CLASS OF 2015 | 2015 | ISSUE 3
Jenna Starr will be serving as the secretary for the class of 2015 notes in the magazine. She writes: “I’m so impressed with everything our fellow classmates have been up to since graduation. If any 2015ers wants to be in the future compilation of notes, please feel free to e-mail me at jstarr@wesleyan.edu.”
Oren Finard went biking around Europe for two months with a Wesleyan friend (from Edinburgh to London, Amsterdam to Brussels, the Loire Valley in France, and up the Rhine in Germany). Then in September, he moved to California to start his job at Google. And accidentally ran into another Wesleyan 2015er at a random party! Crazy!
Samuel Elias and Mackenzie McPike are research associates in the securities group at NERA Economic Consulting in NYC: “Our main contribution to NERA is starring on the company softball and soccer teams.” Additionally, Mackenzie volunteers as hockey coach for kids with special needs.
Max Shafer-Landau spent three months as a backpacking guide in Guatemala for a volunteer run organization called Quetzaltrekkers. They’re able to run a school and orphanage for over two hundred kids by leading treks to the highest point in Central America, Tajumulco, and through the highland cloud forests. Now that he’s back stateside, he moved as far from Middletown as he could, New Haven, where he’s now a graduate student in European and Russian studies at Yale.
Nora Thompson has been working in Manhattan at a healthcare tech startup that enrolls people into Medicaid, called BeneStream.
Since graduating, Andrew Yin has begun interning at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., and coaching youth baseball. Simultaneously, he is working on medical school applications with the hope of getting in and starting medical school in 2016.
Alyssa Brady spent the summer studying Arabic in Jordan with the Department of States’s Critical Language Scholarship and researching for the Arab Renaissance for Democracy & Development (ARDD) Legal Aid. She recently started her position as a research associate for the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, D.C., where she is writing for the Environmental Law Reporter, researching for a project with the Department of Agriculture, and assisting with the Environmental Law and Policy Review course at Vanderbilt Law School.
Six days after graduation, Hannah Rimm picked up and moved to the big bad New York City. Two days later she started working as the marketing coordinator at GKIDS, an independent film distributor that focuses on animated films. Now she’s a full-blown, nine-to-five-working New Yorker, pretending that real life is as great as soaking in the sun on Foss. She spends her days creating social media copy and writing e-blasts and marketing plans.
Kimora Brock’s first month living in Los Angeles has been a dream. Her experiences have ranged from getting her car broken into and robbed, to performing on stage at the Hollywood Bowl with Kanye West as a dancer and model! When not going to auditions or farmers markets, she is taking self-improvement and acting classes, but also practicing her viola and dance skills, too. She would love to get in contact with fellow alums in the area and/or industry. Her number is 301/717-6864
On Sept. 25th, Andrew McCloskey departed for Mozambique, where he will spend the next 27 months teaching 8th–12th grade biology as a volunteer for the US Peace Corps. Feel free to contact him at amccloskey@wesleyan.edu, as it is part of the mission of the Peace Corps for volunteers to share their experiences with people in the United States.
Chloe Jeng is working as a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton in DC. She has enjoyed working with and meeting other Wes alums, in particular Nicole Gerszberg and Robert Chang ’07.
Veronica Birdsall is at Columbia pursuing her PhD in neurobiology and behavior!
Steven Susaña-Castillo moved to New Haven at the end of August to work for Yale-New Haven Hospital as a public health researcher at Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluations (CORE).
Julia Sufrin has been interning at Aragi Inc., a renowned literary agency in Manhattan that represents authors including Jonathan Safran Foer, Junot Díaz, Claudia Rankine, Colson Whitehead, and Edwidge Danticat, to name a few. It’s a huge deal, she loves it there, and is honored to work for such an incredible agency responsible for finding some of the literary world’s greatest new voices.
Rebecca Wyzan lives in New York, working two jobs in the film industry. She is the assistant to filmmaker Sam Fleischner ’05 and the festival coordinator of the Video Art & Experimental Film Festival, which will take place Nov. 12–14 at the Tribeca Film Center.
Brett Keating, Zach Dravis, and Aaron Kalischer-Coggins live in Silver Lake and are learning to be Californians together. They are all “employed.”
This summer, Katherine Lu taught English for a month in Campinas Brazil under US-Brazil Connect as a Global Fellow. It is a Denver-based nonprofit that sends American college students and recent graduates to build intercultural ties between the two countries. It was a lot of fun, and a great way to gain experience in ESL teaching.
As part of Venture for America, Sam Rispaud joined a healthcare startup in Baltimore called Avhana Health. They are a small healthcare software company of nine people working to help doctors better use their electronic medical records. He’s doing a mix of software engineering and business development and learning a lot about the healthcare space. If there are any doctors out there who deal with prior authorization on a frequent basis or struggle to effectively implement clinical guidelines in their practice, please don’t hesitate to reach out (sam@avhana.com). They are looking for doctors to help pilot our software.
Since graduation Danielle Pruitt dedicated most of her time to eating her way through New York City. It can be pretty expensive, though, so in order to help fund this habit, she works at a media agency called Zenith Optimedia as an assistant on the digital/print activation team for Coty (a big fashion/beauty parent company). Yeah, sorry about those annoying ads where you can’t find the X… she also became an honorary member of the Producer’s Guild of America, which has been an awesome way for her to keep up with the film world while she immerses herself in the world of advertising.
This year, Zheyan Ni is on a Princeton in Asia (PiA) fellowship, working at a law firm in Hong Kong. PiA is a small, personal organization based in Princeton, N.J., that offers year-long fellowships in Asia that start after graduation. At this law firm, she is responsible for drafting sections of IPO prospectus and performing due diligence work, which she has never done before. During her free time, she is exploring local culture in HK, especially the food and the hiking trails. Apply to PiA!
Zachary Mintz moved to NYC and is an analyst at Citigroup in the global structured debt group.
Melissa Luning has been working on the residential team of Gould Farm since June 2015. Gould Farm is the first American therapeutic community for people diagnosed with mental illnesses, and it is located in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. Her role on the farm is to support guests in their off-work time by organizing activities, driving trips off-farm, assisting with activities of daily living, administering medication, and most important, forming relationships with the people the farm serves. She is grateful to be part of such a progressive mental health recovery program that values community living and holistic healing. Her position provides valuable experience that she says will give her a context for future studies in this field.
Jenna Starr | jstarr@wesleyan.edu