CLASS OF 2013 | 2014 | ISSUE 2
With the arrival of spring (after what seemed like a perpetual winter) comes the epiphany that it has been almost a year since my fellow classmates and I graduated from Wesleyan. It’s hard to believe how quickly time has flown by! While some of us are settling into the daily routines of corporate life, others are embracing the return to graduate school, transitioning jobs from one field to another, or simply embarking on new adventures around the world.
Ex-Wesleying editor Zach Schonfeld recently left his fellowship at The Wire to take a job at Newsweek, where he reports on many topics, some of which include Wesleyan. In March, one of his tweets was linked in a post on Gawker. He is enjoying Brooklyn, but occasionally misses Olin 3A. Danielle Craig writes in from Manhattan, where she is working as a paralegal at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. She lives with fellow Wes ’13er, Lily Kaplan, in an apartment that is only moderately decked out in red and black. She is learning an enormous amount about the criminal justice system and federal prosecution, and law school or a master’s in public policy is (somewhere) on the horizon. In her free time she plays squash in an adult league with college teammate Grace Zimmerman and has started to volunteer at an animal shelter in Chinatown. She still hasn’t eaten at every restaurant in New York City, but she’s certainly trying. Also in NYC is Miriam Kwietniewska who works in child welfare crisis management at a foster care agency in Queens called Forestdale Inc. While it is mentally and emotionally challenging, the life and work experience has been invaluable. When she is not working, Miriam is combining her passion for dance and social change. She started movement workshops at the agency for birth parents and their children in order to help them through the trauma of being in the foster care system. They are partnering with the Gibney Dance Company to start the workshops this July.
Singing sensation Emma Daniels writes in from the nation’s capital, and is currently working in the Latin American and Caribbean division of an NGO that promotes democracy and international governance. She also moonlights as a wedding singer—those hoping to crash a wedding in the DC area, please contact her! Roomies Evan Baum, Barbaralynn Moseman, and Hannah Reuman are living together happily in New Haven. Barbaralynn is doing clinical research in Alzheimer’s disease, Hannah is doing clinical research in autism spectrum disorders, and Evan is working for a private material sciences company. After work, they make sure to cuddle and reminisce about Wesleyan memories. Kelsey Muller moved to Bozeman, Mont., last summer to enjoy a year off from school. There, she works in a lab, skis as much as possible, and loves training her new border collie puppy. She is deciding which grad school to attend next year to get her master’s in biomedical engineering—possibly USC where she could hang out with her good friend and fellow ’13 grad Becca Koppel. Suat Kilic writes in with big news of tying the knot with Sarah Moustafa ’11! He is in his first year at Rutgers-New Jersey Medical School and Sarah will be starting at the same school in the fall.
In January, Evan Okun performed a solo show at the NYC Bowery Poetry Club alongside other Wesleyan students and alumni (Lily Myers ’15, Mel Hsu ’13, Sam Friedman, Nate Mondschein ’12, and more). The event was such a success that the venue offered him a follow-up show in June. These performances build on his work with Circles & Ciphers, a restorative justice organization in Chicago that uses hip-hop to engage young men (court-and-gang- involved) in critical discourse. Budding author Kristen Salustro just published her sci-fi novel, Chasing Shadows, on amazon.com in February. This has been a huge project for her for several years now, and it is both terrifying and exhilarating to finally have made the book live. She is already working on the sequel to Chasing Shadows, which was the first installment of a trilogy. In her spare time, Kelsey participates as a writer in a project called Story Shift, where readers get to vote on a choice presented at the end of each story’s installment and then the writer develops the next chapter from there. Evan Carmi also just published a new e-book on internships. Since graduating, he has moved to Portland, Ore., where he works remotely as a software engineer for Brewster, a NYC tech startup.
On the other side of the world, Alex Lough is teaching English and music in Thailand. One of his pieces was selected by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States to be featured on the album SEAMUS Electro-Acoustic Miniatures 2013: Negative Space. The title of the piece is “What’s Left Behind” and the album is available on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, etc. Alex plans to move to Miami in August to begin his master’s in music technology at Florida International University. Janet Cushey moved to Seoul, South Korea, after graduation, where she teaches ESL at an after-school academy called Chungdahm Institute. She has also been volunteering with Liberty in North Korea’s English tutor and culture exchange program, working with a North Korean refugee in one-on-one sessions on a weekly basis. Tom Lee is leaving his job in London and moving back across the pond to oversee the mid-season harvest of both organic wildflower honey and of course artisanal-grade beeswax at Wakefield Apiaries in Deer River, N.Y. By the sound of things it should be a big year, as forecasts show that harvests should be up by about 3 to 5 percent.
Anwar Batte notes that postgrad life has been filled with viral content aggregation, streamlined integrated deliverables, and maximizing shareable content. Here’s to synergistic, agile disruptions and Total Information Awareness in 2014!
As always, thanks for writing and best wishes to all my fellow 2013ers! Anyone who is around the San Francisco area, please get in touch!
Laura Yim | Lyim@wesleyan.edu