The CUNY Baccalaureate Blog

Kayhan Irani: Theater and Social Change, B.A., June 2008; Sumasil Foundation Scholarship; Diego Hidalgo Scholarship for the Arts; FEZANA Arts Scholarship; ZAGNY Scholarship; Weston Community Engagement Fellowship; Thomas W. Smith Academic Fellowship; Kaye Arts and Humanities Fellowship; Fali Chothia Charitable Trust Scholarship; Dean’s List.

Kayhan Irani considers herself an “artivist,” fusing theater with activism and social change to activate audiences and transform society.

After graduating from the High School of Performing Arts, Irani longed for a way to combine her passion for the theater with her desire to make the world a better place. She dropped out of college after her first year to try to find a field that would satisfy her. In 2003 she created a one-woman show, We’ve Come Undone, which highlights the lives of immigrant women post 9/11, combining contemporary performance with participatory theater to engage audiences in political and social change. She has performed the show nationally and internationally for universities, non-profit organizations and at theater festivals. She then became a practitioner and trainer of the techniques of Theater of the Oppressed, a participatory form of social change theater developed by the Brazilian director and activist Augusto Boal. In 2004 Irani led theater workshops in occupied Iraq with Childhood’s Voices and Happy Families, two organizations teaching and healing children through the arts. After this immersion in using the arts for social change, Irani decided to return to the university to integrate her experiences with scholarship and research.

While in CUNY BA she was awarded an Asia Pacific Performance Exchange Fellowship at UCLA where she worked with artists from Asia and the U.S. She was awarded a grant from the International Center for Tolerance Education to train ESL teachers in how to use interactive theater to support ESL learning. Working with The Point, a community organization and cultural center in the South Bronx, she wrote and developed a children’s play about asthma and civic pride called Jackie ‘n’ the Beanstalk which combines theater with circus and aerial acrobatics. She was part of a team of educators and artists working on a three-year project with the Barnard College Education Program that created a curriculum to teach about race and racism through storytelling and the arts.

In 2007 Irani was awarded a certificate of recognition by Mayor Bloomberg as part of Immigrant History Week for her work in immigrant communities. She has led theater programs at public schools, for community groups, at juvenile detention facilities, for government agencies and with the general public and is often invited to present her work at major conferences.

She recently co-edited a volume of essays entitled Telling Stories to Change the World: Global Voices on the Power of Stories to Build Community and make Social Justice Claims, about projects around the world that use storytelling as a way of creating social justice, released in May 2008 by Routledge. Currently she is a writer and the Director of Outreach for an ESL TV show produced by the Mayor’s Office of Adult Education and CUNY; this is a project she volunteered for through her Weston Fellowship.

Irani’s degree was constructed with courses in Theater, Political Science, Media Studies, Anthropology and Urban Studies at Brooklyn, Hunter and City Colleges and CUNY’s School of Professional Studies, working with Profs. John Krinsky, Political Science, City and Dale Byam, Theater, Brooklyn.

Kelly Gola: Psychology and Literature, B.A., June 2008; Thomas W. Smith Academic Fellow; Dean’s List.

“My educational history has been a kaleidoscopic array of missteps and accidental fortune. I look back at all of my failures and accomplishments and occasionally indulge the inner self-effacing voice that laments, if I knew then what I know now. However, I would never know what I know now if I hadn’t screwed it up so much then.”

Prior to applying to the CUNY BA Program, Kelly Gola was a hairstylist employed on fashion photo shoots for magazines such as W, Vogue, French Vogue, Italian Vogue and Bizarre, working with the likes of Madonna, Britney Spears, Cameron Diaz and Muhammad Ali. “I looked into the face of Body Dysmorphia, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder and Substance Abuse…I saw how ugly beauty can be.” On applying to CUNY BA, Gola was interested in studying writing “to get back,” as she wrote “at the glitterati that had offended me. It was only later after a number of psychology classes that I realized that I was part of that set. I had quixotic notions about the fashion world that left me disillusioned and it begged the question, why? All this questioning and self-reflection washed me up onto the shores of Narrative Psychology - the psychological study of how we narrate our lives. This field speaks to both my love of story and my pragmatic nature. It combines them in a way that is no longer entirely introspective and selfish, but produces generativity that, after all my years in fashion, I suddenly thirst for.” Working with Profs. Elaine Kauvar, English, Baruch and Suzanne Ouellette, Psychology, the Graduate Center, Gola’s coursework has been done at Brooklyn, Hunter and the Graduate Center.

In winter 2007, Gola traveled to Argentina to learn Spanish and to study the country’s rich history and social evolution. Since her return, she has been assisting David Frost in his dissertation research on the narratives of gays and lesbians in rural and urban areas.

Tennessee Jones: The Religious Dimensions of Social Justice in Literature, B.A., January 2008, Magna cum Laude; Thomas W. Smith Academic Fellowship; Jacob Javits Fellowship; Dean’s List

“I grew up in the Appalachian mountains of East Tennessee. Our water came from a creek spring, and my backyard was uncut wilderness. Three generations of my family lived on top of each other in a little holler, and my parents grew a tobacco crop to supplement their incomes as a sheet metal mechanic and seamstress. It was a place steeped in tradition, and though we lived on the top of the oldest mountains in the world, the horizon of opportunity was very limited.” So wrote Tennessee Jones in his application to the Thomas W. Smith Academic Fellowship, CUNY BA’s major fellowship program.

After he finished high school, Jones hitchhiked around the country and produced self-published magazines for four years; after exploring “every major city,” he knew New York was where he wanted to make his mark. By the time he came to Hunter and CUNY BA, he had considerable accomplishments to his name: publication of a book of short stories, Deliver Me From Nowhere (2005), praised in The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere, and a full-time job as an editor at Soft Skull Press. Soft Skull’s publisher credits Jones with helping take the company from “a scrappy, hit-or-miss operation to one of the more culturally significant independent publishers in the U.S,” adding that he was delighted to learn of Jones’ plan to apply to the CUNY BA because he “would be a perfect individual for a self-directed plan of study.”

Jones’ concentration uses the lens of literature and the practice of creative writing to examine the dynamics of oppressed communities. Under the direction of Prof. Barbara Sproul, Religion, Hunter, Jones’ area was made up of courses in Africana Studies, Religion and English. He included an independent study in Religion and an individual tutorial with Prof Harriet Luria, English, Hunter; both were for work on his current novel in progress, an exploration of the lives of three working class girls growing up in eastern Kentucky. Jones has been accepted to the MFA program at Hunter College.

Bonnie Duen considered a number of different career tracks before hitting upon her true passion for public service. First, she attended Adelphi University to study Biology to become a dentist.  Then, she went to Queens College to study Accounting.  The following semester she switched to Food and Nutrition.  An office job in an architecture firm led her to change her interests to a career in Architectural Design, which led her to Queensborough Community College.  There she served in the Student Government, first as Executive Secretary, then Evening Vice President, then as President - the first Asian-American female President of her class.

Suddenly, Duen was bitten by the public service bug.  She entered the CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies, making John Jay her home college.  Under the guidance of John Jay faculty mentor Professor Jeanne-Marie Col, Public Management, she designed her own major, “Leadership Studies in Public Policy,” using courses from John Jay and Baruch Colleges.

Duen became a New York City Urban Fellow upon her graduation in 2006.  The Urban Fellows Program provides an unparalleled opportunity for young professionals to gain meaningful work experience in public policy, urban planning and government operations as they consider careers in public service. Duen was assigned to the Economic Development Corporation - Real Estate Development.

Today, Duen is participating in the National Urban Fellowship Inc, a nonprofit organization in collaboration with Baruch College CUNY, which involves an accelerated 14-month Master degree in Public Policy and nine months of hands-on work experience mentorship, which prepares leaders with with a strong commitment to equity and social justice issues for service in public and private organizations.

During her nine month mentorship, Duen has been with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest foundation dedicated to awarding grants for the improvement of health and healthcare, working at AARP’s National Office in Washington, D.C.  This exceptional opportunity has provided Duen with dual experience in philanthropy and advocacy.

Born in Portland and raised in New York City, Duen feels she has the best of both worlds with her Hong Kong heritage and exposure to American culture as an “ABC” (American-born Chinese).  After her interest in public service was sparked in the Queensborough Community College’s Student Government, she went on to work with Council member of District 20 John C. Liu, working on improving constituent services. In April 2005, she was chosen to participate in the prestigious Salzburg Seminar in Austria, where she studied global citizenship and World War II.  Believing that the prevention of wars lies in civic duty, she founded “CUNY Unity” at John Jay College to encourage students to be proactive in making a difference.

Duen is always refining her mission as to how she can have an impact in this global society.  Her future plans are to travel around the world to share best practices and encourage lifelong learning.  Currently, she is searching for a dual JD/Ph.D. program in Global Leadership Development.  She would like to work on projects that address the intersections between economic development, education policy and social services in all sectors and levels of government.  She is interested in running for political office with a goal of establishing a scholarship/leadership program involving all levels of government that encourages young adults in public service.  Her own experiences have taught her the importance of civic engagement and the difference that one person can make in giving back to society.

April Mojica has just begun her graduate studies at George Mason University in the M.A. in English Literature.  She lives in in Fairfax County, Virginia, with her teenage daughter, Zuri.  She also plans to take classes at George Washington University, where she works in the Division of Human Resources. Mojica graduated from the CUNY Baccalaureate in 2005, cum Laude and as a member of Chi Alpha Epsilon Academic Honor Society.  In the CUNY Baccalaureate, she designed areas of concentration in World Literature and Writing under the direction of Professor Steven Nardi, English, Medgar Evers College.  She is the recipient of a number of awards including: Competitive Fellowship, Federated Fellow of APARC, Boston University; Medgar Evers College (MEC) Student of the Year Outstanding Achievement Award, 2005; College/Departmental Service Award, English Dept. MEC; Provost’s Distinguished List Award, MEC; and the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship.  While she was an undergraduate, she was a presenter at the Uncovering Connections Conference in 2004; a performer for the Women’s Creative Expressions/Center for Women’s Development in 2005; a participant at the ATHGO International Symposium, U.N., 2005; and she organized “On the Soap Box” for the Democracy Project in 2005.

Mojica recently wrote to the CUNY Baccalaureate Program, saying:  “I enjoyed a transformational, wonderful, rich and varied undergraduate career at CUNY (second to none!).  I miss it and long to come back one day soon as a professor.  It was not been a straight shot for me, first obtaining my GED, then my A.A. and finally my BA, but my B.A. was my crowning achievement.   I was the first in my family, on both sides (and I have eight siblings) to get so far academically.  I had exceptional experiences awarded me through Medgar Evers College, CUNY, and the CUNY Baccalaureate Program — a scholarship, a fellowship to Africa, an invitation by Medgar Evers College to be the keynote speaker at their annual gala, a research internship, a job as Editor of Medgar Evers’ student newspaper, even my face on the buses and trains of NYC (Editor’s Note:  Mojica’s image and story were part of a comprehensive CUNY Public Relations campaign).  These were unimaginable honors for me – almost too much to process all at once.  But, process them I did.  Now that all the fanfare is over, and the golden dust has settled and blown away, I am still here with my dreams and drive.

I never miss an opportunity to learn or be inspired, if I can help it. I was just in NYC this weekend for both the 9th Annual National Black Writers Conference (held at Medgar Evers College) and the 21st Anniversary of the International Cross Cultural Black Women’s Studies Institute where I wildly harvested all of the inspirational energy of those varieties to sustain me until next year.  For now I am here in the Midatlantic and have rooted enough to know that Georgetown does National Poetry month up well and will feature some old favorites.

I’ve attached a link to an article written about me by the alternative high school I attended. When the Director of Y.A.L.A (Young Adult Learning Academy, Manhattan Valley) looked up on the train and saw my face on the CUNY poster, he knew that not only had I succeeded in obtaining my GED but was even on the verge of graduating with my B.A. so he wanted an article from me for his current students to read.”

http://www.youthcomm.org/NYC%20Features/April2006/NYC-2006-04-14b.htm

Prior to applying to the CUNY Baccalaureate, William McCaig was a largely self-taught, moderately successful Information Technology specialist, who had “an aversion to formal educational systems and shunned them whenever possible.”  But in finally deciding to go to college, he said “The scientific arts have always intrigued me for their pursuit of knowledge and truth, as well as the many mysteries that are waiting to be solved.  It is my intention to combine my affinity for technology and my fascination with science into an academic course of study, and eventually a career.  To this end, I am interested in taking courses in computer programming, systems design, biology and chemistry.”  

McCaig was able to accomplish his goals through the individualized CUNY Baccalaureate; he entered in Fall 2003 and designed concentrations in Computer Science and Molecular Biology, taking courses at City, Hunter and John Jay Colleges, under the guidance of faculty mentors Prof. Virginia Teller, Computer Science, Hunter and Prof. Weigang Qui, Biology, Hunter.  During his senior year, his hard work was rewarded with a National Science Foundation Scholarship.  McCaig graduated Magna Cum Laude in June 2007; he is currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Genetics at Stony Brook University.  A paper that he wrote with Prof. Weigang Qui was recently accepted for publication in the CDC journal “Emerging Infectious Diseases.”

Gertrud Lenzer is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and a member of the doctoral faculty in Sociology at CUNY’s Graduate Center. In 1991, she founded the sociology of children as a new field and section of the American Sociological Association and was designated its founding chair. In the same year, she founded the interdisciplinary field and program of children’s studies at Brooklyn College, where she is also director of the children’s studies center. She has published several books and articles, particularly on the U.N. convention on the rights of the child and children’s studies. Professor Lenzer has been the recipient of a number of prestigious awards, grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the National Humanities Center, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

Here’s an excerpt from her address from the 2007 CUNY Baccalaureate Program Commencement Ceremony:

For many years, I have had the good fortune to serve as mentor to numbers of CUNY BA students, who have chosen as their concentration the interdisciplinary field of Children’s Studies which include wide-ranging interests from education, the human rights of children, and children and youth at risk and extend all the way to children and the arts…Such examples, however, represent only a small fraction of the manifold interests which you, our older and seasoned students, bring to the individualized academic CUNY BA program in which you create your own major and curriculum under the guidance of a faculty mentor.

The CUNY BA Program can proudly claim 700 current students and 6000 alumni. The impressive accomplishments of this Program and its students are further exemplified in numerous academic honors which range from inclusion on the Dean’s List and Dean’s Certificates for Academic Excellence to the awards of numerous distinguished and diverse academic fellowships and scholarships, such as the Thomas W. Smith Academic Fellowship, the Diego Hildago Fellowship, and the CUNY BA/BS Alumni Scholarship. Among this 2006/2007 class as well, many of you are being graduated summa cum laude and magna cum laude.

On behalf of all faculty mentors, I am happy to convey to you today our congratulations on your accomplishment. A day like today testifies to the best the City University of New York brings to its students and its students bring to the City University of New York. As Benjamin Disraeli said 150 years ago: “A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.” Although, according famously to Francis Bacon, “knowledge itself is power,” I would like to add that with knowledge comes to us the responsibility for all those who are not as fortunate as you and I are to participate meaningfully in this “place of light, liberty, and of learning.” For all of us also have the mission to bring light and liberty and the fruits of learning to others, to our communities and our nation.

Jonathan Shannon is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and a member of the doctoral faculty in both Anthropology and Music at CUNY’s Graduate Center. He earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the City University of New York Graduate Center. His areas of interest include Cultural Anthropology, Aesthetics, Ethnomusicology, Postcolonial Studies, Psychological Anthropology, Religion, The Middle East, Islamic Society. His research focuses on musical aesthetics and cultural politics in the Arab world and Mediterranean. He has conducted field research in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Morocco, and Spain. His book, Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria, was recently published by Wesleyan University. He was recently awarded a Fulbright Regional Grant for the Middle East, a multiple country award that he is using for ethnographic field research in Syria and Morocco.

Here’s an excerpt from his address from the 2005 CUNY Baccalaureate Program Commencement Ceremony:

When I graduated from college, one of my professors encouraged us to prepare for “the real world.” For you, students of this twenty-headed hydra of an academic beast known as the City University of New York, earning your degree has been very much a part of “the real world.” You live in New York City, Capital of the World (or so we like to think), with its amazing riches and tragedies, opportunities and hurdles, and real life staring at you (or shouting) from every corner, every subway platform. And you are CUNY students, navigating a system full of gems hidden in decayed gardens. To borrow a metaphor from the world of technology, I like to think of CUNY as the Windows 98 of the academic world: out-of-date, clumsy, too large, and prone to frequent crashes. Yet out of this unwieldy operating system you have managed to carve for yourselves a program of study that is - to stretch the metaphor - the Mac OS X of the University: smoother, sleeker, and much more user friendly (in large part due to the work of the CUNY BA Program staff, I should add). It still crashes once in a while, but that’s the nature of the game. I think that the CUNY Baccalaureate Program is remarkable, not only because of the enormous diversity of potential instructors and courses made available to you CUNY-wide, but because of the remarkable diversity of your interests, interests that chafe at the rigid pigeon holes of traditional majors, which are too often cookie cutter degrees for cookie cutter students. You break that mold and by doing so help to transform the system itself, to give it much needed upgrades.

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.

B.S. June 2006, A Sociological Approach to Human Services

• Thomas W. Smith Academic Fellowship

Raul Garcia started out at New York City College of Technology in computer science but felt unsatisfied. He eventually found his calling in human services; he says, “I believe that everyone comes to this Earth with a calling and that mine is to help others and be an asset to society, especially my community.” Garcia is now working for Alianza Dominicana, Inc. in the high school that he graduated from, providing recently arrived students the same help he once got when he arrived from the Dominican Republic not knowing English nor anything about this culture. Upon his graduation, he was promoted to after school coordinator. Before Alianza Dominicana, he worked in an AIDS program; among his many other extracurricular activities he directs the activities of the Youth Ministry in his church. Garcia has fashioned a unique area of study: “A Sociological Approach to Human Services,” and he is mentored by Prof. Justine Pawlukewicz in Human Service at New York City College of Technology (NYCCT) and Prof. Madeline Moran in Sociology at Lehman College. His courses include Human Services courses at NYCCT and such sociology courses “Social Movements,” “Population Problems,” and  “Race and Ethnicity” at Lehman College and, in Africana Studies, “Dominican Identity” at Hunter College. In addition to rounding out his perspective, he is taking electives at Hostos Community College: “History of Latino America” and “Hispanic Migration.” Garcia is applying to the Hunter College School of Social Work