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5 years out, and everyone’s being strangely
quiet… Could it be
that all of our postgraduate study, professional occupations,
travel itineraries, random hobbies and burgeoning families are
giving us more than enough to fill our spare time? If you’ve
never written in to the notes, here’s your big chance to fill us
all in on what you’ve been up to. I look forward to hearing from
you! Pretty please?
Daniel Ingersoll
reports that in the last five years he worked at a restaurant
for a year, met his wife Catharine, went to law school, got
married (hence the wife), got a little dog, graduated from law
school, moved to Austin, Texas, took the Texas bar (which is
cruelly three days instead of two), and started working for the
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Howdy y’all, yeehaw!
Straight out of
Swarthmore, Teresa
Pontual moved back to NYC for two years, one of which was
spent working at a large non-profit organization called Seedco.
Teresa then returned
to her hometown of Rio
de Janeiro
and spent two years working for a City Council member on issues
of early childhood education and family planning. She’s
been back in the U.S. since
August 2007 to pursue a master's degree in International
Education Policy at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. The
graduation is in June and who knows what will come next, but
she’s planning on staying stateside for the next couple of
years.
Melissa Min is
engaged to a wonderful man named Kenny Wan, whom she met in
Philadelphia and who proposed during a summer trip to
Kyoto in a beautiful garden at
Kodaiji
Temple. [All of you
English majors out there – did I get this sentence right?] They
plan to get married in August.
Melissa has been
teaching middle school math for the past three years at
KIPP
Philadelphia
Charter
School in North
Philadelphia, and loves teaching her students, who
are full of energy and a love for learning.
Melissa meets up
with Esther Kim,
Meggie Miao and
Duolan Li
’04 at the Leopard
Lounge on trips to
Manhattan, and
Mike Camilleri at
the Vineyard in Philly.
Now for some news that
was cut from the Winter ’07 notes.
Erika Doyle's first
group photography exhibition featured several of her dance
portraits from Flamenco Chicago at a wine bar downtown.
David Whitehead
and wife Lisa Ladewski
'02 moved from Ann Arbour, M.I., to Chapel Hill, N.C.,
where David is working as an IT
analyst at UNC-Chapel Hill during Lisa's medical residency. They
had a completely spontaneous encounter with
Kadi-Ann Bryan '03
while biking on the American Tobacco Trail this summer!
Finally,
Chris Milla realized
during a 2007 summer internship at the United Nations last year
that there is still one place where you can smoke in NYC: the
delegates' lounge.
Since I’m always two and
a half years behind, it’s never too late to report that
Meg Nam (formerly
Woodworth) married hubby Edwin in Cape Cod.
If it’s good luck to have rain on your wedding day, they are one
blessed couple! Meg,
Edwin and Addis the dog recently moved back to the Philly area,
where Meg is
enjoying reconnecting with old friends, finding new places to
run, exploring the fancy libraries around Bryn Mawr, and
checking up on the Red Sox. (go Sox!).
Kuzman Ganchev
spent last summer interning in Mountain View, CA, hanging
out with Kara Levy
and Nori Heikkinen
in San Francisco, and visiting
the ever-impressive Niagara Falls,
before heading back to grad student life at Penn. Yes,
Kuzman, it never
ends. Nori is still
loving Google – currently doing a rotation on the same team of
Site Reliability Engineers as
Dan Eisenbud '98
(who sits in her cube) - while in reality, her primary job is to
eat vegetables, and secondary jobs are to play complicated card
games and drink whiskey. When she gets bored of the
amazing sunny winter weather,
Nori heads up to
Tahoe to snowboard down picturesque mountains and eat vegan
chilli. In any spare time, she drinks west coast beers,
and tries to convince
Emily Clough to stay here for grad school.
Ariana Lindermayer
and Lucy Lang
visited Teresa Pontual
and Stephen Duvignau
in Brazil
last April. Lucy is
still working as an Assistant District Attorney in
Manhattan;
Ariana just started her first year at Fordham Law School, and
Stephen is working for a hedge fund in Sao Paolo when not
otherwise occupied by important skiing expeditions in the
Alps. Pancho
Estrázulas is living in Bolivia
working for a biodiversity conservation program, an NGO that
works with USAID funds, not USAID itself as I incorrectly wrote
in the notes last summer. Jungle
life treats him well, as does constantly travelling by
motorcycle to communities and municipal governments in and
around the Madidi
National Park and the
Pilón Lajas Biosphere Reserve, facilitating workshops to
strengthen their capacities to promote biodiversity conservation
and sustainable economic development.
Pancho was accepted
at the Kennedy School of Government for a Masters in Public
Policy which will start in September.
Thomas Harding
is finishing a JD/MBA at Columbia and will start working for Merrill
Lynch Investment Banking in early September. After taking
the bar exam, he is planning a trip to
Greece
and Africa in August. He
is living with his girlfriend in the upper west side of
Manhattan.
Carlos Duque is
finishing law school at Boston University
and is working at BU's Office of the General Counsel.
Antonio Moreda-Alegría
lives in NYC with his Cuban girlfriend and works in the TV/film
industry. He's hanging out with celebrities, or, at is at least
on the lookout for them…
Nathaniel Court
lives in Hawaii.
He is staying incredibly busy working in construction, where he
is currently building a 36-story high rise from scratch in Honolulu. He is working on the load bearing
walls and the elevator and invites anyone with a pair of hiking
boots to come check out the site. Okole maluna!
John Anderson
has been in Washington DC
working for Chemonics, a USAID contractor, for more than three
years now. He's currently looking at a position with the Food
and Agriculture Organization, and will likely be in
Nairobi
for the next nine months. He will welcome visitors! After
finishing his master's in Arab Studies at
Georgetown in the spring and teaching Arabic at
Middlebury
College in the summer,
Paul Wulfsberg is
now teaching first and second-year Arabic at
Tufts
University.
This January,
Kate Hurster wrote,
directed and performed in a solo Lady MacBeth piece for her
master's thesis. There was plenty of blood, pomegranate
juice, and singing in Italian. Somehow or other, it worked
out beautifully, or so I hear.
Hollis Easter is
still running the crisis hotline in northern
New York, and travelling to speak at National crisis
center conferences across the US.
He’s also one of 45 New Yorkers chosen to become a trainer for
ASIST: the Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training. It's a
really neat
program that teaches regular people how they can help people
choose to live. In his free time,
Hollis has earned
his private pilot license from the FAA, rock climbing, and
otherwise exploring the Adirondacks.
I get ridiculously cute
photos from Becca
Burnett (formerly Lipstein), who is having a ball tickling
cute and chubby newborn Luke. I also saw the lovely
Helaine Blumenthal
for gorgeous Indian food and all you can eat popcorn and Trivial
Pursuit in Berkeley’s Albatross Pub last weekend, when
husband-and-wife-to-be
Geoff Kleine and
Ellie Salgado passed through on
Geoff’s tour of
architecture graduate schools.
Ellie continues to
teach at
Strath Haven Middle School,
which she loves and somehow managed the costumes for the spring
musical. Helaine is
engaged to boyfriend Dan, and temporarily making do with the
long-distance Berkeley-Seattle relationship while enjoying
exploring a new city.
I owe
Feng He a visit down
in Palo Alto, where he’s halfway to his MBA at Stanford, after a
2008 summer internship in his hometown of Beijing with a venture
capital firm – really, I think he’s hoping to gatecrash the
Olympics. Claire Weiss,
too, has joined the ranks of the westward-bound and is now in
San Francisco. After finishing her
Masters in Archaeology at University College London in September
(with distinction!), she’s now an executive assistant at an
economic consulting firm which allows her to continue running
away for the summer to Pompeii and find some new places to dig
in the ancient city with several members of a former project.
Otherwise, Claire is
biding time and hopefully learning several more languages so she
can start a PhD in archaeology soon.
Elizabeth Nolte,
someone else I owe a visit to (sorry!), is in the midst of her
second semester at
Columbia
doing a Masters in Islamic Studies
Ursula Whitcher
is still in Seattle, expecting to finish her PhD sometime
next year. Last fall she got engaged to boyfriend Brian
Ferguson. In other news, she awaits notification from Her
Majesty Queen Elizabeth Owles of An Tir for membership in the
Order of the Laurel,
the most prestigious arts and sciences honour in the Society for
Creative
Anachronism – a distinct honor awarded for
Ursula’s esteemed
research and teaching accomplishments in onomastics (history of
names), Latin, and knitting.
Susan Christenson
is still at Duke working on a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering.
Her big news is a recent engagement to Mike Henz, with plans for
a hometown Lexington, Kentucky
ceremony. Susan
spends lots of weekends with Skybus, her new best friend, who
has dirt-cheap plane flights from GSO (an hour from
Durham) to PSM (an hour from
Boston).
Kate Nelson-Lee
writes in from the UK, where she’s coaching lacrosse at the co-ed Sedbergh School,
one of the top five best rugby schools in the UK, so she is busy trying to raise
lacrosse to a similar level. While working on a postgraduate
degree in education, her U19 Scotland Lacrosse team (which she
coaches) finished 7th at the World Championships in
Toronto
last August. Kate
reports that Katie
Cloonan has settled into teaching English at
Epsom College
in the UK,
following a number of Masters /PGCE programs in the past three
years, and, amusingly, just starting a lacrosse team. But,
really, Katie’s
earning money for more trips to
Morocco,
South Africa,
and other exotic locals. Kate
also reports that Pam
Lavallee is now working in the advertising part of Staples
just outside of Boston. She is living with her long-term
boyfriend, Jay, and has her weekly poker nights and is a member
of a successful bowling team. Finally,
Kate reports that
Lindsey Van Sciver
is working for a new company as a management consultant. She
moved house down to Florida in the fall, but
spends most of her weeks flying to different places to advise
different companies.
Katie Cloonan visited
Lindsey just after
New Years and said that her house is great and she seems to be
collecting nice cars and large somewhat scary dogs (maybe just
Katie’s opinion?).
And now for a man with
enviable frequent flier miles:
Kiyo Miyasaka
graduated from med school and passed the Japanese medical
licensing exam. His two-year internship (in Matsumoto city,
Nagano,
Japan) started
April1st, but not before a trip: NRT-
HKG-JNB-LVI-JNB-CPT-JNB-HKG-NRT-IAD-PHL-ORD-NRT. That's Japan to Zambia
(Victoria Falls for a week), then to
South Africa
(Cape Town for a week), back to Japan once then
a brief trip to Philly (for a week). And his arms sure are
tired…. [sorry, I couldn’t resist]
And as for me, I’m taking a break from my
still-unfinished PhD dissertation to run away to Trinidad &
Tobago and marry the dashing
Leslie Justin Murray ’02
on May 31, 2008. If you need me, I’ll be at Maracas, munching on
a bake and shark, sipping
Royal Oak, and nursing memories of a
20-piece steel pan band playing the Zosia Polka.
Oh, the things I’ll do
for good rum…
I’m really sorry that
I’ll miss the 5-year reunion, so raise a glass for me! Have a
fantastic time, and keep me updated on all the juicy gossip. =-)
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