“She told me about where she came from, what she hoped to do in her life, and her leadership experience,” recalled Watts.

As it turns out, each of those things played a large part in Britton’s Fordham career. On Saturday, in addition to graduating with a bachelor’s in biological sciences, Britton will also graduate with a bachelor’s in African and African American Studies. Next year, she will head off to Boston University in her hometown to get her master of science in medical programming before applying to med school. In her time at Fordham, she played violin in the orchestra; sat on the executive board of ASILI, the Black Student Alliance at Rose Hill; worked at FUEMS, the university’s emergency medical care organization; and served as a resident assistant.

She said two mentors, Dean Watts and Assistant Dean for Seniors Lisa Gill, Ph.D., helped her make it through what was at times a very difficult four years for any student, let alone a woman of color trying to advance in the sciences. Despite her drive, there were moments she didn’t live up to her own expectations.

“Sometimes, not reaching a goal is just part of being a person. You just have to bounce back. You can’t let it take you down,” said Britton.

Dean Gill said that Britton’s resilience is not unlike that of the rest of her classmates who spent only one year on campus after a global pandemic sent them home. And before they came back to campus for their senior year, the country had a nationwide reckoning with racism.

“This was a very untraditional college experience. Many students had to develop skills that they did not necessarily come into university life with. Then to have to come back with the culture shock of being seniors, as opposed to sophomores. They had to develop all kinds of skills in terms of being resilient, being adaptable,” said Gill. “Sydni exemplifies that, and not just strength in a traditional black-woman-are-strong kind of thing. She can see what’s happening around her and not get pulled under by all of the things that are happening.”

Still, Britton admitted was so “terrified” of doing badly that she nearly missed the point of doing science. But Watts helped her see the discipline as one in which mistakes are not just tolerated, they’re encouraged.

“Med schools look very close at the trend of how you do, not just the GPA,” Watts said. “They want a sense that you don’t fold. You don’t give up, you dug deeper, you found a way to identify more resources, you went and asked for help, which is the key.”

Britton said she began to learn how to fail forward.

“Science is a field where imperfection is valuable because getting something wrong also gives you information, so in the end, it’s hard to even make science into something that’s graded in a performance evaluation,” Britton said. “The nature of real science and real research is that failure’s okay, but within academia, it’s not okay.”

She further clarified that for her, and many other students of color, a lower grade is not simply something to feel badly about. For most of them, it’s a marker of the systemic racism that played out well before they stepped foot onto campus.

“The reality is that Black students disproportionately come from underperforming high schools,” she said, adding that most students from underperforming high schools do not have sufficient courses that bring them up to what’s expected at the college level. “[And] Fordham’s biology department is significantly more challenging than the average university science program.”

For her African and African American Studies thesis, Britton is writing about how the Black male collegiate experience has become commodified for purposes that are not always academic.

She added that over the past four years, the average American teen had begun to look for a more diverse campus experience, making it important for colleges to tout their diversity. But true diversity is not that simple, she said.

“There’s diversity around us all the time, but when you make it a point of selling it is when it becomes racialized,” she said.

“The cultural sentiment around Black students in the classroom is that they are here for a job, the school is giving them a handout, and they’re here to fulfill an image of diversity,” she said.  “Every Black person comes to campus with a personal history with, personal relationships, with family backgrounds, so when talking about understanding Black people, it’s not about some monolithic quality that all Black people have. It’s about a monolithic system that Black people are put under that treats them as a singular entity.”

Similarly, if someone were to walk into a room full of white people, she said, they’d say it wasn’t diverse. “But we have no idea who is rich and who is poor. But for most people, when they think diversity, what clicks for them is racial and ethnic diversity.”

True diversity would look beyond the color of a person’s skin and take into consideration their socioeconomic background, education, politics, sexual identity, and much more, she said.

As Britton wraps up her time here at Fordham, she said both her majors utterly changed her perception of identity and race.

“Scientifically we’re all the same. All our bodies operate more or less in the same way,” she said.

She said she had to stop thinking about Blackness has some inherent quality.

“Blackness is constructed by society. But if I want to be a doctor, I need to understand what’s going on there. I have to get out of myself and start recognizing that it’s not because these people are Black that they have certain health issues,” she said. “It’s because they’re being oppressed. It has to do with larger ideas of economic depression, exploitation, and commodification. These are big theories and concepts that were superimposed on Black people for a very long time.”

She said that the University, and Jesuit institutions at large, are in a unique position to change that.

“I’m not saying that religion is a tool, but Jesuit institutions have a guide that goes beyond this world. They have the ability to reflect and meditate, because of their tradition and their discipline, that allows them to actually be able to fix these issues in a way that is lasting and significant. I mean, other universities don’t have that. That’s honestly how I feel. That’s what I believe.”

She’s never forgotten how a social worker helped her and her family make that transition. And soon she’ll be in a position to offer help to others in need. On May 21, Guirand will graduate with a Master of Social Work from the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS).

To get there, though, she had to overcome some misconceptions about the field. Even though she was attracted to it as an undergraduate at Long Island’s Molloy College, she changed her major three times—from criminal justice to psychology to computer science—before settling on social work.

“I think a lot of people have just one perspective of the social work field—that they’re social workers that take children away from families,” she said.

Guirand attended Molloy on a basketball scholarship, and she said her coach encouraged her to stick with the social work field if it was really what she wanted to do.

“I think that was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made because I’m learning so much and it’s all I ever wanted to do. A social worker helped me, and I wanted to be able to give back,” she said.

When she first began taking classes with GSS remotely from her home in Norwalk, Connecticut, she was working part-time as a caregiver with Assisted Living Services. In February, a field placement assignment introduced her to Family & Children’s Agency (FCA), where she currently works as a social work supervisor, and where she will remain after graduation. Her focus is on geriatric care, an area where the need for social work is growing as the U.S. population ages.

“A lot of seniors, especially during the pandemic, haven’t had contact or relationships with other people, and as they get older, their family members kind of drift away from them,” she said.

“I want to be able to support them. If they need someone to speak to, or they need something that their family members can’t help them with, I want to be that person they can always call.”

The onset of the pandemic presented both challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, Guirand missed what would have been her final year playing basketball for Molloy, and in September 2020, when Covid infections were still spiking, her father had to travel from Stamford to Manhattan to undergo a non-Covid-related lung transplant.

At the same time, remote learning meant that she didn’t have to commute from Connecticut to Fordham’s Westchester campus, where she would have been taking classes if they were in person.

She was grateful, though, that her current placement with FCA is in person and has brought her face to face with clients—even though mask-wearing can sometimes pose a problem.

“One of my biggest challenges was communication, at least in the beginning. The clients are older, so they’re hard of hearing, and plus I have a mask on. It’s a lot of repeating and raising my voice, which I’m not used to,” she said. It made it difficult to establish trust.

“I want to build that rapport with them and coming off too strong, depending on the person’s personality, could be a problem.”

She has also learned the importance of being an advocate for her clients.

“It’s so important because they’re not aware of certain benefits they can receive, or how to advocate for themselves. I’m kind of a point person,” she said.

Linda White-Ryan, Ph.D., associate dean of student services and an adjunct professor at the GSS, said that Guirand helped create a sense of community in her class, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a task made more challenging by the fact that it was held exclusively on Zoom.

Social work is fundamentally the act of building relationships, and Guirand, she said, is the quintessential role model for a social worker.

“One of the things that professors do is model that for students in the classroom and break them into small groups so that they begin to work on case studies together, practice interventions together, or pair up with other students to role play,” she said.

“Marthe helped students engage with each other by creating that safe space. I was impressed with her contribution to making the class such a comfortable place to be—a comfortable learning environment where students could challenge things that were being taught, and also contribute creative ideas.”

When the war in Ukraine began, talk in the class turned to the trauma felt by refugees fleeing conflict, and Guirand shared her own story of leaving the country she called home, White-Ryan said. Guirand detailed how she had to adapt to a change in the pace of life, the mix of excitement and fear associated with the move, and how she had to embrace a new cuisine.

Guirand said that she’s excited to follow in the path of her mother, who has also worked as a caregiver. She’s also taken joy in the fact that she is making an impact in the lives of the elderly people she works with.

“I see that every day with my clients. A phone call just to check in makes the biggest difference. They’re like, ‘Oh my God, Martha, thank you for calling.’ You know, it it’s things like that that make my day.”

Guirand said her favorite phrase is “In a world where you could be anything, be kind.”

“I really like that because you never know what someone is going through or has gone through,” she said.

“That person may act this way or say that, and maybe something is going on with them. So being kind is something that all of my classes at Fordham have emphasized. Empathy plays a huge role in this field.”

Growing up in Colorado Springs, Holloman was immersed in military culture. He graduated from high school in 2010 and enrolled in the New Mexico Military Institute. He went on to earn a B.A. in history at the University of New Mexico, and after enlisting with the Army, he served two tours of duty as a squadron communications officer in Afghanistan and South Korea.

Despite his years in the Army, Holloman never thought he’d make it to West Point. But In 2019, after being promoted to the rank of captain, he was accepted for a teaching position at the famed institution, formally called the United States Military Academy. 

And thanks to a partnership between West Point and Fordham’s Graduate School of Education (GSE), Holloway soon found himself doing something else he’d never dreamed of—attending school in New York City.

On May 21, he and fellow Army captain Rob Berchild will graduate with a Master of Science in Education in Curriculum and Teaching from the GSE.

“I was super nervous, because I had been out of college for about seven years, and Army education and civilian education are two very different things. It was pretty intimidating, but it was really good for me to see,” he said, especially given his lack of familiarity with the Northeast.

“I think one of the things that people don’t do enough is see different demographics and enjoy different cultures within the U.S. It’s been a blast, and I’ve learned a ton.”

Fordham and West Point established the partnership in 2016 to give military science instructors like Holloman the tools to teach soldiers how to navigate battlefields that are more complex than ever.

For Holloman, classes such as Creativity and Teaching, which he took with associate professor John Craven, Ph.D., were invaluable. Not only did he gain the skills and perspectives to be a better instructor, but he also found himself with a platform to share what is admittedly a different perspective, having been deployed twice and moved eight times.

“There were times in class where I’d sit there [in class]and people would say, ‘I can’t understand why this is this way.’ And I’d be thinking, ‘Because that’s not how the world works,’” he said, noting that sometimes he got the sense Craven was thinking, “Josh, why don’t you just say it? 

Holloman did share his thoughts, and said that he feels the experience “helps the people see the world from a different lens.”

His time at Fordham also taught him to contemplate what he is offering his cadets as in instructor, he said.  

“How can I take virtual reality and apply it to the classroom? How can I design that to make it an individualized learning environment for that student? Am I creating an environment for them to thrive, or am I creating an environment that is inhibiting their chance to learn? Am I asking the right questions?” he said.

“That’s what Dr. Craven opened up for us.”

Craven said it was a pleasure to see Holloman, who took several classes with him, go from being somewhat intimidated by a different style of education, in a different area of the country, to adjust, adapt, and ultimately thrive. It’s what GSE hopes to do with all the West Point captains who take the two-hour train ride to Lincoln Center once a week to become the best instructors they can be.

“These captains are taking these young cadets and teaching them leadership skills, communication skills, credible thinking skills and a sense of service to the country,” he said.

Although the civilian world and the military world are very different, Craven said there are a lot more areas of commonality than many realize.

“We’re fighting for social justice and they’re fighting for the country, so we actually share this sense of service to others. That shared connection is formed when we have education majors and teachers and administrators interacting with captains from West Point.”

After graduation, Holloman will return full time to West Point, where he will be an adviser for cadets who are choosing whether they want to pursue a career in military intelligence, cyber security, or signal corps (communications). He will also become a full instructor in the department of military instruction.

He’s grateful both for the degree he’s earned and the fact that being a full-time student brought him closer to his wife Kaysha, who is also earning a master’s in education this year, from Grand Canyon University.

“It was fun for us, because we could actually talk about things when I didn’t understand something. She’d, be like, ‘You know hun, this isn’t the Army, this is how a classroom works. This is how you should look at it,’” he said.

He’s also feeling a bit of disbelief that his life has taken this path.

“A kid from Colorado Springs never thinks they’re going be walking around Manhattan, like in the movies. It’s a pretty awesome gift the Army gave me.”

“The first thing that came in my head was, ‘My career is over,’” Ohams said, recalling laying on the court while the trainers examined him. “I remember that vividly.”

But a few days after he had surgery, Ohams said he felt more determined than ever.

“Something just clicked in me—[I kept thinking] ‘Just try to have the biggest comeback I can have in my career,’” he said. “My thing was to just put two feet in and just grind it.” If he couldn’t make it happen, he said, then at least he would have tried everything he could.

But he needn’t have worried. In 2021-2022, his first full season back on the court after the injury, Ohams had his best season as a Ram. He finished first in the Atlantic 10 conference and fifth in the entire NCAA in rebounding, and posted a double-double in 21 games, a new Fordham record. (A double-double is when a player records 10 or more in two statistical categories, such as 10 points and 10 rebounds.)

Keith Urgo, the new head coach of Fordham men’s basketball who served as an associate head coach last year under Kyle Neptune, said that Ohams was a special talent on both offense and defense.

“With his size, length, and athleticism, it’s very rare that you’re going to see that type of skill level. He was an extremely versatile player for us, and a mismatch nightmare,” he said, noting that a mismatch means he’s hard to match up against on both offense and defense. “Defensively is where he really got a lot better—one of the reasons why we were 40th in the country’s defense is because he’s able, with his athleticism and length, to switch and guard anyone on the floor.”

Ohams is finishing his master’s degree in media management as he prepares to graduate from Fordham for the second time, after earning his bachelor’s degree in communications in 2021. (Ohams redshirted his sophomore year due to injury, meaning he didn’t play that year, so he had an extra year of athletic eligibility.)

Along the way, Ohams said he learned the importance of patience.

“At the end of the day I learned that whatever I put my mind to and work on—the results will come,” he said, even if they’re not immediate. “ It will eventually come.”

Urgo said that not only is Ohams a special player, but he’s also an “unbelievable human being” and was a “larger than life” figure on campus.

“One of our pillars of excellence is gratitude and the other is humility, and he displayed both of those, and as a result, you can see how people reacted to him—from professors, to administrators, to students, they really fell in love with Chuba Ohams,” he said.

Ohams credits his teammates and coaches, including former Fordham men’s basketball coach Kyle Neptune, with encouraging him to keep pushing himself.

“Kyle Neptune was a great coach for me. What made him stand out from some of the coaches that I’ve had—it wasn’t just about basketball with him,” Ohams said. “He wanted me to be the best man that I can possibly be. So he made sure he asked me about my academics, he asked me about the little stuff that I didn’t think mattered.”

Urgo said that he was grateful Ohams was willing to buy into a whole new coaching system.

“I can’t say enough about him because it’s very difficult when a new staff, a new philosophy comes into play, and a sixth-year senior is willing to commit himself,” he said. “Truly impressed, and incredibly grateful to him for his commitment to us as a program.”

For Ohams, who’s been at Fordham since 2016, the end is bittersweet. He chose Fordham, in part, because he’s from the Bronx and playing at the Rose Hill Gym allowed his family to attend his games. Before Fordham, he said, he traveled a lot for games.

“This was the first time for my mom and dad to ever see me play basketball. So I mean, just seeing them in the crowd—I loved every bit of it.”

Urgo said that he’s going to miss both Ohams’ talent on the court and his personality, humor, and support off the court. He noted that as Fordham was looking for its next head coach, Ohams vocally supported him for the job.

“I’m obviously going to miss his bubbly personality, his humor, and his leadership,” Urgo said, adding that he’s also going to miss the chance to develop their relationship further.

Looking ahead, Ohams said that he has a goal of playing basketball professionally, ideally in the NBA. He’s been focusing on preparing for the NBA draft. That preparation included participating in Reese’s Division I College All-Star Game, held in New Orleans during the NCAA Tournament in April, which featured top senior student-athletes from across the country. He scored eight points and had three rebounds.

Ohams said he’s excited to see what the future holds, wherever it takes him.

“I’m born and raised in the Bronx, so it was literally home for me,” he said. “I love this place. I have so many memories. But I’m ready for the next chapter.”

“That is literally my favorite team, my favorite sport,” Chang said.

A business administration major with a dual concentration in marketing and marketing analytics, Chang said he used Fordham’s connections and his own skills to get an internship at the organization his senior year. Chang worked in the sales department, assisting with different marketing efforts.

“Fordham has a great relationship with the Giants, and they also have a lot of alumni within the Giants,” he said. “I can definitely tell how strong the alumni network is. People talk about how strong it is, but I really felt that.”

Marketing Professor Anthony DeFrancesco wrote Chang his recommendation letter for that internship.

“He thinks I helped him—he helped himself as well,” he said. “He was an enthusiastic student, always raising his hand, always looking to go deeper, stopping me and talking to me after class.”

That Giants internship helped Chang land a job at NBCUniversal as a sales associate, which he will start in mid-July. He’s hoping to put both of his concentrations to work there, since he said he enjoys both the data and creative sides of business.

“​​You know how people say, ‘oh some people think with the right side of the brain, some people think with the left,’— I’m a little bit of both,” he said. “I like being very analytical and making data-driven decisions. But I also like using my creativity. And I think that advertising and marketing really gave me the best of both worlds.”

Chang said that he was also drawn to marketing in part because of how he and his generation have been raised.

“I feel like my generation has grown up with phones in our faces since day one—we see all these ads,” he said. “So I feel like we have a better general grasp of advertising and marketing and social constructs and (understanding) people.”

At Fordham, Chang was also very involved with sustainability efforts. One of his favorite classes was global sustainability marketing, which Chang said allowed him and his classmates to really have in-depth conversations on challenges across the world.

“We explored a lot of topics from the business and marketing perspective. We’d cover all the logistics and the operations side, such as what’s going on with sustainability marketing, and where we can fix things, but then we also went in depth about modern day slavery within the fashion industry.”

Chang also was an eco-rep for his residence hall on the Sustainability Committee, which was an initiative launched his first year to help each of the buildings become greener and more sustainable. Chang said that he would help put on incentive and reward programs to encourage fellow students to recycle or become more energy efficient.

Outside of business, Chang was involved with the Rose Hill Society, a group through Undergraduate Admission where students serve as tour guides to prospective students, a member of the Fordham University Emerging Leaders Program, and a founding member of the club wrestling team.

“I was at the food place next to (Alumni Court) South, just getting a sandwich and I was wearing my high school wrestling sweatshirt, and some guy in front of me in line was like, ‘Hey did you wrestle in high school? I’m starting a club wrestling team,” he said with a laugh.

What started as just an idea has grown into a team that travels in tournaments, including trips to the University of New Hampshire.

“Not only did we get a lot of experienced really good wrestlers,” Chang said, “but what was also cool was we got a lot of new people who had never wrestled before.”

Chang credits wrestling and his high school football team with helping him develop his work ethic.

“Before I really started playing sports seriously, my work ethic was kind of bad, but (playing) the sports that you struggle in the most are the ones that build character,” he said.

But when the pandemic hit, she wanted to ask different kinds of questions.

“I thought that if the world is being utterly changed, do I want to be stuck covering politics, which then was mostly Trump, or do I want to do something more intimate and expansive and meaningful? And I chose the more meaningful thing,” she said.

So she enrolled in GRE’s pastoral mental health counseling program, which prepares students to become professional mental health counselors through coursework and internships. After graduation, she will complete an internship at the Addiction Institute of Mount Sinai, where she has spent the last year counseling people addicted to opioids.

Lloyd said that her training as a reporter helped her listen and empathize, but with a different approach than the ones she’s learned at GRE.

“I think part of growing as a reporter is interacting with people’s stories and wishing you could grab onto them more meaningfully, yet you continually get ripped back into the churn of putting out the next story,” she said, so you’ve got to move fast and tie up a story quickly.

“So when I started the GRE program, my style of asking questions was too much like a reporter. With the training, I became more attentive, open-ended, and therapeutic.”

Her mentor, GRE Associate Professor Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D., concurred.

“I think what Alice really learned in the process was that she did not want to just listen to people’s stories of suffering, she wanted actually help them. But when she came to GRE, she had to learn a new way of listening,” said Cataldo.

“Her probing curiosity was very useful, but it had to be modified and used in a different way.”

Cataldo said that what distinguishes the GRE program from other counseling programs is its spiritual component.

“We train people to bring a spiritual perspective to the work they’re doing, and to be able to engage the spirituality of their clients with a degree of expertise in both spirituality and psychology,” she said.

It was that dimension of the program that was attractive to Lloyd.

“I was brought up in the Episcopal church and I have a love for them. But what I like about the program is its spiritual diversity. Some of my classmates are clergy, some are laypeople, and not all of them are Catholic,” she said. “During the pandemic when classes were only held on Zoom, I recruited a young woman who was in rabbinical school to join the program.”

Lloyd she has held an interest in Catholicism for years. She wrote her undergraduate capstone paper at Dartmouth College on Marian iconography and psychology—making the move to GRE a natural progression, she said.

“My first year here at GRE, we took courses on Ignatian Discernment of Spirits and read Christian mystics and the Desert Fathers right alongside the counseling theories,” she said.

The work has increased her interest in spirituality, which complemented her interest in psychology. Cataldo said she’s noticed it as well.

“We’ve talked about the intersection of psychology and religion,” said Cataldo. “Alice is so smart and so curious, now she’s channeling all that intelligence and curiosity towards helping people to really change their lives—and I can tell you that she’s become a truly solid clinician.”

For a spiritual practitioner like Lloyd, keeping one’s beliefs at bay can at times prove challenging, but she strikes a balance when working with patients, particularly because she is practicing the harm-reduction model of addiction treatment. Unlike the 12-step model, which embraces a higher power, the harm reduction model generally eschews spirituality.

“It’s a practice and a way of looking with a closer focus on behaviors, consequences, risk,” she said. She admitted that she sometimes gets frustrated withholding her spirituality in check.

“But it can be rewarding in group therapy when patients get talking to each other and their spirituality comes out. But, later, when I’m writing a treatment plan and notes, there’s not much room for that,” she said.

On further reflection, she said the very act of listening to her patients is spiritual.

“At GRE, I’ve come to an understanding of mental health that is a working relationship with the unknown, be it the unknown outcome that makes one anxious, or an unknown like ‘What happens when we die? What is the nature of reality?’” she said.

“Those are questions that take you into spiritual territory right away, with the big mystery, the cosmic blur. That’s the definition of mental health that I kind of move through the world with.”

In the end, she tipped her hand on where she lies on the question of a higher power being helpful to those living with addiction.

“How could it not have a healing influence on the psyche to say that a seemingly impossible thing happened? Right? You know, what other impossible things are possible? If Mary can be assumed body and soul into heaven, who knows, maybe I can get through the day without a drink.”

Deciding on Fordham involved a bit of serendipity. A fellow Kinder alum, Chandler Dean, FCLC ’18, was already enrolled at Fordham College at Lincoln Center and loving it. But Freedman also had her eyes on Georgetown. Her father suggested she visit the Lincoln Center campus to help her decide, and after a tour, they took a break on the Plaza. 

Taking in the scene, her father noticed for the first time the name of the Lowenstein Center. Leon Lowenstein, the man for whom the building is named, also funded a scholarship that allowed him to attend University of California at San Diego. The moment felt like fate.

“That was one of those moments where I believe everything kind of happens for a reason,” she said. After that, she and Dean spoke at length, and his recommendation convinced her to enroll in the FCLC honors program. On May 21, she will graduate as a dual political science/film and television major. 

But the serendipitous moments didn’t end with that afternoon on the Plaza.

Freedman’s senior project, which was supported by an FCLC Dean’s Senior Thesis/Capstone grant, is a play titled “Self Portrait of a Modest Woman,” about the life of the artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. A staged reading of the play directed by and acted out by theatre students was held in front of a small audience at the Lincoln Center campus on April 25. 

Freedman’s play was inspired by Labille-Guiard’s painting “Self-Portrait with Two Pupils,” and takes place in 18th-century France and the present-day gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the painting resides. Freedman said became fascinated with the work during an art history course, and in the process of writing a paper on it, was dumbfounded by how little research there is about Labille-Guiard. 

“I was only able to find one biography about her, and I adored it. I kept it in my bag for several weeks and I would pull it out and take notes. While reading it, I was like, ‘This would make such a good screenplay. It’s such a good story,’” she said.

It turns out that the biography, titled Artist in the Age of Revolution (Getty Publications, 2009), was written by none other than Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center. 

“It’s so incredible for me to be able to know the only biographer of this French 18th-century artist, and to be able to ask her what she thinks about certain people and their lives,” she said.

Like her classmates, Freedman had spent a year and a half mastering in-person learning before having to pivot to remote learning in March 2020. Living in Houston added another wrinkle, as her home was one of the thousands whose water pipes froze and burst in February 2021 when the Texas power grid failed. Her family ended up living in a hotel for nearly six months during the pandemic, a period in which her dog went half blind and she needed to visit the hospital several times.

“It was such an intense experience. I jokingly refer to this as my study-abroad time in Houston, because this also would’ve been the time that I would’ve potentially been studying abroad,” she said.

A Potential London Debut

Freedman still made the most of her time. During her sophomore year, her first full-length play, The Wilde and Rambling Consequence of Being Virginia, was a finalist in a playwriting competition sponsored by the Questors, a theater company in London helmed by Dame Judi Dench. 

That in turn led to a partnership with a director at the theater to have Freedman write a new play, which may be staged at the theater company’s stage in the future.

She said the honors program has been everything that she hoped it would be, both because of the academic rigor and the camaraderie she developed with her 20-member cohort.

“I just really adore every single person in my class. The honors program is kind of like a sorority, because you have what’s like an intense hazing process your freshman year, where you have four honors classes,” she said.

“But that’s exactly what I wanted.”

Karina Hogan, Ph.D. a professor of theology and director of the FCLC honors program, had Freedman in her Sacred Texts of the Middle East.

While some students arrive their first year with a ‘deer caught in the headlights’ look in their eyes, Hogan said that Freedman stood out from the beginning as knowing exactly what she wanted.

“She is just an outstanding student and is really happy to volunteer and help out with things in the honors program, like mentoring other students,” she said.

After graduation, Freedman is going to take a few months off to travel with her roommate Gabby Etzel, with whom she started the website Absolutely Anything.—which chronicles their adventures in New York and beyond. At some point, she expects to travel to England, to help shepherd the play to completion. 

“Joan Didion has a wonderful quote that I always whisper to myself: ‘I don’t know what I think until I write.’ I think that’s so true,” said Freedman, who also writes screenplays.

“Playwriting and screenwriting is a way of understanding the world, how you feel about it, making sense of all of the insanity, and trying to find cohesion in a theme.”

“I learned discipline, and I’ve been able to mature a lot more and make better decisions in my life,” said Garcia, who has served as an active-duty Marine for about a decade. “The military shaped me into a better man.”

Garcia now aspires to become a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps. When he retires from the Marines, he said, he plans on returning to civilian life—with the help of his new Fordham degree. This August, he will graduate from the School of Professional and Continuing Studies with his bachelor’s degree in information technology and systems.  

A NYC Native Who Grew Up in the Dominican Republic

Garcia was born and raised in Brooklyn. As a child, he always saluted police officers in the street. He considered them heroes and dreamed of becoming a police officer or a member of the U.S. military, he said. But when his father was unexpectedly deported to the Dominican Republic, 10-year-old Garcia put his dreams aside. 

“I left behind good friends, and life in the DR was not what I was expecting, especially coming from New York,” said Garcia, who lived in the DR until finishing high school. “It was challenging, but it prepared me for life ahead and made me a tougher person overall.”

After high school graduation, he returned to New York City to attend the Globe Institute of Technology and play collegiate-level baseball. But he said it wasn’t easy to balance sports, school, and a full-time job. He dropped out of school before graduating and joined the Marine Corps in 2012.

Garcia also worked as a Marine recruiter in Brooklyn. One of his favorite memories as a recruiter was participating with his fellow Marines in the Tunnel to Towers Race in New York City, an annual run that honors the final route of a fallen firefighter on 9/11.

“It not only represents the Marine Corps, but also New York and the United States,” Garcia said. “Being together and having all the civilians cheering us on was very powerful. I still have my running badge number with me.”

An Officer in Training and Aspiring Cybersecurity Specialist

For many years, Garcia has served as an enlisted Marine, with the goal of becoming an officer. But in order to become an officer, he needed to earn a college degree. In 2019, he was selected to join the Marine Enlisted Commissioning Education Program (MECEP), which allows select active-duty Marines to serve in the military while attending a four-year college full time. 

“This program allows me to pursue my education, to better myself, and ultimately, to become an officer and serve in the fleet Marine force, where I can better serve my military branch and become a leader among the enlisted ranks,” he said. 

In 2020, Garcia enrolled at Fordham and its Navy ROTC program. Over the past two years, he said he has learned to think outside of the box and gained valuable networking experiences. His uncle who works in IT inspired him to study information technology and systems. Now he hopes to also earn a master’s degree in cybersecurity and specialize in that field in the Marines. 

Upon graduation, Garcia will become an officer in the Marine Corps. He said he hopes to spend at least another decade in the Marines and then retire from the military. What awaits him is life as a civilian—and the ability to give back to his community full time. 

“I struggled as a kid, seeing my dad get deported. So when I think about my kids and others who may be struggling and unable to see a way out, I want to give them hope,” said Garcia, now a 32-year-old father who lives on Long Island with his wife and their three children. “I reach out to young individuals I recruited and see how they’re doing; I try to show them different programs they can participate in or push them to further their education.” 

‘What It Means to Succeed’: A Mentor for Young Marines 

Kevin Dewaine Leonard, a retired master sergeant who was stationed with Garcia in New York from 2015 to 2019, described Garcia as a family-oriented man. (Their families are close, and their children have trick-or-treated together during Halloween.) That same dedication toward his family has extended to his brothers and sisters in the Marines, said Leonard. 

Garcia took young Marines under his wing, especially teenagers who were living away from home for the first time, said Leonard. There were other higher-ups around, but it was Garcia who took the initiative to organize physical training sessions for the young Marines, work out with them, and get them in shape. 

“We never had a situation where a Marine failed a PT test or didn’t meet their development milestones because Garcia constantly had his hands on the pulse with those guys. And his training was effective. When the unit got called up to deploy in 2018, we didn’t have any Marines who weren’t in shape or ready for the task at hand. Sergeant Garcia made sure that those Marines were ready,” Leonard said. 

“Garcia was willing to work and to show those Marines exactly what they needed to be successful and to advance within the Marine Corps,” Leonard said. “He showed the Marine Corps what it means to succeed.” 

“I appreciate the beautiful ways that Roman Catholicism has shaped me. But as an openly gay woman, I wasn’t sure if I could find a home in the church,” said Stapleton Smith, who is now training to become a priest in the Episcopal Church, where women can become priests. 

“I want to be for a young queer kid what I needed when I was their age—somebody who embodies a love of the gospel, shows that it is OK to challenge church teachings, and lives in the hope and promise of God’s love for us.” 

Stapleton Smith is now a doctoral student in theological and social ethics at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. After she graduates this August, she said she will use her Fordham education to not only better inform her ministry, but also her work as an educator. 

“I want to work in ministry on the ground, but also teach and conduct research at a university,” Stapleton Smith said. “God is calling me to academic life, to be a disciple of Christ, and to be a church leader who brings people closer to God and heaven.” 

‘Where I Could Live in the Fullness of My Being’ 

Stapleton Smith was drawn to her faith at an early age. She was raised in a devout Roman Catholic household, where she recalled pretending that her stuffed animals were receiving the Eucharist. She graduated from the Ursuline School, an all-girls Catholic middle and high school in Westchester County, and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in theology from Boston College and a master’s degree in religion from Yale Divinity School. 

Several years ago, she felt a calling to the priesthood. However, her personal life conflicted with the official teachings of her Roman Catholic faith. The church does not condone gay marriage, but Stapleton Smith is married to a woman, she said. In addition, the church does not recognize women as priests.

“I didn’t leave the church in hate …  [A]ll of my scholarship stems from a deep love of Roman Catholicism. I left the church in a movement of grace and love of God—to where I could live in the fullness of my being and become the best Meg that I can be,” said Stapleton Smith, who will be ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church this fall. 

Her identity as a queer white woman has shaped her perspective as a church leader. “As someone who has been marginalized by ecclesial communities and church teachings, I’m sensitive to power dynamics,” she said. “Am I leaving someone out? As a white person, am I unintentionally preaching a sermon that recapitulates the language of anti-Blackness or a narrative of the church as a colonizer?”

‘I Didn’t Even Know that People Like You Existed’

Stapleton Smith’s queer identity has also informed her scholarship at Fordham, where she studied the intersection of liberation theology, virtue ethics and sexual ethics. Her dissertation “Queer Virtue Ethics: Mary Daly’s Challenge to Catholic Sexual Ethics,” is the culmination of her research. It focuses on Mary Daly, a key figure in modern feminist theology, and Daly’s ideas on using the virtue of courage and Catholic sexual ethics to counteract sexual shame, said Stapleton Smith, who spoke in detail about her dissertation in a Fordham News story last March.

“Meg is an incredibly perceptive thinker, teacher, and human being who sees the ways that ideas can take root in bodies, for better or for worse. As someone studying theological and social ethics, she brings those concerns to her work in the classroom and in her ordination to the priesthood,” said Christiana Zenner, Ph.D., associate professor of theology, who has taught and mentored Stapleton Smith. 

While reflecting on her time at Fordham, Stapleton Smith recalled why she chose to attend the University six years ago.  

“It was actually one of my mentors from Boston College who said to me, looking at the professors at Fordham, ‘That’s the place for you. You want to ask the deep questions, and Fordham is going to bring you to that place,’” said Stapleton Smith, a recipient of the Elizabeth A. Johnson Endowed Scholarship Fund and a dissertation mentee of Bryan Massingale, S.T.D., the James and Nancy Buckman Chair in Applied Christian Ethics. 

Stapleton Smith said that Fordham has also helped her grow as an educator. She served as a teaching assistant and instructor for four theology courses, where she taught students from different faiths and disciplines. Stapleton Smith said that at the end of the semester, she has received notes from students that remind her of why her work is important. 

“I remember one note that read, ‘I was not raised in a religious household, and I didn’t even know that people like you existed—a lesbian theology professor who’s becoming an Episcopal priest,’” said Stapleton Smith. “It’s notes like these that remind me of why I do what I do.” 

“I remember sitting with some really amazing, bright people, listening to their questions and hypotheticals. They seemed to have such a grasp on knowledge that I didn’t have, and many of them had previous work experience or parents who were lawyers. I didn’t know how I had snuck in. But what’s helped combat that feeling is working really hard and taking classes that I enjoy,” said Gogia, who will earn her Juris Doctor degree from Fordham’s School of Law this spring and start working as a litigation and government enforcement associate at multinational law firm Baker McKenzie this fall. “I’ve stayed true to myself and forged my own path.” 

Chehak the ‘Chirping’ Bird

Gogia was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, to Indian immigrants who moved to the U.S. in 1995. 

“My first name means ‘the chirping of the birds in the early morning,’ but my mom says it also translates to ‘talkative.’ She always jokes that she should’ve named me the Hindi word for ‘calm,’ and that would get me to stop talking,” Gogia said, chuckling. 

When her parents became naturalized citizens, she believed that the best way to pay it forward to the U.S. was to become its next president. 

In second grade, every president she learned about was a lawyer, she said, so she thought she needed to become a lawyer before reaching the White House. But even after she realized the truth, she continued to pursue the same goal. 

In high school and college, she served as an intern for several politicians, including as a foreign policy and defense intern for U.S. Senator Dick Durbin in Washington, D.C., where she said she helped to successfully advocate for the release of a political prisoner in Algeria. 

“I’ve always loved being able to break down an argument and convince someone to see my side of things,” Gogia said. 

In 2019, she earned a bachelor’s degree in global liberal studies from New York University, where she also served as captain of the mock trial team. Then she went straight to law school at Fordham. 

One of her most influential law school experiences was the Brendan Moore Trial Advocacy Center—a Fordham team that competes in mock trials with law schools across the country—where she said she placed in seven out of eight competitions and will be competing in a ninth this summer. She said her competition experience has helped her learn how to quickly adapt to situations in the courtroom. In addition, her semester-long experience at the law school’s Federal Litigation Clinic showed her how to advocate for real clients under the guidance of professors. 

“It’s interesting to be able to work on all sides of the legal argument and to be responsible for the legal advocacy for real people who need our help,” said Gogia, who helped to write briefs that were submitted to courts. 

Gogia said she will use these skills in her job at law firm Baker McKenzie, where she will help companies to work through investigations and settle disputes.

“My clinical experience has given me a lot of insight into what litigation will look like when I start working this fall,” she said.  

A Fierce and Confident Litigator 

Gogia is fierce, determined, and quick on her feet in the courtroom, said her mentor Brittany Russell, FCRH ’11, LAW ’13, a trial attorney at Weitz & Luxenberg who coached Gogia at the Brendan Moore Trial Advocacy Center last year. Russell recalled a competition where Gogia found her way out of a tough situation. 

“There were a series of facts that were inadmissible. But Chehak is a very good listener. She heard the other side’s witness say something that opened the door to those facts, and then she made an extremely sophisticated and creative argument—and she executed it beautifully, convincing the judge to agree with her,” Russell said. 

Gogia’s confidence in the courtroom often gets the attention of other lawyers, Russell said.

“When you put yourself out there in a competition trial, you get feedback from other attorneys from all over the country. Those attorneys may have different conceptions of what a woman in a courtroom is supposed to sound like. But Chehak has weathered sexist comments and never let them bother her,” Russell said. “She never listened to them or concluded that she should change something about herself. She always carries on with who she is, and being the best and strongest advocate she can be.”