What are some of the reasons why you decided to attend Fordham?
Two major reasons why I decided to attend Fordham University were the location of both campuses and the reputation of the University. When I was doing research on schools, I was intrigued by Fordham’s selective admissions, notable alumni, small class sizes, and its access to an abundance of research and resources.

What do you think you got at Fordham that you couldn’t have gotten elsewhere?
The opportunity to connect with alumni through the Fordham Mentoring Program. Being a Fordham mentee helped me get my foot through the door and into the professional world. I [took part in]the mentoring program in my junior and senior years and was matched both times with amazing people who were able to help me grow and develop my skills and career mindset.

Did you take any courses or have any experiences that helped put you on your current path? What were they, and how did they prepare you for what you’re doing now?
I had little to no experience in the office setting before I was placed in the Office of Alumni Relations for work-study. Through the staff’s guidance and instruction, I was able to learn and develop important skills such as data management, efficient communication, and organizational skills that serve as the core of my professional abilities. As a human resources intern, I was able to learn more about the functions of a human resources department and how HR supports a company or organization. The department is the backbone of an organization and plays an integral role in its success.

Who is the Fordham professor or person you admire the most, and why?
Professor Karen Siedlecki in the psychology department! I had her for most of my required classes in the psychology major and learned so much. I love how she breaks down detailed scientific concepts into topics that are easy to learn and easy to remember. She is always willing to help students and is always available to talk about research, psychology topics, or life.

What are you doing now? Can you paint us a picture of your current responsibilities? What do you hope to accomplish, personally or professionally?
Right now, I am the human resources administrative assistant at University Settlement/The Door/Broome Street Academy, a family of organizations that give back to immigrant and low-income communities and provide youth services for New York City’s disconnected youth. I am involved in onboarding new hires, data management and compliance, and maintaining the human resources information systems. I hope to gain enough experience to become a knowledgeable and skillful HR practitioner and one day lead my own team of HR professionals.

What are you optimistic about?
The end of the coronavirus pandemic! I am excited about travelling the world and trying out different cuisines, and I hope to be able to do that safely soon.

Is there anything else we should know about you, your plans, or your Fordham connection?
I am thankful to be a Fordham graduate and proud of where I am today as a first-generation college student who graduated magna cum laude in three-and-a-half years. I would not have made it here without the amazing faculty and staff members of Fordham, especially those in the Office of Alumni Relations, the psychology department, and the Mandarin Chinese department.

The injustices of offshore tax evasion. The relationship between Sigmund Freud and his mentor Jean-Martin Charcot. The connection between stress responses and glucose-sensing neurons in the brain. The power of dance to promote social-emotional learning.

These topics sparked the interest of three recent Fordham College at Lincoln Center graduates whose research papers were honored by the Global Undergraduate Awards, a Dublin-based program that recognizes top undergraduate work and seeks to connect students across cultures and disciplines.

Examining the Injustice of Tax Crimes

Public awareness of offshore financial crimes has risen since the publication of the Panama and Paradise Papers in 2015 and 2017, respectively, but Briana Boland, FCLC ’19 was left wondering whether the attention has resulted in increased regulation.

For her foreign service seminar, the international studies major looked at the tax governance policies of the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Group of 20, the international body composed of leaders from nearly two dozen of the world’s largest economies.

What she found is that while public scrutiny of offshore finance has increased, there has been little progress toward better international tax governance.

“Global governance mechanisms have failed to effectively regulate tax avoidance,” Boland writes in “Tax Injustice: The Failure of Public Scrutiny to Translate into Global Tax Governance.”

She does express optimism about the potential for increased public attention to lead to better regulation, stating in the paper’s conclusion that “[p]ublic engagement and activism to hold states and intergovernmental organizations accountable … is critically important to ensuring any future justice and equality in the international economy.”

Boland’s paper was recognized by the Global Undergraduate Awards as a Highly Commended entry in the political science and international relations category—a designation given to the top 10% of papers submitted in each subject area. It later was named a Regional Winner, meaning it was deemed the best paper in that category in the United States and Canada.

Boland described the recognition as “a tangible result of hard work and scholarship,” and expressed gratitude to her faculty mentor, adjunct instructor Anna Levy, “for encouraging me to pursue my research interest in the topic and for continuing to work with me even after our class had ended.”

Since graduating from Fordham last May, Boland spent the summer in Dalian, China, studying Chinese as a recipient of the Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. State Department. Now she’s back in New York City interning for U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on immigration and foreign affairs issues.

Freud as a Mentee—and the Amygdala’s Role in Eating Behavior

Kaetlyn Conner, FCLC ’19, who majored in integrative neuroscience, produced two award-winning papers.

In “Charcot: The Catalyst of Freudian Psychoanalysis,”—which received the Global Undergraduate Awards’ Highly Commended designation in history—she focused on the relationship between Sigmund Freud and one of his mentors, Jean-Martin Charcot. Conner decided to write about Freud and Charcot as a final assignment for her interdisciplinary capstone course, Hysteria/Sexuality/Unconscious, taught by professors Doron Ben-Atar and Anne Hoffman, because they were both prominent figures in the study of hysteria and sexuality.

Freud worked under Charcot, a prominent neurologist, at Paris’s La Salpêtrière hospital in 1885 and 1886, an experience that gave Freud the tools to invent the practice of psychoanalysis, Conner wrote.

“Freud’s ideas about trauma, sexuality, and hypnosis, that were formed and shaped by his early exposure to male hysteric patients and Charcot’s therapeutic methodologies, went on to have significant impacts on Freud’s way of thinking,” she wrote.

“By studying the works of both men, I was able to draw parallels between the two and infer some of the effects that Charcot’s work may have had on Freud’s career.”

Conner’s second paper earned the Highly Commended honor in psychology.

In “Glucose-Sensing Neurons in the Medial Amygdala and their Role in Glucose Homeostasis,” she investigated the way the medial amygdala portion of the brain responds to glucose levels, and how that affects subjects’ eating behaviors.

While most studies on glucose-sensing in the brain have focused on similar neurons in the hypothalamus and brain stem, Conner finds that the medial amygdala, which is central to reproductive, sexual, emotional, and defensive responses, may also have a role in feeding behaviors or glucose regulation.

“As obesity rates in America continue to rise at alarming rates,” Conner writes, “research investigating the neuronal processes and mechanisms behind feeding behavior will continue to be of the utmost importance.”

The paper came out of an independent research project Conner conducted under the supervision of Sarah Stanley, Ph.D., at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. Conner continued to working in the Stanley Laboratory after graduating from Fordham, thanks to a grant from the American Heart Association that allowed her to extend her work there through the summer. More recently, she moved back to her hometown of Pittsburgh for a job as a research specialist in the CARE Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which studies how parental care is related to how children learn to express and regulate their emotions using brain and behavioral methods.

Conner says that her research and professional success reaffirm that she chose the right school.

“Fordham’s unique mixture of supportive peers and engaging professors really challenged me and gave me the space to explore new areas of research that I had not previously considered,” she said.

Dance Education as an Agent for Change

Caroline Shriver, FCLC ’19, double majored in dance and Latin American and Latino studies, and she brought both of those subjects to bear in her award-winning research, which was recognized in the anthropology and cultural studies category.

In “Becoming an Agent for Positive Change: Youth Development of Self Efficacy and Agency through Social and Emotional Dance Education in Aguas Frías, Colombia,” Shriver sought to demonstrate how Colombia’s tumultuous history and identity of conflict pervade the country to this day, and how students would benefit from an emphasis on social-emotional learning.

After teaching dance-based social-emotional learning classes in the rural community of Aguas Frías and conducting interviews with a number of her students, she found that “a physicalized form of social-emotional learning gave students the opportunity to develop a degree of self-efficacy.”

In these classes, she had students take part in physical trust-building exercises, and she asked them to teach a dance move to their peers to build a collaborative choreography.

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Employing her research and that of others, she concluded that physicalized social-emotional education “offers an effective strategy to combat Colombia’s social order of conflict and provides a vehicle for young people to develop personal and cultural agency.”

Since graduating from Fordham, Shriver traveled to Spain, Berlin, and Panama, where she participated in dance workshops and taught dance. She also led a group of 13 undergraduate dancers from the U.S. on a dance outreach trip to Colombia. After returning from these travels, she has been freelancing as both a dancer and dance teacher. She said she plans on continuing to pursue a career as an artist and social activist.

“This award reminds me that arts education can have a positive impact on young people around the world, and it inspires me to further develop and share my passion for dance education,” Shriver said.

Boland, Conner, and Shriver are not the first Fordham students to be recognized by the Global Undergraduate Awards. In 2018, Joshua Anthony, FCLC ’19, was named a Global Winner for his paper on the morphing historical perceptions of La Malinche, the indigenous woman who was the chief translator to Hernán Cortés.

“The range of the majors and minors of these winners captures just some of the breadth of the many academic and research opportunities offered at Fordham University,” said Josie Grégoire, J.D., assistant dean for seniors at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. “We are delighted with their success.”

Erik Angamarca needed a backup plan. He had studied in Beijing during his junior year at Fordham and loved it—the food, the culture, the people. Passionate about travel and public service, multilingual, and long set on joining the U.S. diplomatic corps, he applied to the State Department’s Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship Program in pursuit of his dream.

The program turned him down.

“I was sort of bummed,” Angamarca says. “My ‘Plan A’ was to apply for the Foreign Service.”

He went on to graduate from Fordham in 2014 with a degree in international political economy and a minor in Mandarin Chinese. Looking back, he realizes he wasn’t quite ready—but he also wasn’t prepared to give up.

So, the summer after graduation, he applied on a whim to teach English in South Korea through the Council on International Educational Exchange. “I didn’t know one word of Korean, but I’d just been to China and China was great,” he says. “I thought, ‘Let me get that experience overseas and learn more about Asia.’”

And learn he did. During his two-year teaching stint, Angamarca spent four months exploring East Asia—backpacking through the Philippines, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia. He lodged in temples and volunteered at an elephant sanctuary.

The experience paid off. Late last year, Angamarca earned a Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Graduate Fellowship, which will support his training for the Foreign Service. He recently began graduate studies at Georgetown University.

An Early Interest in Diplomacy

Angamarca wants to become an ambassador, and even though he’s years away from that goal, he has already gotten a few tastes of what it’s like to represent America abroad. He got the travel bug at age 10, after leaving New York to spend two years in his parents’ native Ecuador, where he realized that he liked trying new things (roasted guinea pig, anyone?) and first envisioned himself as a diplomat.

“Even at that age, you get a lot of questions,” recalls Angamarca, whose flawless manners and quiet self-assurance seem like a natural fit for a career in diplomacy. “‘How is New York?’ ‘What does snow feel like?’ Teaching them about Thanksgiving. I didn’t know until years later that I was representing the U.S.”

Another experience followed his adventures in South Korea and East Asia. After returning to the U.S. in 2016, he reconnected with Fordham’s Office of Prestigious Fellowships, which helped him earn a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Taiwan. He spent the 2017–2018 academic year there, not only teaching English to grammar school students but also introducing them to American traditions like Halloween costumes and candy canes.

As he pursues his studies at Georgetown on the Rangel fellowship, supporters have cheered him on, including his parents, his younger sister, and Patricia Scroggs, a retired Foreign Service officer who directs the Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Program. She’s known Angamarca since he participated in the organization’s undergraduate scholars program.

“From the time I met Erik, I thought, he is such a natural diplomat, is interested in so many things, and interacts so well with people,” says Scroggs, also noting his adaptability and resourcefulness. “He has done the kinds of things he’ll be called upon to do as a Foreign Service officer.”

When Angamarca applied for this year’s Rangel fellowship, which provides full financial support for the two years of diplomatic studies, he was one of 30 people chosen from among 550 applicants.

“I’m already planning to be there at his ambassadorial swearing-in ceremony,” says Scroggs, seeing into the future, to the culmination of Angamarca’s dreams.

He’s on track to graduate in 2020 and must stay in the diplomatic corps until at least 2025.

“I’ve always told the director it’s not a five-year commitment for me,” Angamarca says. “I definitely want to stay in the Foreign Service for a while. It’s needed now more than ever.”

—Julie Bourbon