will be out and about at 11 or even 12 am. During the month of Ramadan, most folks are up even later, so unless I’m exhausted from a day packed with tea-drinking, soccer-watching, tagine-eating, and the occasional class instruction, it’s impossible to fall asleep before midnight with all the commotion outside my apartment.
What was the most surprising or unexpected part of living abroad?
The most surprising thing about living abroad is 100% how fast you can adjust and adapt to the situation you are living in. Morocco has traditions, perspectives, lifestyles, and beliefs that are totally different from how I lived and what I was comfortable with in America. The work-life balance, the deep centering of faith and belief in almost every aspect of daily life, the conservative dress and prominence of gender roles, the extremely rural lifestyle I found in the communities I served was all totally different from my upbringing.
At first, I thought it would be difficult to adjust and adapt when I’ve been stripped of so much that I would consider “American.” However, I quickly learned and adjusted to the intricacies of Moroccan life, formed language skills and friendships that got me over the hurdles and barriers that I thought would hold my service back. I no longer woke up from the pre-dawn Call to Prayer every morning, and my diet adjusted well to the different cuisine and style of Moroccan home-cooking. I picked up on the subtle details and skills needed to communicate with men and women of my site and treat them with the level of respect they showed me. I was able to integrate myself into my community because of the friendship, bonds, and trust I could place in the people around me, who helped guide me and teach me what I needed to succeed. And by integrating into my community, I gained the ability to see and understand the similarities and commonalities with how I grew up and how I found myself living in that moment. It wasn’t as different or as foreign as I first thought, and I soon was able to find that “America” I knew in the attitudes, the love, the hopes, and the dreams of the people around me.
What project or accomplishment are you most proud of?
There are two projects that I am most proud of. The first is a pen pal program I was able to accomplish in my town. For two years, I was able to organize a letter-writing workshop between my students at the Dar Chabab and the students of a friend of mine from Rutgers, now a teacher in South Jersey. To be able to see the excitement on the kids’ faces when they learned that they would be able to talk to and know real American kids was wonderful. They learned so much; not only improving their abilities to write and read in English, but also learning about the similarities and differences between kids in two different places, as well as the universal experience of growing up, facing the challenges and joys of youth, and a lot of shared interests and goals. They loved learning about how they listened to the same music, liked the same artists, played the same positions in football, while also learning about different favorite foods and hobbies. The American kids asked for good recipes for Moroccan couscous and other traditional dishes and the Moroccan children were happy to provide them.
The second project that I am extremely proud of was my participation and support with a girls’ empowerment camp in a nearby town. A volunteer friend of mine had a grant project to create a week-long Girls Lead Our World (GLOW) camp in a mountainous town nearby, and the volunteers of the region would bring themselves and a number of girls to participate. Ten girls, aged of 12 to 15, participated in the camp. This was a huge deal because, for a lot of the girls, this was their first time away from their families for an extended trip, so we needed to make sure everyone would be comfortable with such a new experience. I was fortunate to have a lot of extremely helpful, kind, and trusted counterparts in my community who helped organize, plan, and lead our delegation to the camp. My volunteer friend who organized the camp did an absolutely amazing job. The girls who attended were able to build important life skills, gain self-confidence and learn to love themselves, forming important friendships and lifelong bonds with each other. In addition, they learned how to process the mental and emotional weight that comes with womanhood in Morocco. The camp included visits to esteemed higher education institutions in Fes, where the girls made the important connections to further their education and met with successful women business leaders and professionals, who inspired them. It was truly wonderful to see it play out in person, and I’m extremely proud I was able to do a small part in providing this opportunity for youth in my community.
How does Peace Corps service shape your future?
Peace Corps service has a seismic effect on your future and who you are. I know there’s an overplayed saying that “in life, there’s a before-Peace-Corps-service, and there’s an after-peace-corps-service,” but it’s a cliché because it’s true. Volunteering in a foreign country, living in rural communities, seeing the complexities of human life and emotion in places so far from what you have experienced and are comfortable with, radically alters the way you see and understand the world. It changes how you value your time and energy, how you view human connection, friendships, and bonds. It gives you different perspectives on not just how the world works and how human beings work, but also on your life back in the States, including how you define “home.”, It will improve your priorities in life.
Especially straight out of college, joining the Peace Corps is a major decision to make. If you're considering furthering your pursuit of higher education through graduate school, law school, etc., I highly recommend joining the Peace Corps for two years in between undergrad and that next level, whatever it may be. It will expand your maturity, your perspectives, and your abilities. On a direct level, the Coverdell Fellowship program and the Non-Competitive Eligibility for Federal jobs are great benefits as well. These are great tools to take the next steps in your career.
What advice would you give Rutgers students who are thinking about joining?
If you’re on the fence about joining the Peace Corps, I would say do it. Try it, take that risk. If you are considering making such a major decision, if you are weighing those costs and benefits and the consequences of your actions like that, then you are definitely ready to join. You’ll never be as young and have as much freedom over your actions and your pathway as you have right now. It’s always better to do and see where the road takes you, rather than to be left on the sidelines, wishing you could have seen and experienced where the unknown could have taken you. “Serendipity” is a powerful word with even more powerful consequences; put in the work, prepare yourself for what could be, and let life take you as far as you want to go. Take bigger strides.
Looking back, why do you think the Peace Corps is a valuable opportunity today?
Personally, I think the pace of life in America is ever-increasing, getting faster and faster and faster. We can find ourselves losing control with so much information and data fed to us on a constant, unending stream. Peace Corps enables you to remove yourself from that flow and places you into an entirely new environment. It’s a structured journey, with trainings and guidance and experience you might not have so readily available if you were to do it on your own. Once you have a grip on the tools they equip you with during training, and you arrive at your final site, you’re free to help and support as you please. The decisions are your own, and you have to make do with your own eyes, ears, and hands. It can be scary, it can be overwhelming, but eventually, you’ll realize you’ve learned something of value from it. At the same time, you’ve provided a lot of good for people and communities that don’t always have things go their way, and you’ve created lifelong bonds and memories along the way.
Speed Round: Bonus Questions
• What is your favorite food from your host country?
My favorite food in Morocco is rfissa. It is a very labor-intensive dish that is usually served on special occasions. In a large bowl, msemmen (which is flat, fried Moroccan dough--also a favorite snack of mine, it is delish when served hot with honey, cream cheese, olive oil, or jam) is ripped apart and placed, and topped with stewed chicken in an au jus, with lentils, cooked-down onions, spices, and roasted almonds. You either eat it with your hands or with a fork, and it is otherworldly.
• Is there a phrase in the local language you still use?
Shwya bshwya, which means “little by little.” It is very useful to explain a lack of progress on your language skills, but to show that you are still trying. It can also explain enjoying the calm and slowness of life. Take your time, get it right. And, of course, Inchallah, meaning “God willing,” very common throughout the Muslim world, but specifically in Morocco. It tends to have an ironic usage, used as a way of declining an offer, putting something off, or straight-up saying no.
“Will you be coming over for tea today?”
“I have a class at 5 pm, but Inchallah I’ll try to make it.”
More than likely, tea will not be attended.
• Was there one item you couldn’t live without abroad?
My Kindle. I found I had a lot of free time, especially during the searing months of summer or during Ramadan, and so I tried to read as much as I could, something I rarely did back in the States. I wanted to develop some positive non-service-related habits, and reading definitely became that for me. I read a lot of classics, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Catch-22, Count of Monte Cristo, Dostoevsky, Bowles, McCarthy, Patti Smith, Percival Everett, and Ottessa Moshfegh. Although, I learned I much prefer paperback, and too much of my living allowance went to buy up any English novels I could get my hands on. Three times we attempted to create volunteer book clubs, only to find ourselves too busy reading to pick up the phone and talk to each other each time.
To learn more about Peace Corps, reach out to our Rutgers Peace Corps Recruiter Pablo Arenas Gallo, and visit our website.
