Tag: 2017

After deciding to pursue a crazy career pivot during senior year at Wes, Sonya Levine is graduating from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in May and starting her residency in family medicine at Brown in June. She hopes to work with dancers again one day and get back to her roots! She is marrying Henry Simon(Bates ’16) this summer, and they would love to have lots of Wes visitors in Providence in the coming years.

Ilana Ladis married Dylan Abrams on May 4 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Of course, Erica DeMichiel and Courtney Laermer were instrumental to the day as bridesmaids and by Ilana’s side the whole time. Ilana is moving back to New England over the summer to begin her clinical psychology residency at Brown University and would love to connect with any Wes alumni in the greater Boston/Providence area!

Julia Tyminski graduated from graduate school with a master’s in speech language pathology in May and will be working in Philly in the medical field with adults and children with swallowing, cognition, speech, language, and voice disorders.

Adam Rochelle is still going strong as a cat person. The release party for his Endless Pants album was crashed by anti-pants protestors, but after much discussion and smooth jazz they reversed their position and declared that pants need not end. He is still riding high from playing Bonnaroo last summer with Matan Koplin-Green ’15 in Paper Idol, and this fall he and Johnnie Gilmore ’18 (who just got his driver’s license, go congratulate him) started a fusion band called Low Poly Cactus (poly as in polygon, not polyamory, though circle back on that one later).

Ketrah Mugambe ’18 and I will be tying the knot in August of this year and are excited to celebrate with friends and family including Wesleyan alumni!

Erica Arensmand passed the bar exam and is now a full-blown lawyer! She started working at the Public Defender Service (PDS) for the District of Columbia in November and is loving it. She interned at PDS while she was a student at Wesleyan, which is what made her decide to go to law school in the first place. In her limited free time, she has taken up running and is thinking of doing a half marathon next fall. In D.C. she has been staying with Molly Muoio, who also graduated law school and passed the bar this year! Molly is now a litigator at one of the best and most prestigious law firms in the country. The two of them got a (real) Christmas tree for the apartment, which was particularly exciting because Molly’s wonderful boyfriend, Abe, who is also in law school—can you imagine an apartment full of lawyers?—has never decorated a real tree before! He was worried about fires, but Molly and Erica assured him that they would let him escape the apartment first if things went wrong.

The big news, no pun intended, is that Mark Otdelnov got a job at an auditing firm. So, he’s in a good spot with this. Their brother he told us about last time is doing everything he can to secure him an internship at a bank in the meantime. Things are good overall. Papa is happy he’s finally cutting on spending. “It wasn’t easy I must admit.” At the moment they are focused on studying for CFA Level 2. They took Level 1 this month and is waiting for results.

Kai Blatt married Tyler Harden ’18 at NYC City Hall. They tied the knot on the 10th anniversary of the night they met by Mamoun’s falafel truck. Tyler is now working as a software engineer at Google in NYC and making videos @tyler_the_snob on Instagram and TikTok. Kai is in their third year of a dual master’s in architecture and master’s in landscape architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. 

Sara Swaminathan is finishing up their PhD at the University of Florida this year, focusing on community ecology of coral reefs. After they defend, they hope to continue conducting research with a government agency or nonprofit organization.

Carolyn Dundes finished their PhD in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at Stanford this year and  couldn’t have done it without their Wes family!

Abby Cunniff has been calling for Wesleyan to divest from companies that are complicit in human rights abuses in Palestine, as part of the long tradition of Wesleyan alumni and students advocating for divestment from South African apartheid, weapons manufacturers for the Iraq War, and fossil fuel companies. She hopes that all other interested alumni will sign on to the petition as well. 

Tess Altman has been advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza, and recently signed the alumni petition demanding that Wesleyan divest from companies profiting off Israeli occupation and apartheid.

Submitted by Nat Warner: Erica Arensman graduated law school from Michigan after winning a whole bunch of awards for oral advocacy and helping lead the law school’s public defense organization. She lived in LA for several months where she got the worst sunburn of her life, watched The Wire for the first time, and saw a million Wesleyan people. She took the bar exam in July and is starting work as a public defender in D.C. for PDS in November. She also got engaged in January!

Over the past couple of years Mark Otdelnov has tried working as a brand manager, product manager, and (of all things) a teacher since he has had a pretty good track record at that from his time at Wesleyan and graduate school (from elsewhere). That said, he does want to get a real industry job so he asked his brother to get him an interview at an investment bank (he’s well connected). Now he’s just sitting tight waiting for an offer to come by (“at my expense, of course, since I have some debt left over from his failed business project, but it’s a whole another story”). Overall, things are good. His family is supporting him and he loves them very much.

Zach Lambros is currently in Virginia after a brief stint in Arizona. No girlfriend found in either. He’s running out of states.

And ending on this sad note, in between issues of the Class Notes, we received news of the passing of David Schwartz last spring. His obituary said he loved living in California and enjoyed, among other things, piloting drones/aircraft. In 2015 David was featured in a Wesleyan Connection article about founding the Wesleyan Radio Control/Drone Club. Our condolences to his family and classmates.

Lili Kadets and Ben Marvin-Vanderryn are getting married this May. Shout-out to Professor  Franklin-Fowler’s Advanced Media Analysis class!

Erica Arensman and Nat Warner got engaged! Also, Erica got a job that starts after she graduates law school: she’ll be a public defender with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.

Noah Mertz lives in Albuquerque. He researches the culture industry and teaches French at the University of New Mexico. Soon, he will be on exchange in Paris. He tries to floss at least three times a week, but sometimes he forgets.

Cloie Logan has been working ridiculously hard to unionize her workplace, Allandale Farm, in Brookline, Massachusetts! (Follow us at Allandale Workers United on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook!) After a whirlwind campaign, she and her co-organizers secured 75% of employee signatures in three days for a petition for a union election. Three weeks after Allandale Workers United filed the petition with the NLRB, the employer voluntarily recognized the union!! She is now heading into potential affiliation and eventual contract negotiations. Anyone in the Boston area looking to help out (pro-bono labor law advice? local union rep connections?), or anyone in a similar industry looking to unionize their own workplace, please reach out at allandaleworkersunited@hotmail.com.

Lydia Ottaviano has spent the past 14 months as a digital nomad, working and traveling around the country and the world alongside her partner of five-plus years. She’s a product manager for a fintech start-up based in Cleveland, Ohio, where she had been living full time until throwing her stuff in storage and beginning her adventures. Highlights of her adventures have included spending two months in Mexico City and Playa del Carmen, a second-annual ski month in Salt Lake City, weddings and graduations in California and Colorado, summering in Cleveland with new and old friends, familiar beaches and family time on Fire Island, five European countries in five weeks, and late-fall southwest hiking with family. 2023 is still shaping up, but you can definitely catch her back on the slopes of SLC in February and March, and eventually reminiscing at the weddings of close friends, including one of her oldest and best Wesleyan pals, Keyonne Session, and his new fiancée Ketrah Mugambe ’18 (“Congrats!!!”).

I’m very happy to announce I got engaged during November’s Homecoming weekend at Wes to Ketrah Mugambe ’18. Luckily, Wesleyan photographer Tom Dzimian caught the moment on camera.

Please send news and updates to your class secretary.

Ali Felman works in, on, and around people as the senior people associate at Intersection, an out-of-home media company. She is basically a professional RA, but with fewer cool parties and more emails. Per her last class note, you can find her in Brooklyn, with everyone else.

Noah Mertz has been bopping between the mountains of California, Mexico City, and Boston for the past few years, where he has been working in outdoor education and local political organizing. He’s settling in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to begin graduate studies in French literature and philosophy, and to work with a friend on an environmental project called we.grow.eco (www.wegroweco.org), through which they facilitate youth education and coalescent community events that prompt folks to reconsider the way we act and interact with and within our ecosystem. He tries to pick up one piece of trash (at least) a day.

Adam Rochelle is in LA producing and performing with Matan Koplin-Green ’15 as the delusional pop duo Paper Idol. He also makes jazztronica music and glitch-pop remixes as PRNDL, and is still joyfully producing for Kidz Bop. Additionally, he has completed his transformation from dog person to cat person.

James Wilson and Luke Lira started a company called reUser (https://www.reuser.app/) together! reUser makes it easier for universities, hospitals, corporate campuses, and their members to reUse takeout packaging, while saving money and reducing their environmental footprint in the process. They just helped Wesleyan relaunch the Eco-to-go program at Summerfields to start reUsing again on campus. Now, once each student is done with their container, they use the reUser app to exchange it for a digital token that they can keep conveniently on their smartphone until they need a new container. They are super excited to be able to give back to Wesleyan and come together to fight for a better future!

And finally, Meredith Smith and Andrew Mehr married May 22, 2021. Many Wes classmates were in attendance.

Please write to your class secretary.