Tag: 2015

Jenna Starr has switched positions at Wesleyan! She is now part of the alumni and parent relations team. Keep your eyes open for fun event invitations, and, as always, keep sending her your class notes.

Katherine Lu works in human resources at the Mission Neighborhood Health Center in San Francisco. She enjoys hearing more Spanish than English, and is putting her HISP major to the test.

Peter Cornillie earned his certified cicerone, which is the equivalent of a beer sommelier, or someone who knows way too much about beer.

Marissa Castrigno accepted a job writing for the public affairs department of New York-Presbyterian Hospital. She will also be attending the 2017 Wesleyan Writers’ Conference during her time off between positions, and looked forward to a spending few days of early summer back on campus.

Michael Leung gave a presentation on behavioral science at Morningstar Investment Conference—the flagship conference for Morningstar, Inc.—to a crowd of 200 finance professionals! He enjoys his work of incorporating behavioral science methods into software development to help people reach their goals

Since graduating, Catherine Chase works at the San Antonio Museum of Art and is the assistant to the director for a little over a year. She reunited with her former Wes roommate, Katherine Du. They met up at Reunion and Commencement and ate a lot of dumplings at Tibetan Kitchen.

After two years of sharing a wonderful apartment together, Diana Lin, Angela Yoo, and Elaine Tsui are ready to take the next step in their careers. Following her role as a senior consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, Diana is looking forward to attending Penn State College of Medicine. Likewise, after spending two years at the NIH, Angela will be heading off to medical school this fall. Elaine will miss them dearly, but is excited to return to academia and attend Princeton’s chemistry PhD program. We are glad to have shared so many great memories over the last two years and look forward to our next Reunion!

Virgil Taylor and Gabe Gordon recently took the Staten Island Ferry. In the stormy Friday evening light, they could see for themselves the possibilities offered by a life at sea. Taylor and Gordon live as one in Brooklyn.

Aletta Brady is moving to Jordan in September for a research Fulbright studying the intersection of drought, water scarcity, and the refugee crisis.

Rebecca Caspar-Johnson is starting law school at Columbia in the fall.

Mateusz Burgunder has not changed much since the last issue. He still lives and works in Switzerland. He has met many Wesleyan friends around the U.S., Europe, and on Skype, and he looks forward to more conversations. He is also very impressed by how many of his Wesleyan friends finished marathons.

Orelia Jonathan just graduated from UPenn with her master’s in education. She plans to teach English in China for the summer before heading back to The Lawrenceville School to teach and coach as full-time faculty.

Geneva Jonathan is headed off to Northwestern University in the fall to start a PhD program in clinical psychology in Dr. Evan Goulding and Dr. Cynthia Dopke’s Bipolar Technology Lab.

Hana Elion and JJ Mitchell began singing together at Wesleyan and formed a band called Overcoats. They released their debut album, Young, via Arts & Crafts in April, and performed an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. itunes.apple.com/us/album/young/id1199218160 and youtube.com/watch?v=pXtAhfQhEG4.

Jenna Starr | jstarr@wesleyan.edu

Kate Linde just got promoted to digital campaign manager for Teen Vogue.

Silvia L. Diaz-Roa worked for a year with the nonprofit DKMS: Delete Blood Cancer to help register people to the bone marrow registry and save lives. Then she started a digital marketing consulting company called DR Digital Studio with her sister and it’s going well so far! She also applied to graduate school and has been accepted to Yale and UPenn.

Andrew Hove has been in Boise (Idaho, for those who may not know where that is…) since graduation working as an analyst at an engineered wood products company called RedBuilt. He’s spent about 40 percent of his working time in Mississippi assisting the management team of a plywood mill rebuilding and refinancing the facility that was leveled by a tornado two-and-a-half years ago. Outside of work, he tries to play music around town about once a week and usually head up to the mountains or camps somewhere right outside Boise on weekends.

Kimora Brock ended her first year in LA with a guest appearance on an Investigation Discovery Channel show called Married with Secrets, and a trip to Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, and Qatar as a yoga model for 2016 Udaya Live, a yoga festival. With the second year just underway, she has moved to Malibu with her partner and launched her company, Malibu Trail Mix, in early 2017. Malibu Trail Mix, LLC, is a 100 percent raw, organic, and sprouted trail mix designed to share the highest quality nutrition and love to the world. Please share the news, follow on IG and like on FB @malibutrailmix, malibutrailmix.com, and info@malibutrailmix.com. She thanks everyone for all of their support thus far and sends love and blessings.

Anthony Antonellis is coaching football and getting his master’s in liberal studies (both at Wesleyan). Previously, he worked at EMC corporation in Boston doing tech sales.

2016 was a great year for William Mendoza. In May, he graduated from Wes again with his M.A. in psychology. Recently, he started working as a research analyst at Ipsos, a market research company.

Anqi Guo got a master’s in finance and risk from the London School of Economics, and is starting her new job at Accenture London in January.

Jenna Starr | jstarr@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

Mateusz Burgunder now works at Accenture in Switzerland and continues to enjoy making sense of numbers.

Adin Vaewsorn is a sexual health counselor, STI tester, and case manager for HIV-positive clients at Boston Children’s Hospital.

John Pacheco is operating out of Boston Children’s Hospital as a tiny cog in the enormous machine that is NIH-funded clinical research, hoping against hope that wasting two years of his life in this farm system will actually pay off and allow him to entry to medical school in 2017.

Kate Weiner is living in Boulder, Colo., and working with Nicole Stanton, on Loam, an environmental arts organization that publishes a biannual magazine as well as coordinates workshops on arts, activism, and outdoor adventuring. With Lily Myers, she is the co-founder of The Shapes We Make, a site for exploring holistic feminism. Lily and Kate are at work on their first book.

Sara Guernsey left CBS in June to attend UCLA to get her MFA as a part of the UCLA Television and Film Producer’s Program.

Shortly after graduation, Ibironke Otusile headed to Lagos, Nigeria, to conduct a water sanitation service project. She interned with the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency and Lagos State Water Corporation, working in their microbiology lab and traveling to different water sites to learn about the water purification process. Ibironke also taught a class of about 100 students at Opebi Senior Grammar School, in Ikeja, Lagos, about the current water in crisis in Lagos and how to prevent further damage to Lagos’s water source. Currently, Ibironke is in Queens, N.Y., working for New York City Health and Hospitals on Rikers Island, a jail complex. Here, she works in the medical records department serving the underprivileged jail population of New York.

Scarlett Perry has been in Beijing at Elite Scholars of China as a college counselor. This past application season, she helped guide eight Chinese high school students through every step of the process. Her role varied from teacher, to mentor, to friend. A couple weeks ago her students decided on which U.S. university/college they’ll be attending this fall, and she’s very excited for what they’ll accomplish in their four years abroad. While there have been many highlights to the job (and also to living in Beijing), what she values most from the experience is the opportunity to have been a part of this important period in her students’ lives.

Matthew Lynch has been completing a one-year MS healthcare management program at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. He is the committee leader for the most active organization at Carey (Healthcare Business Associate), he is heavily involved in administrative school marketing and branding efforts, and he participates in national business case competitions. He recently received the “Carey Brand Ambassador Award” for advancing and promoting the brand of the business school in an outstanding way. After graduation this August, Matt will be moving to Pittsburgh to start as a healthcare consultant for Highmark Inc. in the data analytics and informatics department.

Jessica Seidman will be attending the University of Connecticut School of Law this fall. She hopes to pursue a career in sports and entertainment law.

Andrew Yin will attend Weill Cornell Medical School this fall and is very excited to be moving to NYC. He’ll be sad to give up coaching baseball, working at Sibley Hospital, and spending time at home in DC, but he is ready for this next adventure!

Since graduation, Dylan Niehoff has been an account executive in the digital client services department, at Epsilon, a marketing agency. He recently began a second job as the digital marketing director for a start-up, Way of Life Athletic Co. (Wola-Co) out of a WeWork lab in downtown NYC

Alissa Myer writes: “I will be attending the USC School of Social Work to concentrate in military social work with a focus on PTSD and reintegration for veterans and their families. During my time off from school, I’ve been occupied with a collection of volunteer and paid positions. I’ve been volunteering at a therapeutic preschool and the Veterans Administration, I was hired at a mental health and addiction recovery center, and I am a piano and homework tutor as well as part-time hostess.”

Katherine Lu continues to teeter between the illusion of being a recent post-grad and the wonders of adult life. Currently working as an office manager at an IT consulting company in San Francisco, you can often find her at the newly opened SFMOMA or reading in Erik Islo’s living room. She welcomes new friends and new adventures.

Jenna Starr | jstarr@wesleyan.edu

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