For her senior thesis project for the honors program at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, she expressed her ideas in a graphic novel titled Nath for its lead character. In Cleary’s imagined world with no weapons, Nath is a college athlete in a street gang. But the author, a major in new media and digital design, pointed out that just because there are no knives or guns, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was a world without violence.

“I was curious how people may adapt to something like that, so I settled on hand-to-hand combat,” she said. “In Nath’s world there’s a lot of emphasis on honor in fighting, and I thought about how in martial arts they focus on protection and not on harming others.”

Set in an urban landscape that combines the density of 20th-century New York with the sprawl of modern Tokyo, Cleary’s novel wrestles with many contemporary issues, such as the need for weapons in the first place.

Cleary also majored in economics at Fordham, and her background in that area informs the story as well; the characters come from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. She said Nath’s life in college differs from her hardscrabble upbringing on the streets.

“There’s an otherness to her, and she tries to bridge that gap,” she said. “Throughout the course of the first issue, she feels that gap in some ways closing and in other ways, it’s too great for her to exist in both worlds.”

It’s an otherness that is not too far from the personal challenges faced by Cleary, who grew up in a suburban working-class family and is the first to go away to college. Her father died when she was 8, and her mother raised the family on her own.

“I am here on scholarship and I don’t come from a very privileged background,” she said. “But my mother always made sure we were together and doing things even when she was looking for work. She never broke down. I’ve always been inspired by her. No matter what struggles I’m facing, because of her, I know I can still overcome them.”

While in Nath’s world there is no established patriarchy, in the real world, Cleary said, the comics industry has been somewhat dominated by men. But she said publishers— even the big ones like Marvel—are starting to hear and hire diverse voices. She plans to shop her comic around at the end of the summer and use her economics background to help market it in “a changing economy.”

In the meantime, fans can keep up with Nath on Instagram by following @streetfighterturbo.

“It was very cold, but I was so happy that I didn’t mind,” said Oruada.

His comment is indicative of his glass-half full view of life. Today, despite his challenges, or maybe because of them, he will earn a Master of Social Work degree from the Graduate School of Social Service. Oruada’s name stems from a traditional pattern for his clan, the Chief Oruada Udeagah family in the Abiriba community. All the first sons in the family bear the first name Oruada, he said, and for some it is a surname as well.

After he arrived from Nigeria, his father enrolled Oruada in a crowded Queens high school where classmates bullied him for his accent and earnest participation.

“I did well, so I didn’t mind whatever the students were saying to me,” he said. “I flipped every single bad thing thrown at me and turned it into motivation.”

He graduated from high school with honors and enrolled in New York City College of Technology, where he studied human services. He said he chose Fordham for his M.S.W. because it emphasized on-the-ground experience with city nonprofits and also offered opportunities to work with international nongovernmental organizations. Today, he is doing both.

During the day, Oruada interns at the United Nations as a youth representative for Close the Gap, an international NGO that supplies computer systems and supports social innovation projects for young entrepreneurs in developing countries. At night, he works at a residence for young people with severe autism. Oruada said that working at the United  Nations fulfilled a lifelong dream. When he first set foot on U.N. grounds, he spent a half hour gazing up at the buildings, where he now gets to employ his passion for statistics and data that can help create social change.

“I want outcomes,” he said. “For example, if you tell me five out of 10 are doing well and recovered from opiate addiction, that’s good! Don’t just tell me we helped ‘a good amount of people.”

Oruada said that he expects to stay in New York City to continue in social work and advocate for the profession. He said the field is deserving of more respect.

“Social workers are saving lives,” he said. “We’re the liaison between the community and the services they need.”

He hopes to continue in his role at the U.N. and in his work with autistic youth.

“We immigrants are purpose driven; we have goals to meet, like a better life or education,” he said. “I like to do things that make an impact on someone else, not for self-gratification but to empower others.”

]]> 89667 https://now.fordham.edu/commencement/2018/postal-carrier-discovers-new-routes/ Wed, 16 May 2018 15:45:27 +0000 https://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=89661 Mail carrier LaVerne Bowen visits her old West Farms route in the Bronx.LaVerne Bowen’s mother found out she had cancer when Bowen was approaching her teens. She asked each of her seven children where they would like to travel with her. While Bowen’s brothers and sisters chose places in the West Indies, Europe, and Africa, Bowen chose Los Angeles. She wanted to see where the movies were made.

“We went on every single production tour, tours of the movie stars’ houses, because I wanted to be an actress and a director and my mother knew that,” said Bowen, who is graduating with a bachelor’s degree in communication and media studies from the School of Professional and Continuing Studies.

Soon after her mom passed away, Bowen’s father left his job at the fire department to became a full-time preacher in Harlem. The family lived above his Pentecostal church. Alone, with seven children, he encouraged them to get steady government jobs. For the past 15 years, Bowen has worked as a letter carrier for the United States Postal Service. A bit of a rebel, she left the family congregation to join a church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She worked in youth ministry there, putting on plays with the children that riffed on the pastor’s sermons.

One day, along her old route in the nearby West Farms neighborhood, Bowen noticed kids standing idle after school. She decided to break out the plays from her past and got the kids to perform fundraisers for a local storefront church. They eventually developed a program for Bronxnet, the local cable access network.

“From the time we did that show, my job was a better job, I loved going to work every day,” she said.

Around the same time, she began to notice Fordham literature in the mail she was delivering. She enrolled in 2005 and took some business courses, but soon needed a break from school to care for her son. She returned to Fordham in 2015 and realized business wasn’t a good fit. Roberta Willim, an assistant dean at the School of Professional and Continuing Studies, began to ask her about her background.

“When I started I didn’t really tell her about my past and my work with the kids, I just wanted to start fresh and go to school,” said Bowen.

Willim unearthed 60 credits that Bowen had accumulated from other colleges that could be transferred. She then set about getting Bowen life-experience credits for her community work.

“She sat and chatted with me and she said, ‘You’re gonna go for communications and you’re gonna
graduate,’” Bowen said. “I loved it and I started to flourish. I wrote a script about a mail lady called ‘She Delivers’!” she said with a laugh.

At a recent convention for postal and other federal employees, Bowen began to envision how her newfound media skills could take her beyond her route. She can now consider communications jobs within the post office and at other federal agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Smithsonian.

“With this degree, I can start applying to other jobs and bring my federal pension with me,” she said. “I love my route. But as a single woman, I have to look at the outcome for my future. I now have enhanced my skill sets and opened up options so I can be upwardly mobile.”

So when she thought about spearheading a new club at Fordham in her sophomore year, a UNICEF chapter seemed like a perfect fit. Under her leadership as president since 2016, the club has successfully engaged in fundraising and advocacy to advance the U.N.’s efforts for children.

Graduating from Fordham College at Rose Hill with an international political economy degree in the French language track, Olveira credits Fordham’s West Wing, an integrated learning community, with nurturing her as a student and a social justice activist.

“It gave me a sense of community, but we were also talking about public policy, international relations, and local issues,” she said of the West Wing, which focuses on Ignatian leadership and civic service. She also gained confidence in her public speaking abilities, which she needed to pursue leadership roles.

“Just looking at who I was sophomore year versus now, I know that the program was a catalyst for so many things for me,” she said.

Olveira’s aspirations for peace building and public service have flowered through internships she pursued, including positions with the U.N.-affiliated Religions for Peace, UNICEF USA, and most recently, Pencils of Promise, which helps build educational infrastructure in Ghana, Guatemala, Laos, and Nicaragua.

In 2017, she was elected to represent UNICEF USA as one of six National Council Members at the college level; in this role she has advocated on Capitol Hill for the human rights of children.

Olveira received a Tobin Travel Fellowship from Fordham to fund a research trip to England, France, and Germany following her junior year. She studied how governments in these countries are helping refugee children transition to new schools after their educations have been disrupted.

“That really connected with me because I know how important it is, after having moved my whole life, to be at a school that can welcome you and create an environment where you feel like what you are doing is important, and also help you catch up with the work,” she said.

Through school visits and interviews, Olveira learned that while some schools, particularly in Germany, have many resources for these children, others are severely lacking. She hopes to publish her findings as part of an expanded project.

While in England, Olveira learned of a University of Cambridge M.Phil. program in education and international development. She applied and was accepted, but decided to defer enrollment to pursue a prestigious UNICEF USA Global Citizenship Fellowship, which she has just been awarded.

The two-year program prepares individuals working on behalf of children for effective leadership in public service. As the New York Community Engagement Fellow, Olveira will lead partnership development and grassroots implementation of UNICEF initiatives.

Ultimately, she aims for a career with a worldwide view.

“I would love to be an ambassador and do foreign service work, or if not, be in an organization like UNICEF working on a larger leadership scale,” she said.

–Nina Heidig

“In most of my ministry work, I’ve worked with women because we had a really hard time getting young men to show up for anything,” said Baker, who was serving as director of campus ministry at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania.

He wondered if the absence of young Catholic men was a sign that the programming was not relevant in their lives.

“I simply wanted to ask—where are they and what are we doing wrong?” said Baker, who graduated this year with a doctorate in ministry from Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education. The hybrid doctoral program allowed him to take many of his classes online and complete the degree remotely.

“Before I started this program, it was hard for me to see the direct connections between ministry, theology, and spirituality,” he said. “These were three things that I knew were central to my work, but I couldn’t always articulate or see how they all connected.”

His doctoral thesis, “Men For and With Others: Engaging the Stories of College Men and Exploring Pastoral Postures,” aimed to examine some of the challenges of reaching college-aged men of diverse backgrounds and experiences.

The project led him to research topics in philosophy, spirituality, masculinity, gender, and feminism, along with current practices related to campus ministry in Catholic universities.

He also organized a focus group with college-aged men to develop potential interview questions for other young men who were disaffiliated from their faith. He later carried out the interviews at two Catholic campuses in the Northeast.

“I was very intentional in my work, especially in my interviews with people from some diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds,” he said. “That’s where you get into layers of privilege. Privilege isn’t just about men versus women. Privilege gets wrapped up in race, culture, and sexuality as well.”

Through the interviews, Baker learned that getting young men to participate in campus ministry was not a matter of “simply winning them over.”

Too often, he said, campus ministry is focused on “trying to deliver to people the things that we want to fill them with, [like]our preset agendas,” rather than recognizing the things that are distinctive in some young men’s lives—whether they are queer, black, atheistic, or from an interfaith background.

“We’re missing the richness of people’s lives,” he said. “We’re missing the insights and the wisdom for today’s spiritual age, which is wrapped up in the lives of young people who are already navigating a lot of challenging issues that previous generations didn’t deal with.”

Having recently been promoted to vice president for mission integration at Mercyhurst, Baker, a father of four, said he is looking forward to putting the lessons he learned about student engagement into practice in his own ministry.

“Part of what campus ministry should be able to do is serve all students regardless of their faith tradition,” he said. “I’m not here to bring my truth to students. I’m here to help them uncover their own truth. I want to make myself present to their stories and the theology and spirituality already at work in their lives.”

A native of Wooster, Ohio, Gorman is a member of the Gabelli School’s inaugural Lincoln Center class. He’s graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Global Business, and he’s one of the top students in his year. But he didn’t get there without a little help.

During his junior year, he earned an internship with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the world’s largest private cancer center, through an interaction he had with Ian Cairns, GABELLI ’18.

“He said, ‘I like the things that you said in class. I’m interning at Memorial Sloan and part of our role is to help recruit,” recalled Gorman. “Why don’t you send me your resume?”

Cairns passed Gorman’s resume along to recruiters at the hospital. After being interviewed, he was offered a role as an investment management intern. When his internship ended, Gorman helped to recruit and interview other Fordham students for his role, just as Cairns had done for him.

“If you like your employer, and you like Fordham, then you want to help them both find one another,” he said, adding that he hopes younger classmates will follow his and Cairns’ example.

After completing several internships, Gorman served as a chief economist for the Gabelli School’s Student-Managed Investment Fund. He also worked on the Dean’s Council alongside Vincent DeCola, S.J., assistant dean of the Gabelli School of Business, to help improve the academic experience of undergraduates at the Lincoln Center campus. And he’s volunteered at open houses for admitted students and events for first-year students.

“I remember being in their place four years ago and trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and talking to current students was very helpful,” said Gorman.

Hu— who is graduating with a Master of Science in taxation— has helped to organize networking events with Fordham alumni as a board member of the Fordham Accounting and Tax Society. She also helped spearhead a career fair with representatives from firms like Friedman LLP and Ernst & Young. Last spring, she put together an event with a professional English-language teacher for international students interested in improving their English.

Her drive to help other students in her program was inspired by a phrase her mother, a quality controller at a food company, used to say to her growing up.

“She would always tell me that ‘helping others is helping yourself,’” recalled Hu, a native of Nehe, China. “That helped to build my character. I never go somewhere and expect that I could just receive things and take that for granted.”

Hu said her father, a part-time computer shop owner and farmer, would talk about macroeconomics around the house when she was young.

“He wasn’t able to go to business school but supported my decision to go,” she said. “I was able to stand on his shoulders, learn more, and see a broader field.”

Hu and Gorman both said the experiential learning opportuni- ties and classes they have had at the Gabelli School helped to shape their post-graduation goals.

Gorman said he has always been interested in math but didn’t know what career path to take until he served on the winning team of the Gabelli School’s Consulting Cup challenge, the biggest on-campus academic competition for sophomores at the school. He also took a financial management course that same year.

“That’s when it clicked that I wanted to try something in the finance area,” said Gorman, who has interned for North Brookside Capital and the French investment bank Société Générale, where he will soon work as a full-time investment banking analyst.

“We were talking about current events around that time, about the border adjustment tax and the tax plan the new administration had been proposing. It was kind of eye opening to see those things in the news and then come to class and put some numbers behind it,” he said.

Hu’s aha moment came in an international taxation course, where she studied the tax systems of the U.S. and foreign countries as well as topics related to tax treaties, transfer pricing, and foreign tax credits.

“I’m interested in how international transactions work and how businesses get taxed in different jurisdictions,” said Hu. “A lot of the logic makes sense to me, especially with my international background.”

Hu recently accepted a position in Ernst & Young’s Diversified Staffing Group in Houston. She said she looks forward to putting her accounting training into action.

“My job would be to become a well-rounded tax professional in the beginning and then specialize in one area,” she said. “It’s really cool to know that what I was learning will apply to my job later on.”

Born in Dubai, she came to the United States to study psychology in 2010, and when she graduated from New York University in 2014, she set her sights on law school. Working with marginalized, oppressed, and vulnerable populations had always appealed to her, and she felt that a law degree would be the best way to effect change on their behalf.

At the suggestion of a classmate, Nagib joined the student group Advocates for the Incarcerated in her first year at Fordham Law. The group revived a tradition of constructing a life-size mockup of a solitary confinement cell at the school and invited formerly incarcerated people to come talk about their experiences. Firsthand stories like these are critical, she said, in getting others to understand what conditions are like in prison.

“No matter how many times people hear about it or how many times you have the conversation, there will always be someone who needs to hear directly from the person who experienced it,” she said.

Nagib quickly realized that she wanted to work on criminal justice reform. She visited Rikers Island dozens of times last fall as part of an externship with the Legal Aid Society’s Prisoner’s Rights Project. She and her colleagues presented workshops and educated incarcerated people on their rights. Nagib said this information is often not passed on by public defenders—a calling that she recently considered, and which she saw up close during a summer internship in New Orleans.

After graduation, Nagib will work with a program that serves people who have been charged with violent crimes and focuses on alternatives to incarceration. It aims to divert people who have been responsible for harm away from jail while being mindful  of survivor needs. The program promotes a racially equitable response to violence, Nagib said, and survivors approve of the approach about 90 percent of the time.

That’s because survivors of harm are pragmatic about what’s most likely to keep them safe, and they tend to understand that sending a person to jail won’t do that, she said. Rather, the incarcerated person will be traumatized, denied access to loved ones, and won’t have the wherewithal to accept accountability for their actions.

“Many people who have been harmed have also had family members or loved ones go to prison, so they know how much that breaks somebody. It’s a combination of pragmatism and a nuanced understanding of how the system works and who it targets,” she said.

What she’ll miss most about Fordham is the space that she and her classmates created for people who want to be challenged and challenge others about criminal justice reform. These difficult conversations are more important than “just patting ourselves on the back because we’re here doing public service work,” she said. “We need to consistently critique ourselves and the choices that we make, to think strategically about what we’re doing and whose voices we’re affirming and whose we’re not.”

When Butcher takes her seat among her fellow doctoral candidates on Keating Terrace at commencement, it will be the conclusion of long journey—one that veered from otter conservation in Michigan to rooftop pollination in New York City.

And it all happened because of a chance encounter on the other side of the world.

Butcher, a native of Michigan, was in New Zealand for a conference in 2011, presenting research on green roofs she had conducted as part of her master’s degree in conservation biology at Central Michigan University. Fordham associate biology professor J. Alan Clark, Ph.D., who was there to study penguins at the time, told her about Fordham’s program at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Butcher was skeptical about leaving her family but booked a flight to New York anyway.

“I came out to visit and loved it. I loved the city. I loved the colorfulness of the Bronx. I really loved the Calder Center,” she said.

Her dissertation on pollen dispersal in diverse urban habitats looks at the ways that tomatoes and amaranths reproduce even when they’re stuck on the equivalent of urban islands.

Within four sites—the green roofs on the Rose Hill campus parking garage and the Javits Center, and ground sites at the Queens Zoo and Fordham’s Louis Calder Center Biological Field Station in Armonk, New York—Butcher tracked the movement of pollen by identifying unique molecular markers in the parent plants, and tracking these markers in the seeds.

“I matched the seeds to their mom. I matched them to their dad. And then I could tell where mom was and where dad was, and then calculate the distance. It’s just like Maury Povich,” she said, laughing.

Butcher said there is a dearth of research on pollen dispersal in roof habitats.

“Pollen dispersal is the most important component of plant gene flow. Gene flow is essential because it can maintain or increase genetic diversity within a population and thus increase a population’s capacity to adapt, and in an urban environment, it’s really important because humans are constantly changing things,” she said.

Butcher said she’ll miss the Calder Center, where she briefly resided.

“Other biological field stations may be bigger and better funded, but Calder has a history that’s so interesting,” she said of the field station—a former estate anchored by a 13,000-square-foot, 27-room stone mansion built in the early 1900s.

Butcher, who served as the Biology Graduate Student Association president for several years and had a Clare Boothe Luce fellowship for two years, also taught at the New York Botanical Garden’s Everett Children’s Adventure Garden during her time at Fordham.

That experience revealed to her a passion for teaching science informally, and going forward, she’s exploring a wide array of potential positions, including teaching at a university.

“I’m casting my net really wide for a job now. I think I’ll know what I want to do when I see it.”

In 2018, he will graduate from Fordham’s Graduate School of Education with a master’s degree in mental health counseling.

“My grandmother came to the hospital, and the doctor said he couldn’t stop the bleeding,” Young said of that tragic day. “She said, ‘I don’t wanna hear that.’ She prayed and prayed.” And while she did, the doctors got the bleeding under control.

“When I woke up, my mother was at my bedside saying I was gonna be OK. I thought I’d died, and when I woke up I just burst out crying,” he said.

That experience, the result of a run-in with an acquaintance who was high on PCP, profoundly changed him. He’d already started to turn away from a life of gangs, drugs, and violence thanks to the Young Men’s Leadership Group, an after-school program that Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver started at Young’s New Haven high school. But it was the strength he summoned to forgive his assailant that inspired him to devote his life to helping others.

In 2013, after years of working at rehab centers and homeless shelters in New York City, he earned a bachelor’s degree at the College of New Rochelle’s Rosa Parks Campus in Harlem. He knew he wanted to go on to graduate work at a top university.

“I said, ‘In order to best serve the population that I would like to work with, I need to enroll in a school that’s diverse and sticks to their principles and their mission statement of social justice,’” he said. He applied to Fordham and was accepted.

Shriver, who visited Young’s bedside the day he was shot, said he was blown away when Young told him he was pursuing a master’s degree.

“How many people who’ve been through what he’s been through get degrees at all? Very few. How many people get these degrees with a vision for how to overcome insidious kinds of bias and self-defeating mentalities and cultural barri-ers? … He’s an outlier in every good way.”

Feelings of self-doubt made graduate school difficult at first, but Young credited GSE faculty members, particularly Professor Joseph G. Ponterotto, Ph.D., with helping him overcome his fears. In fact, Young mined his experiences for a research project on how African Americans interact and thrive in unfamiliar environments.

After graduation, Young will be volunteering at the AJS Wellness Center in New Rochelle and doing outreach for the Larry T. Young Foundation in New Haven, which he founded in honor of his deceased brothers Larry and Glenn. He’s planning to apply to doctoral programs in 2019.

He’s hopeful that his own ability to bounce back from adversity will help him inspire others.

“The African-American story of going through slavery and discrimination and still being able to look at someone in the face and say, ‘I love you brother’— that’s what makes us unique. That’s how we survived for 400 years. The perseverance and resilience,” he said.

“That’s my story.”

“I will be a supporting researcher to senior fellows who have a lot of experience,” Matteucci says about the appointment, which begins in August and is based in Washington, D.C. “I’ve respected Carnegie’s work for a long time and used a lot of their work in my own research. I’m excited to be surrounded by these scholars.”

The fellowship provides the framework for Matteucci to advance her research in nuclear policy, an area of study she became interested in as an intern in the Center on National Security at Fordham Law during her sophomore and junior years.

“They work in the broader realm of international security,” explains the international relations and Spanish major who is graduating from Fordham College at Lincoln Center. “I was doing research related to counterterrorism and cybersecurity and there’s a lot of overlap with nuclear policy.”

From the Center for National Security, she was recruited by Sandia National Laboratories, the nuclear arms lab based in her hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. She served there as an international nuclear safeguards and security intern for nearly 18 months.

Today, Matteucci is interning with two nongovernmental organizations at the United Nations, where her focus has shifted from strategy to disarmament.

“It’s very different from the work I did at Sandia, where the focus was often on nonproliferation and strategic concerns,” she says. “I’m in the process of informing myself. Being in the field, you have to understand all of it.”

Matteucci says she aspires to a life of public service that may include government work. She notes the need for more women in leadership positions and more critical thinkers on the subject of nuclear policy in a country that has “one of the largest arsenals in the world.”

“When you learn about nukes and the strategic environment,” she said, “you inevitably learn about conventional weapons as well. So it gives you the full scope, which is why I consider it such a useful lens.”

In April, Matteucci traveled on a Fordham-funded trip to Geneva for the U.N. Preparatory Committee meeting for the 2020 Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty, attending as part of a youth delegation. She and her peers spent a week speaking with ambassadors and monitoring proceedings in the General Assembly. Matteucci also interviewed representatives from NGOs as part of her research for an independent study at Fordham.

“It was clear that states are preparing for the eventuality of cooperation on disarmament,” she says. “This is both timely and hopeful. With dialogue lacking in most political spaces—even the nuclear field is quite partisan— it is exciting to see people searching for common ground.”

Her passion for international policy began in high school with a debate case on unilateral intervention in foreign conflicts. After that, she says she “was hooked.”

Matteucci has presented at multiple conferences and was the first undergraduate student accepted into the Next Generation Safeguards Initiative course at the National Nuclear Security Administration. She has also contributed to the Journal of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management and other publications.

A blues pianist who regularly sings and performs, Matteucci enjoys attending live concerts with her father who plays Spanish classical guitar.

One of her best memories? When she played the same piano graced by the talents of her idol, the legendary Herbie Hancock, at a jazz club in Spain while studying abroad in her junior year.

“It was the coolest moment of my undergraduate years!” she says.

–Claire Curry