Rut took a year off from academics to see a part of our real world. She went to work on the Texas/Mexican border with immigration law as a paralegal and then went to work with torture survivors in Washington, DC. Rut began attending the University of New Mexico in fall of 1999 and has been ever since. She took a break, in a sense, to accomplish two lifelong dreams: the first was studying abroad in her father's country (Spain); the second was to travel around Eastern Europe and the Scandinavian countries.