The CUNY Baccalaureate Blog

B.S., June 2006, Marketing Anthropology

• CUNY Pipeline Fellowship
• Dean’s List

Susan Van Brackle is an entrepreneur who went back to college after 9/11 had a devastating effect on her small business. She had opened a niche cosmetics brand in 1997, ultimately gaining distribution in boutiques and department stores. She later opened her own store in Harlem after obtaining  a $100,000 government sponsored small business loan. Before opening her business and before jobs in the marketing arena, she studied retail marketing at Rochester Institute of Technology from 1979-82 and fashion buying and merchandising at Fashion Institute of Technology from 1982-89.

In the CUNY Baccalaureate Program, Van Brackle designed the unique area of concentration Marketing Anthropology with the support of her two mentors, both of whom are at York College: Profs. Linda Perry, Accounting and Business and William Divale, Social Science. Her marketing courses were taken at Brooklyn and York Colleges. Her Anthropology courses, all taken at York, included “Techniques of Cross Cultural Research, Medical Anthropology, Anthropology of Sex, The Caribbean” and “Alcohol and Obesity.” She used sociology methods courses to pull the two disciplines together. She states that “the ethnographic research methods used to gain understanding of a culture can be similarly applied to consumer research. Moreover, the seeds of marketing were sown through a series of evolutionary cultural experiences.” For each of her courses, she has explained how the two disciples throw light on each other as, for example, in studying medical anthropology, she examined how shamans in Peru “marketed” their healing powers, how competition among healers produces an ‘”ideology of consumerism.’” Van Brackle published a commentary on her unique “major” in The Society for Applied Anthropology’s August 2005 Newsletter; she is a CUNY Graduate Center Pipeline Fellow who recently presented her senior thesis at the Graduate Center: “Psychographics and It’s Impact on 21^st Century Asian Market Consumerism.”  CUNY Pipeline prepares minority students for the professorate. Van Brackle has applied to MA, MBA and Ph.D. programs.