Jackie Freed moved back to LA and got her real estate license a month after graduation. She joined the family business, BKF Properties, and is looking forward to helping fellow Cardinals find a place to land out in Cali!

Trisha Arora just moved to Boston where she is working for Epsilon as a business systems analyst. She also just adopted a kitten named Legolas.

Rachael Metz is moving to Santiago, Chile, with her twin brother (Jordin, Tufts ’16), from September to May to immerse herself in the Spanish language and Chilean culture. Her goal is to be fluent (or close to it) by the time she returns home. They will both get their international certifications to teach English, then will look for jobs in teaching and tutoring English. If any Wes alumni are in Chile, please reach out!

Miranda Haymon has jumped right into rehearsals as the directing fellow at Arena Stage in D.C. If anyone is in D.C. and wants to see a show, let her know!

In August, Abby Gruppuso moved to Taiwan to teach English through the Fulbright program. She is living in Taichung, the third largest city on the island, and is teaching fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. Abby recounts, “Taiwan is beautiful, the food is amazing, my students are unbelievably cute, and my coworkers have been super welcoming.” She is excited for the year ahead.

Instead of spending all of August au pairing in Istanbul as planned, Melissa Leung took up a new German friend’s offer to accompany her to her home in Germany. This spot served as Melissa’s home base for the days she didn’t spend touring Europe. Melissa met up with Wy Ming Lin in Cologne, too! Now Melissa is in East Asia traveling with her two sisters (one a Wes ’10), stopping in Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou. She just signed her lease with Sarah Mi.

 Samantha Hellberg has been working as the program coordinator for the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders at the Massachusetts General Hospital. She has been really enjoying her first few months, even though she started just off the heels of graduation (within less than a week!). She’ll be working there for approximately two years, as she develops her research and clinical skill sets further, and applies to clinical psychology PhD programs.

Caroline Shadle moved to Manhattan to start a new position at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea. She is living in an apartment with two Wes alumni, as well as across the street from two other Wes alumni—reminiscent of Home Avenue.

Nina Channing is pursuing her MFA-2 in interior design at the New York School of Interior Design after spending a fulfilling summer helping with Dylan Fernandes’ successful primary campaign for the state representative seat in Falmouth, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket.

Former housemates Alessandra Cervera and Liyan Yao are having post-grad separation anxiety, and miss each other dearly. Sandi is doing cognitive development research at Yale, and Liyan has been accepted to med school, deferring to January. In the meantime, Liyan plans on taking some time off to spend with friends and family.

Emma Buford moved back to NYC to pursue the arts. She loves being in her hometown and continues to spend time with family and fellow Wes alumni. She will be in a production at the Joyce Theater this October, thanks to a connection made by Caroline Shadle, and will also be singing at a fundraiser in November.

Hannah Sokoloff-Rubin has picked up her stuff and moved across the country to Portland, Ore., to see what the whole “West Coast” thing is all about. She’s working for Planned Parenthood as the community education and outreach coordinator in Washington County and hopes to spend as much time in the outdoors as possible.

Jack Reuter just got a job working at a golf course as “the person who drives around in that little cart picking up balls from the driving range.” Jack reports, “That’s about it. Living at home, job hunting. Life is good.”

Ellen Paik | epaik@wesleyan.edu

Andrew Yin is a first year at Cornell Medical School in NYC. He has been trying to stay afloat amidst the loads of work and uses every chance he gets to explore the city or catch a baseball game.

Katherine Gibbel started her MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop this fall. Mackenzie McPike is now an analyst at Jane Street Capital in NYC. Alicia Gansley joined an e-commerce startup called Zola in Manhattan where she is a software engineer.

After working in litigation for almost a year in Boston, Ming Zhu is now going to a master’s program in entrepreneurship at Babson College’s business school to pursue his passion in the agri-business/food-tech business. Also, if any alumni or current students are interested in the food business, especially plant-based beverages, they should reach out to him!

Mateusz Burgunder is working at Accenture in Switzerland, where he is focused on big data and business intelligence.

Five years after meeting on the first floor of 200 Church, their freshman dorm, Marianna Ilagan and Jimmy Nguyen got married in Professor Alice Hadler’s backyard in New Haven, Conn. They are moving to Ann Arbor, where Jimmy is starting his master’s in biostatistics at the University of Michigan.

Michael You Rong Leung has been enjoying summer in Chicago since passing level one of the CFA program. He has been taking sailing classes and traveling around the country. He managed to meet up with Leslie Lai ’14, David Mai, and Jenna Starr in his most recent trip to Wesleyan!

Ibironke Otusile has left NYC Health and Hospitals on Rikers Island, a jail complex in Queens, where she worked in the medical records department, serving the underprivileged jail population. She is an MS candidate in biomedical sciences at Barry University, in Hollywood, Fla. In her free time, she creates videos for her new YouTube channel, Ibironke Otusile.

Jenna Starr | jstarr@wesleyan.edu

Greetings and happy fall, class of 2014! Here is what some of your classmates are up to:

Jessica Titlebaum is back in Michigan for her second year of veterinary school at Michigan State University. She is hoping to focus on small animal medicine upon graduation, and toys with the idea of specializing in neurology.

Lucy Finn moved back to San Francisco and is a business consultant for Kaiser Permanente. She is missing New York, but it’s been fun being back in the Bay.

Jennelle Herrick reports: “After working as a paralegal in trust and estates and at real estate law firms, I have taken a break from the legal setting and joined the private real estate developer, Discovery Land Company, on one of their newest projects on Maui, Hawaii, located at the Makena Golf and Beach Club. Although it was hard to say goodbye to Connecticut—the state in which I was born, raised, educated, and started my career—it’s safe to say I have fallen head over heels for paradise. I am in the final stages of completing my Hawaii real estate license and I am looking forward to witnessing our project grow from the beginning stages.”

Rachel Fox has been quite busy. She completed a master’s in narrative medicine at Columbia University in August 2015, spent the 2015-2016 academic year as an adjunct professor at Rutgers and Sarah Lawrence, and is now getting her PhD in communication and science studies at UC, San Diego. Rachel is living in La Jolla.

In other news: “Nick Petrillo, Keegan Dufty, Sky McGilligan, Ben Kafoglis, Remy Lieberman, and Casey Lasda all live in NYC where they are working on a scene-for-scene, shot-for-shot remake of Dirty Dancing. Most of them are single.”

After graduation, Simon Riker worked mainly as a freelance musician, most notably as associate music director for Summer Theatre of New Canaan, and as music director and marketing associate at PGT, a nonprofit children’s theater in White Plains, N.Y. He is an assistant choirmaster at Christ’s Church (Rye, N.Y.) and associate product manager at Axial, a fintech startup in Manhattan. Simon is stoked to share that his Wesleyan senior thesis, Me Prometheus: Caveman Love Story, had a second student production at William & Mary, and will be having its New York premiere as part of the New York Theater Festival in next summer.

Julian Theseira completed a master’s in international history at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Since he left Wesleyan, he has presented his research at the inaugural global history student conference at the Freie Universitäet Berlin, the inaugural world history student conference at King’s College London, the inaugural Yenching Global Symposium at Peking University, Beijing, China, and the British Postgraduate Chinese Studies network annual conference also at King’s College London. Outside of academia, Julian has interned with the Permanent Mission of the Sovereign Order of Malta to the United Nations in Geneva, during which time he managed external communications and reported on sessions of the UN Human Rights Council, UNHCR Standing Committee, the UN ECOSOC Humanitarian Affairs Segment, and other international meetings. He is interning with the International Organization for Standardization in Geneva, where he manages external communications on social media.

Keep the notes coming and enjoy your PSL’s. Much love,

Mary Diaz | mcdiaz@wesleyan.edu