Eva Badowska, PhD, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), presented the diploma to Baker’s wife, Presbytera Katherine. She was accompanied by two of her sons—Isaac, 12, who accepted his father’s doctoral hood, and Cyril, 4. It was the final award given out at the GSAS diploma ceremony at the University Church on the Rose Hill campus.

Baker is mourned by Fordham faculty and colleagues and by the entire Orthodox theological community. A letter from His All Holiness Bartholomew, Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch was read at Baker’s funeral, Badowska said.

Baker was one year shy of completing a dissertation on Georges Vasilievich Florovsky, an Orthodox Christian priest, historian, theologian, and ecumenist who engaged in the 20th-century philosophy movement of hermeneutics, she said.

“Though his dissertation was not yet finished, Father Matthew Baker already established himself as an expert on the thought and writings of Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky and published numerous articles on Florovsky and related topics, many of which were translated into Greek and Russian,” Badowska said.

“At the time of his death, his curriculum vitae was already well ahead of what we typically expect of freshly minted PhDs. This posthumous doctorate thus honors not simply his memory and the goal he and his family had worked towards, but his actual academic achievements.”

A native of Cranston, Rhode Island, Baker resided at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Yonkers while he worked toward his degree. He held a Master of Divinity from St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in South Canaan, Pennsylvania and a Master of Arts from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, Massachusetts.

He was ordained to the priesthood in January 2014 by His Eminence Methodios, Metropolitan of Boston of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North America. That same month he began teaching as an adjunct professor of theology at Hellenic College/Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology.

Aristotle Papanikolaou, PhD, professor of theology and the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture, served as his dissertation adviser.

Papanikolaou, who is also senior fellow and co-founder of Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center, said Baker was no ordinary doctoral student.

“Matthew had a brilliant mind and a great love of theology, but not simply for its own sake. He believed it mattered for people’s lives, and most especially for people’s relationship with God,” he said.

“He’d already developed international contacts, and was becoming internationally recognized as an emerging voice in Orthodox theology.”

An online crowdfunding account set up to help provide for his family raised $763,900 from 6,543 donors. Information on providing support can be provided here.

Douglas M. Brooks is director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy. A licensed clinical social worker, he has held many high-level policy positions related to the AIDS epidemic including board chairman of AIDS United in Washington, D.C., and member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. He has advised governments and nongovernmental organizations on addressing AIDS and directly managed many federally funded programs aimed at treating and preventing the disease.

Matthew Goldstein oversaw the transformation of the City University ofNewYork as its chancellor from 1999 to 2013. Once dubbed an “institution adrift” by a mayoral task force, the university added schools and colleges, built up its faculty, increased graduation rates, achieved record enrollments, and raised its academic profile. He is a nationally recognized education expert who has served on the U.S. Teaching Commission and the New York State Commission on Higher Education, in addition to leading national summits on public higher education.

William Loschert, GABELLI ’61 is a retired chairman of ACE Global Markets who served for six years on the Fordham University Board of Trustees. He is a generous Fordham supporter who has funded scholarships, an endowed chair in entrepreneurship, a lecture series at the Fordham University London Centre, and other enhancements while also giving generously of his time to advance the University’s mission. A residence hall on the Rose Hill campus is named in his honor.

Thomas A. Moore, LAW ’72, is a widely respected trial lawyer who has twice been named Lawyer of the Year by The National Law Journal, and who was the most frequently mentioned attorney in New York Law Journal‘s Verdicts and Settlements Hall of Fame for medical malpractice cases from New York, published last year. He and his wife, Judith Livingston, funded the Brendan Moore Chair in Advocacy and the Moore Advocacy Center at Fordham Law School, named for Moore’s late brother.

Judith Livingston, also a distinguished attorney, was deemed “a legal legend” by Lawdragon and is the youngest person and first woman to be admitted to the Inner Circle of Advocates, an elite group of the country’s top 100 trial lawyers. She has been recognized twice by Best Lawyers as the New York Medical Malpractice Lawyer of the Year; in other pursuits, she has been active with Judges and Lawyers Breast Cancer Alert. She and her husband, Thomas A. Moore, received the Fordham Founders Award for 2014.

Admiral Michael Mullen retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2011. He led the military through the end of combat in Iraq and a new strategy in Afghanistan, and also promoted the new technologies, international partnerships, and new antiterrorism methods that led to the elimination of Osama bin Laden in 2011. He advocated for shorter combat tours, more attention to veterans’ posttraumatic stress, and more public support for service members, and played a key role in dismantling “don’t ask, don’t tell” so gay service members could serve openly.

His Eminence, Jaime Lucas Cardinal Ortega y Alamino, Archbishop of Havana played an important part in sustaining the Catholic Church in Cuba under communist rule. Under his leadership, the church in Cuba has become an effective mediator between the government and dissidents, and in 2010 Cardinal Ortega worked with the government of Raul Castro to secure the release of 126 political prisoners. He also had a key role in Pope Francis’ successful efforts to bring about dialogue between the governments of Cuba and the United States.

Mary Anne Sullivan, TMC ’73, is one of the top energy lawyers in the country and a partner at the global firm of Hogan Lovells. She served as general counsel for the U.S. Department of Energy in the Clinton administration, and before that as the department’s deputy general counsel for environment and nuclear programs. She provided critical legal support for the world’s first deep geologic disposal facility for radioactive waste and negotiated the first agreements with electric utilities on voluntarily reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Dennis Walcott, GSS ’80, served as chancellor of New York City’s public schools from 2011 to 2013, ushering them through major changes. Under his leadership, the city’s education department replaced large low-performing high schools with smaller schools, resulting in higher graduation rates and more college enrollments, particularly for disadvantaged students of color. In addition, he launched a major effort to improve the quantity and quality of the city’s middle schools and led a $13 million expansion of after-school programs.

A few mornings a week, you might glimpse Lester Taylor running through Van Cortland Park’s cinder trails.

You would do well to catch him.

Earlier this year, Taylor, FCRH ’15, set the Bahamas’ indoor record in the 800 meters, 1:49.65, beating a time set 13 years ago by Bahaman Chris Brown, an Olympic track and field athlete who won a team Gold at the 2012 games.

Taylor’s mark, set at the Valentine’s Day Classic in Boston, qualified him for the Pan Am Games, which take place in Toronto in July. But although the team’s season, as well as Taylor’s collegiate career, is winding down, he could by then have set his country’s outdoor mark in the distance, now 1:49.54.

But Taylor, who is majoring in economics with a minor in business, isn’t dwelling on the records.

“It’s something I keep in the back of my head but I try not to think about it too much and have as much fun as I can and compete,” he said. “Times will come.”

The Bahamas’ Pan Am squad hasn’t yet been named, and Taylor is not taking anything for granted: he recently sent Syracuse University a down payment for a first semester of law school, which he would start in the fall.

“Unless,” he said, “I get an opportunity to train for the 2016 Olympics.”

Taylor was born in Miami, where his mother, a nephrologist, did her residency. The family returned to Nassau, Bahamas, soon afterward and he spent his formative years there.

“It’s a very warm place to be,” weather-wise certainly, but also with regard to family, he said. “Everybody knows everybody.”

He goes home to the island several times a year—for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and summers. He usually also spends spring recess in the Bahamas. But Taylor, the University’s athlete of the week four times this season, stayed in the Bronx this March to train for a defining season.

Although he played soccer at his junior high in Nassau, Taylor only started running middle distances competitively as a junior at Suffield Academy, in Connecticut, where he relocated as a teenager. He was on the swim team all four years and also ran cross-country and played soccer.

He then spent a year at St. Joseph’s University before transferring to Rose Hill. Taylor posted good times through his junior year at Fordham, but the Boston race established him among elite runners: He had trimmed nearly three seconds from his outdoor best a year earlier.

The team’s coach, Tom Dewey, called Taylor a singular athlete who could only get faster.

“He’s got a tremendously effortless style,” said Dewey, who is in his 35th year as Fordham’s track coach. “He’s as smooth a runner as we’ve ever seen.”

Taylor is still learning the finer points of both technique and tactics, Dewey said, and preparing for the Pan Am Games could lift him into yet another class.

Despite carrying 16 units in addition to his track obligations, with the Olympic Games just 16 months away, next year could be even headier. Taylor is clear-sighted about the prospect.

“I’ve been an athlete all my life. To really give it all up is going to be a real tough decision, a very emotional decision. It’s all I know,” he said. “It’s a decision I want to have to make—it’s a good problem. But I try to just take it a day at a time.”

— Rich Khavkine

A U.S. Navy recruiter at the time, Joel Knippel helped them do just that—and, in so doing, found a new path for himself as well.

Talking to people about what they wanted and helping them get it “opened up a whole new world to me,” said Knippel.

Today, as he completes his MBA at the Gabelli School of Business, he’s continuing to follow this career path by working as a recruiting outreach manager in human resources at Pfizer. It’s rewarding work that is a world apart from the ambitions he had set for himself while growing up in Brooklyn.

The son of public school teachers, he aspired to a military career from an early age and earned his commission through the Navy ROTC unit at SUNY Maritime College in the Bronx. He served for four years as a surface warfare officer and returned to SUNY Maritime for a master’s degree, intending to enter the shipping industry, but went back to active duty as a recruiter instead when the recession hit.

Serving as director of recruiting operations for New York City and much of its surrounding region, he encountered a wide cross-section of potential recruits, including many people with families who simply couldn’t find work.

“We had everyone from investment bankers who decided they want to be F-18 pilots to former lawyers who decided they want to be nuclear officers to just everyday blue-collar workers who had lost jobs,” he said. “For many of them, it was a call to service,” and made a profound change for the better in their lives, he said.

After three years in this role, he switched to the Navy Reserve and set out to build his business career, seeking a job that would allow for making a similar kind of impact on people’s lives. He worked at a tech startup while pursuing his MBA at Fordham, which he picked, in part, because of its strong support for veterans under the federal Yellow Ribbon Program.

Coming to Fordham was “a bit of a culture shock for me, but wonderful,” he said, because of the chance to absorb entirely new subjects—forecasting, capital structure, valuation—that he found fascinating.

“The exposure was fantastic,” he said. “The MBA forces you to be ready to move instinctively, and with a measure of agility, to take advantage of the right opportunity.”

That opportunity came midway through his degree program, when he learned of the Pfizer job through Fordham’s Edge4Vets program. He switched to the part-time MBA program so he could take the job, which involves helping recruit people from diverse backgrounds—including veterans and people with disabilities—and helping to ensure that they feel welcomed.

“The ability to have a positive impact—on the people we’re actively trying to recruit into the company as well as on the internal culture of the company—is tremendously rewarding,” he said.

In 2008, while he was studying political science and English at UCLA, the financial crisis hit. His mother, who was single at the time, lost her job and spent her life savings. Soon, collection agencies became a familiar presence.

The experience crystallized his decision to go to law school.

“I wanted to take my passion for issues about economic, racial, and social justice and learn something that was practical,” he said. “There was something missing in my undergraduate courses and I needed some sort of tool kit to work in these areas.”

Akosah’s parents inspired him long before his mother faced struggles. His father immigrated to New York City from Ghana when he was 19 in the 1970s and worked as a courier. He got a bachelor’s degree at the University of Kansas and a master’s at Southern Illinois University. His mother, who is of German ancestry, met his father after moving from Illinois to California.

This means that visiting relatives requires traveling to rural Illinois and to the Kumasi region of Ghana, where he says he has more aunts and uncles than he can keep track of. It’s a blending of the cultural and ethnic that Akosah says makes him feel thoroughly at home in the United States, yet still attached to Ghana and the immigrant experience.

“My dad’s an immigrant, and he’s always driven into me the value of education. There was never a moment in my life when I was not going to go to college, and when I told him I was going to go to law school, he was completely thrilled,” he said.

Akosah said his parents really instilled in him “a powerful work ethic.” In his three years at Fordham Law, Akosah has worked with Project Vote in Washington D.C., the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, the Legislation and Policy Clinic at Fordham Law, and the American Civil Liberties Union. This past semester, he worked in the office of the mayor to ensure the implementation of Local Law 29, which dictates that city agencies make voter registration available to their clients.

Akosah’s work has not gone unnoticed; he was selected as this year’s Fordham Law School recipient of the Monsignor James J. Murray Prize for Achievement in Public Service.

In the fall, he’s returning to the Brennan center as part of a two-year fellowship from the Equal Justice Works Foundation. He plans to help people with past criminal convictions who’ve been illegally denied their right to have voting privileges restored.

“I’ve had so many election law and voting rights experiences up to this point. I feel lucky to be able to work on it right out of law school,” he said.

He said that voting rights have become an especially important topic since the Supreme Court overturned Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. That section required states and local governments to obtain federal pre-clearance before making any changes to their voting laws or practices.

“Without Section 5, it’s really incumbent upon public interest organizations to be on top of these cases,” said Akosah. “As there’s no receivership with the justice department anymore, you have to actually have eyes and ears on the ground, and find out where the [discriminatory]practices are going on. Because you can’t intercept them before they’re implemented like you could in the past.”

“Voting rights litigation is going to get more intense,” Akosah said, and he is looking forward to contributing to legal challenges on issues he is passionate about.

— Patrick Verel

When he arrived in New York, he became a dishwasher.

“My first job here was cleaning pots in a restaurant,” said Blanchard, DMin. “It was traumatic for me. But I did what I had to do as a father and a husband.”

Over the following decades, Blanchard gradually reestablished himself in academia—but he didn’t stop there. In February, 25 years after restarting his professional life, he achieved his doctorate in ministry on a full scholarship from Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (GRE).

“I always dreamed of having a doctoral degree and Fordham gave me the opportunity to do that,” Blanchard said.

To get back into the classroom, Blanchard took a job teaching religious education at Christ the King Church in the Bronx, where he and his family attended church. He taught introductory Bible courses, and eventually became the parish organizer and taught community pastoral leadership.

From there, he landed a job with Catholic Charities. He then earned a master’s in religious education at GRE through the Fridays at Fordham program, which offered graduate classes to members of the local Latino community.

Then, in 2004, Edward Cardinal Egan selected Blanchard to direct the New York Archdiocese’s Office of Hispanic Ministry, making Blanchard the very first layperson and first Dominican to serve in the high-level position. Landing the job was no small feat—Blanchard became the point person for all issues concerning the Hispanic community in the second-largest diocese in the country.

“I got my job in the archdiocese because I had a master’s from Fordham,” Blanchard said. “For that reason, I’m grateful to the University.”

His work as director of Hispanic ministry caught the attention of both church and Fordham leadership. In 2008, he received the Papal Medal Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice for distinguished service to the church—the highest medal that can be awarded to the laity by the pope. Two years later, GRE presented Blanchard with the Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, SJ Award for Service to the Hispanic Community.

Overseeing the needs of New York’s Catholic Hispanic community ultimately had an academic upside. Having noticed an increase in Dominican immigration to New York in recent decades, Blanchard focused his doctoral dissertation on the relationship between New York’s Catholic churches and those in the Dominican Republic (DR).

Through interviews with laypeople and clergy in both countries, Blanchard found that individual parishes in New York and in the DR have informally paired and formed strong, ongoing partnerships.

“Churches in New York often provide financial help to churches in the DR, and in turn, Dominican churches send well-prepared lay leaders and clergy to work in New York parishes,” Blanchard said. “The Dominican churches even send priests where there is a shortage.”

In September, Blanchard will return with his wife to the DR to begin teaching religious education at the Catholic University of Santo Domingo.

“My passion is teaching. I have been teaching all my life,” he said.

“I was always interested in people’s backstory; I wondered what experiences in their lives had led them to the position they were in,” said Juliano.

“I was interested in the human aspect of the job… but that side of the story wasn’t part of the agenda. So, I decided to do something different with my life.”

Desiring to work for social change rather than prosecute violations of the law, she enrolled in the clinical social work program at the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS). When she arrived, though, she quickly realized just how different the social work and legal professions are.

“In the legal profession, the focus is much less on emotion. It’s more about the facts and the law. But social work requires a certain amount of emotional intelligence,” she said. “It was very difficult in the beginning. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to make it through, because I was feeling as though I didn’t fit in.”

She held on, and gradually she was able to incorporate her analytic training into a more flexible and intuitive style. Most importantly, she said, she learned to “trust [her]gut,” which was critical when it came to facing the unknown in her fieldwork placements.

Her first placement involved counseling young men with substance use disorders at Odyssey House Leadership Center. She did her second placement at the Training Institute for Mental Health, an outpatient mental health clinic. Alongside her fieldwork, Juliano volunteered at the New York Peace Institute, where she conducted community and civil court mediations to help families and individuals settle disputes.

As she grew more comfortable in her role as a social worker, she began to realize that she had discovered her life’s work.

“I felt like I was sharing in the human experience with other people, and I realized that this was definitely what I want for the rest of my life—to have those connections with others and to make a difference in someone’s life,” she said.

“Now, looking back [on my time in the GSS program], I can say it was a transformative experience.”

During her time at GSS, Juliano also helped to launch the 21st Century Social Justice Journal, the school’s first student-run scholarly journal.

“The journal was founded to be interdisciplinary because we believe social work spans so many different fields,” she said. “We’re hoping to get a wide variety of articles, from neuroscience to economics, from both Fordham and non-Fordham students.”

Following graduation, Juliano plans to pursue additional training in either psychoanalytic therapy or in family therapy.

“We don’t live as individuals in a vacuum. We live interpersonally, always intersecting with other people in relationships,” she said. “There’s always some relational aspect to someone’s conflict. I think it’s healthier to focus on the whole person, including the family system they’re functioning in.”

Nana Lordina—wife of H. E. John Dramani Mahama, President of Ghana—is national president of the Lordina Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that works with partner companies and agencies to make health care more accessible in Ghana and to expand educational opportunities. In addition to working on behalf of the disadvantaged, she strives to advance the cause of educating women and girls as a way to improve communities worldwide.

“In conferring an honorary degree upon Mrs. Mahama, it is we who are honored,” said Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham. “Her work with women and children in Ghana and across Africa reminds us of persistence of kindness and the will to make a difference in the world.”

Nana Lordina’s work embraces many pressing public health and educational issues. The Lordina Foundation has provided medical supplies—including, in one instance, an ambulance—to hospitals and health facilities in Ghana, worked to prevent breast and cervical cancer and HIV infection in Africa, and helped provide shelter and vocational training in northern Ghana for women accused of witchcraft who were shunned by their communities.

The Foundation also provides food, clothing, and cash for seven orphanages across Ghana, and offered scholarships to 21 Ghanaian students to study in China, with support from the Chinese government.

Among her many advocacy efforts, Lordina helped secure the Ghanaian government’s approval of a World Bank program to provide secondary school scholarships to 10,400 Ghanaian children—half of them girls—who come from deprived communities.

“Today, women are accelerating economic growth and improving conditions in their communities across the world,” she said last year in an address at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C. “Perhaps if there were more women in decision-making roles around the world, we would create fairer and better societies. Women’s education brings positive changes not just for women but for communities and future generations too.”

She applauded her husband’s appointment of many more women to be cabinet ministers or to hold other public posts.

Mrs. Mahama was born and educated in Ghana, earning a bachelor’s degree in hospitality management and a master’s in governance and leadership from the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration. She became First Lady of Ghana in July 2012, when her husband—then vice president—ascended to the presidency upon the death of his predecessor, John Atta Mills.

She is a first vice president of the Organization of African First Ladies against HIV and AIDS (OAFLA) for West Africa, and is premier ambassador of the UNAIDS Global Plan on the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission.

Last year, she was honored with a Global Inspiration Leadership Award and inducted into the Global Women Leaders Hall of Fame at the second Africa-Middle East-Asia Women Summit in Dubai, organized by the Centre for Economic and Leadership Development and the CEO Clubs Network worldwide. Among her other honors, she was awarded the key to the city by the City of Newark, N.J., and given awards for her anti-cervical cancer advocacy in Namibia and Mozambique.

Nana Lordina Dramani Mahama will be awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters at the commencement ceremony.

More Honorary Degrees

Fordham will also present honorary degrees to nine other accomplished individuals:

Douglas M. Brooks is director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy. A licensed clinical social worker, he has held many high-level policy positions related to the AIDS epidemic including board chairman of AIDS United in Washington, D.C., and member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. He has advised governments and nongovernmental organizations on addressing AIDS and directly managed many federally funded programs aimed at treating and preventing the disease.

Matthew Goldstein oversaw the transformation of the City University ofNewYork as its chancellor from 1999 to 2013. Once dubbed an “institution adrift” by a mayoral task force, the university added schools and colleges, built up its faculty, increased graduation rates, achieved record enrollments, and raised its academic profile. He is a nationally recognized education expert who has served on the U.S. Teaching Commission and the New York State Commission on Higher Education, in addition to leading national summits on public higher education.

William Loschert, GABELLI ’61 is a retired chairman of ACE Global Markets who served for six years on the Fordham University Board of Trustees. He is a generous Fordham supporter who has funded scholarships, an endowed chair in entrepreneurship, a lecture series at the Fordham University London Centre, and other enhancements while also giving generously of his time to advance the University’s mission. A residence hall on the Rose Hill campus is named in his honor.

Thomas A. Moore, LAW ’72, is a widely respected trial lawyer who has twice been named Lawyer of the Year by The National Law Journal, and who was the most frequently mentioned attorney in New York Law Journal‘s Verdicts and Settlements Hall of Fame for medical malpractice cases from New York, published last year. He and his wife, Judith Livingston, funded the Brendan Moore Chair in Advocacy and the Moore Advocacy Center at Fordham Law School, named for Moore’s late brother.

Judith Livingston, also a distinguished attorney, was deemed “a legal legend” by Lawdragon and is the youngest person and first woman to be admitted to the Inner Circle of Advocates, an elite group of the country’s top 100 trial lawyers. She has been recognized twice by Best Lawyers as the New York Medical Malpractice Lawyer of the Year; in other pursuits, she has been active with Judges and Lawyers Breast Cancer Alert. She and her husband, Thomas A. Moore, received the Fordham Founders Award for 2014.

Admiral Michael Mullen retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2011. He led the military through the end of combat in Iraq and a new strategy in Afghanistan, and also promoted the new technologies, international partnerships, and new antiterrorism methods that led to the elimination of Osama bin Laden in 2011. He advocated for shorter combat tours, more attention to veterans’ posttraumatic stress, and more public support for service members, and played a key role in dismantling “don’t ask, don’t tell” so gay service members could serve openly.

His Eminence, Jaime Lucas Cardinal Ortega y Alamino, Archbishop of Havana played an important part in sustaining the Catholic Church in Cuba under communist rule. Under his leadership, the church in Cuba has become an effective mediator between the government and dissidents, and in 2010 Cardinal Ortega worked with the government of Raul Castro to secure the release of 126 political prisoners. He also had a key role in Pope Francis’ successful efforts to bring about dialogue between the governments of Cuba and the United States.

Mary Anne Sullivan, TMC ’73, is one of the top energy lawyers in the country and a partner at the global firm of Hogan Lovells. She served as general counsel for the U.S. Department of Energy in the Clinton administration, and before that as the department’s deputy general counsel for environment and nuclear programs. She provided critical legal support for the world’s first deep geologic disposal facility for radioactive waste and negotiated the first agreements with electric utilities on voluntarily reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Dennis Walcott, GSS ’80, served as chancellor of New York City’s public schools from 2011 to 2013, ushering them through major changes. Under his leadership, the city’s education department replaced large low-performing high schools with smaller schools, resulting in higher graduation rates and more college enrollments, particularly for disadvantaged students of color. In addition, he launched a major effort to improve the quantity and quality of the city’s middle schools and led a $13 million expansion of after-school programs.

But fate had another plan.

“The direction I thought I wanted all of the sudden seemed foreign to me,” said Dwyer. “In college you’re trying to come up with a life plan. For me, it was especially scary because I’ve always been somebody who thought I knew exactly what I wanted.”

Although she loved to write, she’d also worked with the homeless in high school. So in her sophomore year, Dwyer threw herself wholeheartedly into social work as her major. In May of 2013, she founded the Student Coalition for Street Outreach, which visits people living on the streets of New York and provides food and a sympathetic ear.

“You really get to see the impact of giving someone a sandwich on the street, or having a conversation with someone who’s typically marginalized,” said Dwyer, who last year earned the prestigious Truman scholarship in part based on her rigorous community service.

This semester, she handed over leadership of the group so she could focus on Denim Day NYC, a sexual assault awareness campaign inspired by a 1998 Italian supreme court decision that threw out a rape conviction because the victim wore tight jeans. The group held a dialogue at the Lincoln Center campus on April 27 on how faculty, students, and administrators can combat sexual assault on campus.

While the homeless outreach was a very direct kind of service, Dwyer said, Denim Day is an exercise in community organizing and advocacy.

“Denim Day was an opportunity to see a different side of activism and social change, and that’s why it intrigued me,” she said. “You are talking about wider changes.”

Looking back on her four years at Fordham, Dwyer said no single experience made her realize how much she belonged here—although she mentioned Mary Shelley, assistant director of the Campion Institute for Prestigious Scholarships, and Elaine Congress, PhD, associate dean at the Graduate School of Social Service, as mentors and staunch supporters.

“It’s a culmination of small moments that remind you that there are people here who care about you, challenge you, and want to see you succeed,” she said. “Whether or not you get every award or grade you want, they’re still going to be in your corner.”

After she graduates today, she is putting her Truman award towards graduate studies at Boston College next year. Her plan is ultimately to pursue a doctorate in social work. Since her studies at Boston College don’t start until spring 2016, she’s bracing for a break in academic life.

“Fordham offered so many different options, and you could really take ahold of your own identity in a way that I’m not sure you could do at other schools, and that’s something I’m really thankful for,” she said.

“No university’s perfect, and no student is perfect, but I don’t think at Fordham it’s about trying to reach a level of perfection. It’s more about finding your unique drive.”