Tag: featured

Before entering Baruch College, Mark Smiley had taken only one science class in his life. A little more than 15 years later, he is an emergency physician in North Carolina, saving lives on a regular basis.

The scene: New York City, 1996. Acting legend and Manhattan native Robert De Niro and his producing partner, Jane Rosenthal, whose dream of nurturing the local film community led them to found the Tribeca Film Center several years prior, need a finance whiz with a commercial real estate background for their growing venture. Enter Zicklin School grad Sandy O’Hearen (’91), who takes what proves to be a life-changing phone call from a job recruiter with an offer she can’t refuse.

When President John F. Kennedy famously declared, “We choose to go to the Moon” in 1962, few Americans fully understood how we would achieve that lofty goal, including—apparently—many NASA engineers. “I knew nothing about space, but who did?” laughs Gerald Sandler (’56), an unassuming statistics major who became a lead engineer and program manager with the Apollo Lunar Module Program. “Even for those of us behind the scenes, reaching the Moon was like going on a vacation where you don’t know how you’ll get there and have no idea what the destination will be like!”