Given that computer algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence increasingly disrupt the financial service industry, Zhang said knowledge of progressive trends in finance is important to have.

“Finance used to be about looking at the fundamentals of accounting, the cash flow, balance sheet, and the value of a company,” said Zhang. “Nowadays, I feel the trend is more data-and technology-driven.”

Halpin said he was considering a career in journalism and communications when he first enrolled at Fordham. But after taking a few courses in information systems during his sophomore and junior years, he realized that it was a “perfect blend” of everything he was interested in.

“What really excites me about the future of technology, and especially graduating with this degree, are the endless possibilities to leverage technology to improve business and solve problems,” he said.

Earlier this month, Halpin was one of 200 technologists across the country selected to participate in the Fourth Annual LGBTQ Tech & Innovation Summit and Fellowship at Google’s Washington D.C. offices. The event aimed to use technology to address pressing issues that are affecting Americans and members of the LGBTQ community, including mental health, criminal justice, poverty, and educational equity.

“I was so excited to learn from and work alongside such accomplished leaders in tech,” said Halpin, who is preparing to present his team project at a New York tech summit in September.

Opportunities for growth

Last June, Zhang secured a full-time position as an analyst at Morgan Stanley, while continuing his studies in the master’s in quantitative finance program.

“Taking 16 classes in total in my first year was very tough, but looking back I think everyone in the program realizes how much they have learned through that process,” he said.

Zhang moved to the United States from China in 2008, and called a number of states home before coming to Fordham. He attended high school in Kentucky, and studied mathematical economics and finance as an undergraduate at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Before enrolling in graduate school, he worked as an associate consultant at Utegration, Inc., a Texas-based consulting and solutions company focused on SAP (System Applications Products) technology. His desire to be in a more active and energetic city led him to New York, the world’s financial capital, he said.

“I always wanted to be in the financial service industry,” said Zhang. “It’s not an industry where you can be just anywhere.”

For Halpin, who hails from the suburbs of Chicago, Fordham’s proximity to an array of New York startups and businesses allowed him to get hands-on experience in business and technology. In addition to helping to build Fordham’s entrepreneurial community through the Fordham Foundry, TEDx Fordham University, and the annual Entrepreneurship Conference, Halpin interned for AOL when it was being acquired by Verizon.

“It was exciting to be at a company that was going through such a transition,” he said.

At another internship at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Halpin said he was able to use his information systems training to help its risk and compliance analytics group prevent money-laundering within the financial services industry.

“Fordham was in the perfect spot to study, and New York was perfect to put what I learned into action,” said Halpin, who has served on the Gabelli School Academic Dean’s Council and recently led the Gabelli School›s freshmen/sophomore retreat at Fordham’s Goshen Retreat House.

Making connections

Both Zhang and Halpin said Fordham’s extensive alumni network has been an important part of their success. In fact, Zhang said four Fordham alumni—Christopher Busch, GABELLI ’06, James V. Bruno, GABELLI ’00, Brent A. Masucci, GABELLI ’08, and Lindsay Heather Starr, GABELLI ’03,—guided him through the recruitment process at Morgan Stanley.

“You can very easily find Fordham alumni in any of the major firms,” he said. “They’re able to help you and answer your questions, especially if there are any openings in their firms or groups.”

Halpin, who will be working as an analyst at BlackRock after graduation, said the BlackRock opportunity came about through a conference he attended during his senior year, at which a few Fordham alumni who worked at BlackRock shared their experiences.

“The people that I’ve met over the past four years, from students to professors to administrators to deans, have been invaluable to my Fordham experience,” he said. “Nothing has been more true.”

Of all the lessons Roche has learned throughout his time at Fordham both on the football team and in class, nothing compares to his experience donating bone marrow to help a 60-year-old woman who was suffering from leukemia three years ago.

“It definitely opens your eyes and changes your whole perspective on life,” said the Fordham College at Rose Hill senior, who is graduating with a degree in economics. “Not only does it make you realize how precious and short life is, it just makes you appreciate it every day.”

Roche was selected as a potential donor for the woman after giving a cheek swab at the annual Fordham football Be the Match registry in 2014. At the time, there was a 1-in-9 million chance of a match.

He did more tests in August 2014, when the odds were down to 1-in-10 that he would be a compatible match. The following month, he received an official confirmation of an exact match with the critically ill woman.

“It’s still very possible for the recipient’s body to reject the donor’s bone marrow, so I was nervous that the donation process wouldn’t be successful,” he recalled.

Preparation for the donation began during football season, two months before the procedure. A nurse came to Roche’s residence hall and gave him shots to prepare his marrow.

He said the actual procedure took about five hours, during which he had to sit perfectly still in a chair.

“Through the help and full support of my coaches, Coach Marmaros and former Coach Joe Moorhead, donating during football season was a very efficient and smooth process,” he said.

Roche was asked to donate to the same woman again in 2015 after tests suggested that she might become ill again from her cancer. He did not hesitate to help and said the experience was life changing.

“I was willing to make this sacrifice not only because it was the right thing to do, but because if I had a loved one in that situation, hopefully someone would do the same thing,” he said.

Roche credits his parents for instilling positive moral values in him. His mother is a special education teacher and his father, a 9/11 first responder, helped with the rescue and with cleanup efforts after the tragedy. Both of his parents taught him the importance of “doing the right thing,” of “persevering” in the face of challenges, and caring about the well-being of others.

This year, Roche was named to the 2016 Patriot League Academic Honor Roll for academic excellence. While he is still weighing potential career paths in economics, Roche said he hopes to work in asset or portfolio management. After graduation, he will be interning with OppenheimerFunds’ equity product management team, and hopes to pursue a master’s degree in finance.

“I know it’s cliché, but it’s true what they say,” he said. “College is really the best four years of your life. It shapes you into a person that you know is going to be successful.”

When she lies down to sleep at night, she’s in the 21st century. But during the day, Barnhouse is firmly ensconced in centuries long past.

Barnhouse, who is earning a doctorate in history on May 20 from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, has long been interested in questions about how law, the practice of the religious life, and social expectations of men and women intersect in the Middle Ages.

“I’ve been fascinated by stories about the Middle Ages since I was young enough to be falling out of trees while pretending to be Robin Hood,” she said.

She’s also been interested in medieval health. In her dissertation, “The Elusive Medieval Hospital: Mainz and the Middle Rhine Region,” Barnhouse researched four independent hospitals in Mainz, Germany: a 12th-century foundation, another hospital established by women forced to leave that foundation, a leper hospital, and a private foundation that functioned in the 1350s. She explored the seldom-examined comparisons between leper hospitals and other hospitals.

She said that leper hospitals have often been treated in scholarship as a separate category, distinct from multipurpose hospitals. Such a division is more a modern construction than actual history, however, as all kinds of medieval hospitals were legally defined as religious institutions. Therefore, she argues that “the regulation of medieval leper hospitals was not driven primarily by any fear of the disease.”

“The history of medieval hospitals remains quite fragmented even as it grows,” said Barnhouse, who visited Mainz on a Fulbright Fellowship from 2013 to 2014.

“I’m attempting to provide a basis for further synthesis that will enable us to incorporate medieval hospitals into our larger hospital history, to get a longer view of health care, and to avoid isolating the Middle Ages and making careless assumptions.”

Although it was the era’s vividness that piqued her initial interest in the medieval, what keeps Barnhouse coming back for more, she said, are the questions that don’t have obvious answers.

This coming fall, Barnhouse’s love of all things medieval will continue, as she’ll be teaching medieval history and literature as a visiting assistant professor at the College of Worcester.

She is also a founding member, along with Elizabeth Keohane-Burbridge, of the podcast series Footnoting History. Since the series’ launch in February 2013, she has contributed 18 episodes on women’s history, medical history, opera, and British popular fiction of the early 20th century. It’s both an outlet for Barnhouse to talk about interests not directly connected to her research, and a model for establishing communication between academics and the public.

“At Footnoting History, not only do we tell cool stories of historical research, but we explain how we found them.”

Six years later, however, McCauley has embraced a different calling. The Houston native is graduating with a major in mathematics and a minor in economics. This year, he realized he had a knack for computer coding—and the response he received at a recent interview at Google has convinced him to pursue it as a career.

He discovered an interest in coding after spending his junior year studying abroad at the London School of Economics. Even though he was able to line up several internship interviews for positions in management consulting, nothing came of them. He found himself with no plans for the summer.

So he turned to his thesis adviser, David Swinarski, Ph.D., assistant professor of mathematics, to see if he could assist in any research. With a summer research grant, McCauley created an analysis suite using raw data from motion capture technology that Columbia Presbyterian Hospital doctors are using to study breathing.

“Breathing looks very different in a person with emphysema compared with a normal person,” he said. His resulting research shows how those differences can be expressed mathematically.

“When I started this project, I realized I could take it as far as I wanted to,” he said. “It ended up being a much more valuable experience, from the standpoint of developing skills and having some experience, than a management consultancy would have been.”

As his interests have evolved from theater to finance to coding, McCauley  also feels like he’s learned how to relax more. A 4.0 student in his first semester, he joked that he felt like he learned more during some of those subsequent “3.75” semesters. His four years at Fordham also afforded him the chance to form long term relationships outside his immediate family. This year, he shared an apartment in Harlem with two fellow honors students who he first met his freshman year, and spent a great deal of his free time at a poetry collective that one of them started.

The college’s small size and liberal arts focus made it the perfect fit, he said.

“If you put yourself out there, you have direct access to everybody—from the professors all the way up to [FCLC Dean] Father Grimes,” he said.

“People really express an interest in the individual student’s well-being.”

Unlike men who’d fought in World War II, baby boomers came of age in an era that was more global. They engaged more with the world outside of themselves and their families. They were less insular, but they experienced late onset PTSD symptoms. And they reacted differently to retirement.

“I thought the different attitudes were fascinating, so I put it in the back of my head, thinking I might want to look at it later,” she said.

Aware that there was very little research on baby boomer retirement, Selkirk, a native of Brandywine, Maryland, undertook a dissertation, “A Longitudinal Study Of Retirement Satisfaction In Baby Boomers And Vietnam-Era Veterans.”

Using data from a longitudinal study conducted by the University of Michigan, Selkirk attempted to measure the predictors of retirement satisfaction for veterans and civilians of the baby-boom generation.

Among civilians, she found that having financial security and physical health before retirement were the best predictors of post-retirement satisfaction. She also found that physical health, emotional health, and retirement choice were predictive of retiree satisfaction.

However, Selkirk found that none of those predictors had any effect on retired Vietnam-era veterans. In fact, she realized that variables such as marital status, which had had an effect on World War II veterans, had less impact on Vietnam-era veterans, while issues such as peer support, which was important to them, were never explored.

She said the subject of retirement satisfaction and baby-boom veterans is still relatively new. Now that she knows which variables are inapplicable, she can focus on other more poignant variables in future studies.

“This tells us that there needs to be further investigation into how being a veteran uniquely impacts not just somebody’s retirement, but their whole life trajectory,” she said.

It is important to undertake these studies now, she said, because veterans of recent conflicts in the Middle East have a lot in common with vets from the baby-boomer generation. Finding new ways to treat today’s returning vets could help.

Selkirk interns at the VA hospital in Manhattan. Upon graduation, she’ll stay on as a postdoctoral fellow in geropsychology. Enthusiastic about working with older patients, she calls it “an honor” to work with veterans who were drafted against their will and witnessed unspeakable violence, and yet persisted upon their return to America.

“For some of them, that has meant shoving their military experience into a deep, dark place in their brain, and then as they get toward their advancing years, finding the strength and courage to face it, be curious about it, and explore it,” she said.

But the 2017 Encaenia ceremony of academic excellence wasn’t short of humor—thanks to the Lord of Manor Liam Paris.

Paris, who was tasked with delivering a playful address about his memories as a Ram, told the crowd that he first wanted to go to Fordham because of its reputation and “perfectly manicured flowers” in front of McGinley Center. He also couldn’t resist the opportunity to be a part of the “Ramily”—though he did have some gripes with the name.

“We have so many beautiful mantras—AMDG, Cura Personalis, “set the world on fire”— [but]Ramily?” he said. “Just change one letter? [We] couldn’t even put it in Latin?”

Ultimately, Paris said he couldn’t imagine being anywhere else, as he recalled spending time at “Eddies” during the spring months.

“Albeit, I’m watching from under the shade of that tree by Freeman [Hall] while I slather on SPF 2 billion,” he teased. “But there’s never a stronger moment where I look out and am reminded that I am surrounded by the some of the most talented and awe-inspiring people I’ve ever met, and we’ve all got a shared experience together.”

Class valedictorian Jennifer Rutishauser, a double major in biology and history who is graduating with a 4.0 GPA, said attending Fordham allowed her to step out of her comfort zone. She shared how a contemporary history class taught by Assistant Professor Christopher Dietrich, Ph.D., enriched her academic experience and sparked her interest in history.

“I’m sure we all had professors like this who had a particular impact on us, who helped us find our way, inspired us, pushed us, and encouraged us to grow,” she said.

In addition to being a part of a community where it was “cool to be involved in campus ministry” and participate in social justice initiatives at community spaces like POTS and the Rosedale Center, Rutishauser said Fordham was also a place where students lined up an hour in advance at the Black Box Theater just to get a seat for a show, cheered on their on their favorite University dance crew, and watched the Ramblers serenade “unsuspecting students and professors on Valentine’s Day.”

“Fordham has shaped me and all of us in many ways, but the most significant reason my experience at Fordham has been life changing is because of all of you,” she said.

Two students received special awards from Maura Mast, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill. The Claver Award, which is granted by the Jesuits of Fordham to a FCRH senior who best represents Fordham’s dedication to community service, was given to Madelyn Murphy. The Fordham College Alumni Association Award, which recognizes a FCHR senior who embodies the “Fordham spirit,” was awarded to Emma Bausert.

As the graduating seniors prepared for the next chapter in their lives, Dean Mast asked them to reflect on St. Ignatius Loyola’s Prayer for Generosity, which was handed out to attendees on a card before the ceremony began.

“As you’ll see throughout this prayer, we are continually asked to learn, to be open to reflection, and from that reflection to be open to change,” she said.

She encouraged them to be generous in their pursuits and not “count the cost” when they give.

“What if you are guided by this prayer? What if you live a life of generosity, of service, of giving?” she asked.

She told the graduates that they could transform the world with those principles.

“You are each called to something different, to something worthy,” she said. “There is no owner’s manual, there is no roadmap. You have to make the path by walking it.”

Social justice leaders Chloe Potsklan, GABELLI ’17, and Alexa McMenamin, FCLC ’17, will be awarded the Dorothy Day Peacemaker Award for Leadership in Social Action at this year’s 2017 commencement ceremonies.

“They have built amazing relationships and transformed their communities, which has inspired their fellow classmates and leaders to continue to fight for justice on campus and off campus,” said Katheryn Crawford, associate director of the The Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice.

The award’s namesake, Day, co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement, where she applied Catholic social teaching to advocate for the poor and marginalized communities.

Potsklan, who has served as a mentor and New York regional director at the Social Impact 360 program at Fordham, has helped to cultivate conversations at Fordham focused on everything from race and diversity to gender and class. She said community service allowed her to connect with her roots.

“I think most of it stems from the fact that my mom is an immigrant from Venezuela, and growing up in Greenwich, and particularly Connecticut, I was one of the few people [in my community]who were of mixed backgrounds,” said Potsklan, an information systems major.

Potsklan said her participation in the pre-orientation program Urban Plunge exposed her to the diverse community of the Bronx during her freshman year, and inspired her to raise awareness about issues that were affecting underrepresented Bronxites, including food justice and immigration. Since then, she has volunteered at local nonprofits like The Bronx is Blooming, tutored bilingual middle school and high school students, and mentored underclassmen at Fordham. But there’s still more work to do, she said.

“One thing that Father McShane said that has really resonated with me was that he wants us to leave Fordham ‘bothered.’ I really like that term because it encourages us to not be numb to the things that are going on around us,” said Potsklan, who will be volunteering in Ecuador this summer. “Even standing in solidarity with other people makes a huge difference.”

McMenamin grew up attending Quaker school in Philadelphia, where she said social justice was an integral part of her upbringing. She recalls tagging along to work with her grandmother, who taught low-income disabled students in the Philadelphia school district.

“It’s about collective labor,” she said. “We’re all personally obligated to do this work.”

McMenamin, a programming director of the Feminist Alliance at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, co-founded the anti-sexual assault organization, the It’s On Us Coalition at Fordham last year to promote healthy discussions among students around sexual assault and sexual misconduct. A double major in political science and English, McMenamin has also helped to organize a “blackout” protest at Fordham in 2015 to bring attention to racism and bias crimes.

“A lot the work that I have been doing has been about building community and making people feel like they have access when things go wrong, especially marginalized communities on campus,” said McMenamin, who writes about campus life issues for Teen Vogue.

After graduation, McMenamin will be working as a volunteering fellow at the Philadelphia nonprofit the Bread & Roses Community Fund.

Crawford said Potsklan and McMenamin’s dedication and passion for creating a better world will take them far.

“I think Chloe and Lexi have learned some great skills and lessons through the Dorothy Day Center that they will take with them to the next community they build,” she said.

As of May 15, Fordham students earned 76 awards, including Fulbright scholarships, German Academic Exchange Service grants (aka the DAAD), and Boren scholarships.

“Fordham students have won international and national recognition, including a number of firsts: from a Newman’s Own Fellowship to a Schwarzman Scholarship in Beijing, China,” said John Kezel, Ph.D., director of the Campion Institute. “Those who have worked with the institute have a lot to celebrate.”

Psychology major and Fordham soccer player Turner Block’s interest in athletes and physical impairment has earned her a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Queensland in Australia.

Under the direction of Sean Tweedy, a senior lecturer of physical activity at the university and principal investigator of its International Paralympic Committee Classification Research Partnership, an accredited classifier in Paralympics Athletics, Block will explore mental barriers and facilitators that influence athletic identity in Paralympic swimmers who have moderate to severe cerebral palsy. The research will have “ramifications for rehab,” she said.

“I’ve seen how being injured can really impact your mentality. This research will give athletic identity the weight that it deserves.”

Gabelli School of Business alumna Ran Niu is one in a select group of students who were awarded a Schwarzman Scholarship, which trains future leaders about China’s expanding role in global trends. Niu, who graduated last year with a master’s degree in global finance, said working in international affairs has long been her goal, having interned in United Nations’ Regional Commissions New York Office. She is Fordham’s first Schwarzman scholar.

“I was attracted by its vision of ‘global leadership for the 21st century.’ As an international student who has studied and worked in New York City, I feel connected to this global vision,” she said.

In August, she will enroll at Schwarzman College, a new institution that is part of Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University, with the goal of earning a master’s degree in global affairs.

As China’s foreign policy evolves, Critical Language Scholarship winner Robyn Emory said acquiring an understanding of both the language and culture could have real-world applications, especially in government. As an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas, Emory visited China while studying abroad. She has been studying Mandarin Chinese for about eight years. Through an eight-week intensive program in Xi’an, China at Shaanxi Normal University, the International Political Economy and Development (IPED) graduate student hopes to develop proficiency in the language.

“I’m trying to use my economic and political knowledge to see where conflict can come in and where it can be avoided,” said the former Peace Corps volunteer. “It’s going to take studying Chinese to understand the full side of things.”

As Critical Language scholars are paired with Chinese roommates, she is excited to engage with native speakers on a personal level.

“Having done Peace Corps and lived overseas before, I know that the cultural aspect is just as important as the language,” she said.

This summer, Aaron Kristopik, an international political economy major in Fordham’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies, will be working in the economics department of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine as part of a distinguished internship with the U.S. Department of State.

Prior to coming to Fordham, Kristopik served in the Marine Corps for close to eight years. During that time, he worked as a guard for multiple U.S. embassies, including the U.S. Embassy in Nouakchott, Mauritania. While in Africa, the New Britain, Connecticut native provided security during the 2010 Palestinian-Israeli peace talks in Egypt, he said.

As “fake news” and right-wing populism rises in Europe, Kristopik said he is hoping to learn how these changes will impact U.S. relations with Eastern European countries like the Czech Republic and Ukraine.

“There’s a lot going on in Central and Eastern Europe and it sparked my interest,” he said. “If you can understand their mindset, culture, language, and the norms of their country, it makes it more beneficial for building relationships.”

In addition to earning a Department of State internship, Kristopik has also been offered a Boren Scholarship in Czech Republic.

Kezel said the institute is investigating new fellowship opportunities all the time, and that he’d like to “see more alumni take advantage of all that our office has to offer.”

As of May 15, other prestigious scholarships won this year include:

Six additional Fulbright Fellowships: James von Albade, FCRH ’17, to France; Nina Heyden, FCRH ’17, to the United Kingdom; Gabrielle McGovern, FCRH ’17, to Costa Rica; William Stern, GSE ’20, to India; Priscilla Cintron, FCLC ’15, to the Dominican Republic; and Michael Perrin, GSAS ’14, to Spain.

Five Gates Millennium Scholarships: Kevin Berlanga, FCLC ’19; Dylan Hollingsworth, FCRH ’17; Amarachi Korie, FCLC ’18; Yota Oue, FCRH ’18; and Anisha Pednekar, GABELLI ’19.

Nine Clare Boothe Luce Scholarships: GSAS students Elle Barnes and Elizabeth Carlen; Lauren Beglin, FCRH ’19; Elizabeth Chesnut, PCS ’19; Victoria Cirrillo, FCRH ’19; Amy Feng, FCRH ’19 (2); Carolyn Ogden, FCLC ’19; and Marissa Vaccarelli, FCRH ’18.

Two Additional Critical Language Scholarships: Cody Harder, FCRH ’18 (Swahili); and Halina Shatravka, FCLC ’17 (Russian).

Three DAAD Fellowships: Sara Hurley, FCRH ’18, to the RISE Germany Program; FCRH graduate student Matthew J. Kasper; and GSAS doctoral student Michael Begun.

Four National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships:
Yoliem Miranda Alarcon, FCRH ’15; Samantha Walker, FCRH ’16; William Beatrez, FCRH ’19; and Nadine Moukdad, FCLC ’17.

One additional Boren Scholarship: Sean McKay, FCRH ’17, to Brazil.

One Newman’s Own Fellowship:
Shannon Kelsh, FCRH ’17, to work with the Women’s Business Development Center in Chicago.