Alumni Spotlight: Sybil Chidiac 98Ox 00C
Like many first-year students who step onto Oxford College’s campus, Sybil Chidiac 98Ox, 00C arrived with a carefully mapped-out plan: excel in pre-med, honor her family’s cultural expectations, and secure a future in medicine. What she didn’t expect was that she’d leave Oxford with something her carefully laid plan never accounted for—the confidence to write a different one.
As the daughter of Haitian-born parents, Sybil grew up with a blend of strict discipline, strong family values, and a well-traveled sense of adventure. Her father’s 30-year engineering career with Xerox meant moving around the U.S., and constantly learning to make new friends. No matter where they landed, her family immersed themselves in the communities they lived in and spent weekends on road trips exploring new places. By the time college applications were due, Sybil and her family were living in Marietta, Georgia.
Two schools had her heart: Emory University and Cornell, from years spent living in upstate New York. Ultimately, staying close to family mattered to her. Although Emory's reply wasn't the acceptance she expected, it presented another option Sybil hadn't considered…Oxford College. Having the opportunity to choose Oxford eliminated the added stress of homesickness and allowed her to focus on school and truly figuring out what she wanted to pursue as her career.
Sybil explains that in Haitian culture, traditional beliefs held by the parents of her generation maintained that professionally, “you seek a career as a doctor, lawyer or an accountant.” So at Oxford, she enrolled in pre-med, the path her mother and many of her aunts and uncles in medicine had laid out long before she had any say in the matter. Sybil had other interests, though. She was interested in photography, French, international Development, and many other topics, but those didn’t really feel like options for her, more like an idea.
The idea of being and pursuing something different took root in her heart years earlier, inspired by her late aunt, the first person in her family to say out loud that she wasn’t taking the culturally traditional route. Sybil recalls her aunt as a relentless learner, working on her third master’s degree at the time. She remembers spending weekends in Berkeley with her aunt, listening as she recounted memories of her time in Kinshasa, DRC, where she served in the Peace Corps. Sybil describes this as “unheard of for a Haitian, or anyone that comes from a developing country, to then go into voluntary service to live and serve in the same or worse conditions that they previously had lived”
Her aunt’s stories, paired with this example of breaking the mold and a growing dislike of Chemistry 141), were seeds that started to bud in Sybil, showing her with certainty that pre-med was not her destiny. Oxford’s size and support gave Sybil room to make the case to her parents to follow an international affairs and French track. Changing course taught her something no textbook could: how to tune out those predetermined expectations and take a chance on herself and what she truly felt was right.
Oxford quickly proved to be a place like no other. It was diverse and unique, offering an environment where she could truly find herself and her calling. The tight-knit community made the transition from high school to the demands of higher education smoother. She found that the campus environment made all the difference.
"The small campus exposed me to a wide range of cultures. So, we really got to know each other, spent time together, and understood our differences."
Most importantly, those intimate settings strengthened her academic journey: "I think being able to bring students together with different perspectives is super important, especially in a learning setting where you're in a classroom.” Those different perspectives and backgrounds allowed her to create those bonds with her peers. That sense of community also allowed Sybil to assimilate smoothly into the Atlanta Campus. She noted, "I think the transition was feasible because of that tight-knit community at Oxford... I may have had to start all over again, be more reclusive, and build friendships. But friendships made at Oxford are the one thing that helped that transition.”
Oxford had ultimately prepared her academically to navigate the unpredictable story that awaited her after graduation as she stepped into the real world. She reflects, “The classes that I took between Oxford and Emory really helped me understand the theory part of worldview. It helped me understand history, culture, and lessons, why certain things happened from a perspective, and to challenge that perspective.” From her first days at Oxford to her transition to the Atlanta campus and finally into life after graduation, each shift in mindset and phase served as a launching pad for the long-held ambition to work internationally in development.
That combination – self-trust, cultural fluency, a willingness to question the accepted narrative – pointed her straight toward her aunt’s example. Sybil set her sights on the Peace Corps, briefly considering Mauritania, but ultimately choosing Benin, drawn by a sense of history and connection, knowing many Beninese had been displaced to Haiti and the Caribbean during the slave trade. From 2000 – 2002, she served as a small business volunteer in Porto-Novo, working directly with local savings groups and community associations – hands-on training in economic empowerment that quietly shaped the rest of her career.
Today, Sybil, Senior Officer for Economic Opportunity Africa at the Gates Foundation, leads investments in inclusive finance, agriculture livelihoods, and digital infrastructure in Africa. She helps build the financial and digital foundations that let women’s cooperatives access credit, along with digitizing savings group structures. When Sybil travels to African countries and walks into a meeting with government ministers, commissioners, and CEOs, and even in remote village communities, she is relying directly on the skills she learned and practiced at Oxford and Emory.
“Oxford helped build the skills, and then at Emory I was practicing it because all of a sudden you're on this huge campus and you don't know who you were walking by or speaking to.”
Sybil arrived at Oxford believing her future had already been decided for her. She left with the confidence to question that, to pursue a calling that was actually hers, and to walk into unfamiliar rooms with curiosity instead of fear.