A string of alumni who worked as assistants for the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program and/or who interned at The New York Review of Books are launching careers in the publishing industry.
Baruch alumna Ashley Candelario, a former NYRB intern, recently got a job at HarperOne Group (HarperCollins Español, HarperVia, Amistad, HarperOne) in the publicity department. Alumna Nikkia Rivera, who does publicity for Flatiron Books, was a Harman program assistant. Katherine Hernandez, who works at Simon & Schuster, was also a Harman assistant.
The pathway to the publishing industry “seems to be a lovely pattern for former Harman assistants,” said Professor Bridgett Davis (Journalism), former director of the Harman Program.
Student Sable Gravesandy and Baruch alumna Anacaona RodriguezMartinez, who are both interning at The New York Review of Books, recently earned a double byline in NYRB for an interview with Ed Park, a novelist, journalist, former executive editor at Penguin Press, and founding editor of The Believer magazine.
Double-bylined article in New York Review of Books by Baruch student and alumna
“Our Harman interns are doing us proud over there,” said Harman Program director Esther Allen, who coordinates the NYRB internships for Baruch students.
Rodriguez is studying for her master’s at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
Candelario decided to pursue a career in publishing after her stint at NYRB. The internship provided “the skill set and experience that made me confident in pursuing other internships, and eventually, my current role” at HarperCollins, she said.
She double-majored in English and journalism, with a minor in translation studies, and said her “wonderful professors … offered adequate space for me to further cultivate my love for literature and storytelling, across language and form.” She looks back on Baruch as a “place where I felt welcomed, encouraged, and understood, which meant more to me than I can describe during what felt like constant turbulence in my personal life.”
“In my ‘Immigrant Cities’ course, I have amazing students. Behind them stand amazing parents. The mother of my student Marc serves on the leadership team of @unitehere100, and she visited our class today. Sussie Lozada is the union’s Secretary-Treasurer.
“… @unitehere100represents ~18K food service & restaurant workers NY/NJ, nearly all immigrants and many women of color. Sussie’s an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, a feminist, a single mother, and Latina Muslim; she has fought for social justice since she was a teen.
Sussie Lozada, right, speaking to a Baruch Zoom class about her union work
“…In an hour-long conversation, Sussie shared with us the work that the union does, what motivates her in her work, and the importance of community organizing around issues affecting workers, immigrants, and women.
“…Sussie also encouraged my students to get involved with the community, and she welcomed them to apply for a communications internship with her union. Sussie really inspired us all, and my students asked such thoughtful questions. It was a good day!”
Exciting news: Live theater is back at Baruch College with the production of And Then There Was Us.
It’s a new student-written musical developed by Tony Award- and two-time Obie Award-winning playwright/songwriter Stew (Passing Strange).
This will be the first live-audience theater event at Baruch College since March 2020, when colleges across the country and around the world switched to distance-learning models amid the Covid 19 pandemic.
And Then There Was Us presents a series of original musical vignettes and songs that explore the bounds of love, death, friendship, tragedy, and coming-of-age in New York City. Directed by faculty member Christopher Scott, the production features the writing of Baruch undergraduates Kenneth Fremer, Sable Gravesandy, Ursula Hansberry, Inga Keselman, Nicole Nelson, Brittany Williams, and the talented community of actors and crew members at Baruch.
Unfortunately the show, which runs November 16-20, is already sold out, so we can’t invite you to buy tickets, but you can read more about it here, and we hope that more performances will be coming soon to our campus!
Students pursuing master’s degrees in corporate communication heard from three alumni in a panel organized by Professor Caryn Medved for her “Introduction to Corporate Communication” course. The theme was “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Challenges and Opportunities for Communication Professionals.”
The alumni were Mary Anne Ravenel, diversity business partner at Facebook; Sabina Mehmood, product manager, Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index; and Meeckel Beecher, global head of DEI at Shutterstock. They were joined by Carmella Glover, DEI director for the Arthur Page Society and president of the Diversity Action Alliance.
DEI in communications speakers
Glover’s organization would like to see the communication industry “as diverse as the United States is by 2025.” That will require a major acceleration in progress, but she said it’s become easier to get organizations to sign on to DEI goals in the wake of the racial reckoning that followed George Floyd’s murder.
But because DEI is a relatively new area, “there’s no real roadmap” for achieving goals, Ravenel said. The speakers agreed that simply collecting data and being transparent about demographics is a key starting point for any organization–though that’s often easier pledged than done. But you can’t identify gaps or track progress without detailed information on a company’s makeup and how it changes over time.
The speakers noted that improving DEI isn’t just about recruitment and hiring. It also involves an unflinching examination of track records and policies in areas like promotion, salaries, and retention. At the same time, “DEI is not just HR,” as Beecher put it. Depending on the company, DEI principles may also need to be applied to areas like product development, marketing, and how customers are cultivated.
What challenges do women and LGBTQ individuals face in the military? What issues exist for Black veterans? How have Vietnam-era veterans coped with PTSD, and what lessons might their experience hold for a new generation of veterans?
These issues and others were discussed by three incredible featured speakers and two students at a powerful and moving Baruch-hosted pre-Veterans Day event: “Listening to Veterans,” Nov. 9, 2021.
Baruch College President S. David Wu offered introductory remarks and referenced his own national service in the Taiwanese Navy. The other speakers, all of them US military veterans from the CUNY community, brought expertise on a variety of issues related to the experience of serving in the military. You can watch a video of the hour-long event here:
Speakers for Listening to Veterans event, Nov 9
We were thrilled to have Tanya Domi, a US Army veteran and CUNY Graduate Center director of public relations, participating. She’s an expert and activist on women’s/LGBTQ issues in the military.
We were also incredibly honored to have the participation of Isiah James, US Army veteran, Baruch MPA alumnus, and senior policy director of Black Veterans Project. He spoke about a recent trip to lobby officials in Washington to provide funding to care for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We also heard from Professor Glenn Petersen, an anthropologist who teaches at Baruch Weissman and at the CUNY Graduate Center. He served in the US Navy in Vietnam and recently wrote a memoir reflecting on the trauma and mental and emotional repercussions of his service, called War and the Arc of Human Experience.
We were thrilled to have two Baruch College seniors participating. Roy Quintuna and Jacob Michaels spoke about their experiences and the challenges and opportunities of military service, along with reflections on their education at Baruch.
Baruch students Roy Quintuna, who’s in the ROTC, and Jacob Michaels, a Navy veteran
Roy shared his perspective as the child of immigrants (his parents are from Ecuador) and a first-generation college student. He is an officer candidate in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps and is attending Baruch on an Air Force scholarship, majoring in Intercultural and International Communication with a minor in Spanish. He recalled telling his father when he was young that he wanted to be a pilot, and his dad saying, “I can’t help you.” The military, he says, offered him “a pathway forward.”
Jacob is majoring in political science and philosophy, and minoring in psychology and Japanese. He served in the US Navy from 2010 to 2019 as “an antiterrorism/force protection specialist as well as working within the nation’s intelligence community as a cryptologist and fusion analyst. All this just means I’m very skilled at standing in one place scanning the distance and I can make a solid PowerPoint.”
He said he’d wondered during his service what was the point of “all the suffering in Afghanistan … Was the Navy, as they say in their commercials, ‘a global force for good’ or did I devote my twenties to an organization that only helped to stoke the fires of imperialism?” At Baruch, “I got to ask my questions from brilliant professors like Claudia Halbac, Cory Evans, and David Lindsey. I learned terms like hegemony and grand strategy; about blowback and the close relationship between the Saudi royal family and the United States government. What I also learned was that I played a very tiny role in a very large machine … and that the moral failings and choices of the officers and politicians controlling the US military over the last two decades, both elected and unelected, that led us into ideological forever wars do not reflect and define my own choices to work with and for my fellow man.”
Please join us on November 18 at 4 pm on Zoom for the next “We Are Climate Action” event, called “Climate Change: Artists Respond.” This panel brings together contemporary artists whose artwork contributes to a broader public understanding of the consequences of climate change for human and non-human existence, and the urgent need for action and mitigation. The seemingly overwhelming scale of the climate crisis is a recognized barrier to public participation in tackling the climate crisis. Art can overcome this resistance through a myriad of methods, from educating and raising awareness to modeling problem solving or giving voice and form to intangible forces. Xavier Cortada, Anina Gerchick, Mary Mattingly and Katherine Behar have created art that is both geographically specific and universally relevant, providing entry points around which people can coalesce.
Work by Katherine Behar, top left; Mary Mattingly, bottom left; Xavier Cortada, middle; Anina Gerchick, right.
Behar, a professor at Baruch and the CUNY Graduate Center, is the director of the New Media Artspace. Cortada, a professor at the University of Miami, is an NSF fellow and creator of UnderwaterHOA, which looks at rising sea levels in Florida. Gerchick, a landscape artist and City College graduate, is the creator of BirdLinkNY, a deployable sculptural habitat. And Mattingly is the creator of Swale, a floating edible landscape. The panel is being organized by and moderated by Reiss, an art historian and CUNY Graduate Center PhD alumna, and editor of “Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene.” Behar is co-moderator.
Participants in November 18 Climate Change: Artists Respond event
Check out videos of our two most recent “We Are Climate Action” events on the Weissman YouTube channel: Climate Change and Preparation for NYC Resiliency and Climate Change and Public Health. If you know any students, researchers, or journalists who are looking for comprehensive resources for papers, research, or stories about climate change, both of these events offer a wealth of data, information, analysis, and quotes from nationally recognized experts.
Professor Stefan Bathe (Natural Sciences) is celebrating a milestone in his research group’s work at Brookhaven National Laboratory: the installation of a massive superconducting magnet. The magnet is a key piece of sPHENIX, a detector that will begin collecting data in 2023 to help scientists understand matter as it existed in the early universe.
A time-lapsed video of the magnet’s installation (shown above) shows the scale of the project. The sPHENIX detector will track particles streaming from RHIC (relativistic heavy ion collider) collisions with what Brookhaven described as “unprecedented precision.” Bathe has been leading the assembly, testing, and calibration of a hadronic calorimeter (the blue circular structure pictured below the magnet), which measures particle energy.
Professor Stefan Bathe, front row center, and some of his research team members
Bathe supervises a team of some 40 students and postdocs from around the US, including students Daniel Richford and Zhiyan Wang from the CUNY Graduate Center, where Bathe is on the faculty. Richford won this year’s RHIC and AGS (Alternating Gradient Synchrotron) Merit Award “for his tireless leadership ensuring the safe and timely assembly and testing of the sPHENIX hadronic calorimeter during a global pandemic.”
Now that the magnet is in place, “we are working on the next layer of calorimeter detectors, to be installed inside the magnet early next year,” Bathe said. “Once the installation of this equipment is complete, we’ll be able to more carefully examine the particle soup that remains floating out there in the universe from the Big Bang.”
The Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions applauds the news that the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to two journalists, Maria Ressa in the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov in Russia. At a time when attacks on reporters are on the rise, this recognition of Ressa and Muratov for standing up for press freedom in the face of repression is significant. It serves as a powerful statement to the world that journalists are vital to upholding democracy and that disinformation undermines peace.
Previous journalists to win the Nobel Peace Prize were Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni journalist and co-founder of Women Journalists Without Chains, in 2011, and Carl von Ossietzky in 1935. Ossietzky’s critical reporting of the Nazi party landed him in prison, where he died.
Attorney-activist Ady Barkan, who has ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and is a fierce advocate for healthcare rights, will speak at a free Zoom event, Nov. 1, 5:30 pm. The event is organized by Baruch’s Sandra K. Wasserman Jewish Studies Center.
