MCAA Avenue

ALUMNI NEWS: IYNNA HALILOU (INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, ‘15) FEATURED AT THE NYU WASSERMAN CENTER FOR CAREER DEVELOPMENT

 

The Master’s College congratulates Iynna Halilou (International Relations, ‘15) for recently being featured on a panel at the NYU Wasserman Center for Career Development. The panel, “Career Conversations: Entrepreneurship Careers,” focused on all things entrepreneurship, from skills all of the necessary skills to succeed to advice for those who want to forge their own career path from scratch. This event helped students explore the entrepreneurial world with guidance and perspective from alumni who have experienced it first-hand. Congratulations, Iynna!

EVENT RECAP: 2019 GSAS THREESIS ACADEMIC CHALLENGE

Last weekend, The Master’s College celebrated the 2019 GSAS Threesis Academic Challenge. Challenged to present their graduate research in just three minutes, armed with only a single PowerPoint slide, over 150 master’s students applied to the program, over 100 completed the mentoring component of the program, and a group of 70+ master’s students competed in the Qualifying Rounds on Friday, April 12, 2019. We thank our esteemed GSAS faculty who aided us in serving as expert judges from a range of fields, spanning from Animal Studies and Experimental Humanities to Biology and Mathematics. After careful consideration by the judges, 12 finalists advanced on to take the stage at the Eisner and Lubin Auditorium in the Kimmel Center for Student Life on Saturday, April 13, 2019, to compete in the Final Round. 

An audience comprised of GSAS students, faculty, and friends, as well as alumni from the MCAA, listened to a diverse and dynamic range of presentations. Topics included the newfound field of “bioart,” in which contemporary biotechnology bridges the science lab and the artist’s studio; an app that arms New York City’s renters with the edgiest information and challenges websites like StreetEasy with fierce competition; and lab work that explores the psychology of voice-hearing experiences in both clinically diagnosed and never diagnosed religious individuals. 

After much deliberation by the Final Round judges and the traditional audience vote, prizes and awards were bestowed by the 2018 Threesis Champion, Ehimamiegho Idahosa-Erese (Psychology, ’18), the Chair of Social Media for the MCAA, Zachary McDermott (Applied Quantitative Research, ’14), and GSAS Dean Phil Harper. 

First Place & Audience Choice:
Herina Ayot (Creative Writing), A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies: The Stories That Are Never Read
Second Place:
DJ Cashmere (Journalism), Transformation through Trust: The Bronx School that Went from Worst to First in Four Years
Third Place:
Kamrun Nahar (Environmental Health Sciences), NYC Street Food Cart: What We Breathe
 
After the event, all finalists, judges, and audiences later gathered for a reception to celebrate the incredible achievement of this year’s Threesis competitors. The research and scholarship produced and presented by master’s students in the Graduate School continues to grow and succeed in both scope and depth. Great job, everyone! 

Check out photos from the event on the Master’s College Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pg/gsasmasterscollege/photos/?tab=album&album_id=2630781880282371

ALUMNI NEWS: RUZMYN VILCASSIM (ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH SCIENCES, ‘13)


{Ruzmyn at the 2013 GSAS Threesis Academic Challenge}

Congratulations to our 2013 Threesis alumnus, Ruzmyn Vilcassim from Environmental Health Sciences, on the publication of his recent research about how traveling to cities with high air pollution levels can be associated with lesser lung function.

“We show, for the first time, that exposure to increased levels of indoor particulate matter in cities abroad is associated with statistically significant acute changes in pulmonary function in healthy young adults,” he explains in the article.

Ruzmyn earned his master’s degree from Environmental Health Sciences in 2013, and also completed his doctoral degree from the same program in 2018. He is currently a postdoctoral research scientist at NYU Langone.

Read the full article and interview on MedPage. Take a look back at Ruzmyn’s winning presentation from the 2013 Threesis Academic Challenge. Congratulations, Ruzmyn!

CAMPUS NEWS: CONVERSATIONS WITH ANDREW HAMILTON

NYU President Andrew Hamilton is getting into the podcasting industry! Check out “Conversations with Andrew Hamilton,” where he will speak with NYU faculty, alumni, and students that are making a difference in the world.

The first episode is a dialogue with Rubén Blades, a musician, politician, and 2018-2019 Scholar-in-Residence at Steinhardt. In 1994, Blades ran for president of the Republic of Panama (coming in third place) and later served as the country’s minister of tourism. He’s also one of the most successful musicians in the history of Latin music, and has won 17 Grammy and Latin Grammy Awards.

Learn more about President Hamilton’s podcast and stay up to date on future episodes!

CAMPUS NEWS: WELCOME PROFESSOR ANTONIO MERLO AS NEW FAS DEAN

Join us in congratulating Antonio Merlo on his appointment as the new Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, effective this coming summer. An alumnus of GSAS (as well as an award-winning coach and founder of NYU’s water polo team), he previously served as the Dean of Social Sciences at Rice University as well as the director of the Rice Initiative for the Study of Economics. A graduate of Bocconi University in Italy (A.B.) and NYU (Ph.D.), Antonio taught at NYU from 1998-2000 as an associate professor of Economics.

Antonio’s research focuses include voting, the economics of crime, career decisions of politicians, and the study of the residential housing market. Among his many awards and honors, Antonio has been elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society; the Pareto Lecture in Economics and Social Sciences; Peden Senior Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge; and the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching. Additionally, he received the Coach of the Year Award for the Collegiate Water Polo Association three times.

Read the official NYU press release for more information.

We look forward to welcoming Antonio Merlo to Arts and Sciences!

SPOTLIGHT ON SUCCESS: SARAH STODDER (JOURNALISM, ’17)

In her second year of her master’s degree program in Journalism, Sarah Stodder applied to the 2017 GSAS Threesis Academic Challenge and advanced on to the Final Round of the competition as one of twelve finalists. Her presentation, “Lazy Lawn: 300 Years in the Life of Rhode Island’s Oldest Summer Home,” highlighted the work of her master’s thesis, which primarily focused on a narrative nonfiction retelling of the 200-year love story between six generations of a family and the oldest summer house in Rhode Island. She won first place.

“I lived alone in the house at age 23,” Sarah explains. “While uncovering the secrets of the house, I examined the way memory shapes how humans view themselves and worked to forge an acceptance of my own memories.” To deal with post-traumatic stress, Sarah moved to the house to find a refuge and begin to heal. “As the summer progressed, I reached a feeling of communication with [the house]–it became a place I could spill my secrets to–and that motivated me to keep digging in its drawers for letters that brought its story to light.”

Threesis provided the opportunity for Sarah to be welcomed into a community where she could share her work, but also presented its own set of challenges on how to do so. “When I first walked into the Threesis mentoring session, I had no idea how to condense my project into a three-minute speech–and that inability was indicative of a greater lack of understanding of exactly what the point of my project was.” Through the mentoring component of the Threesis program, Sarah spent several weeks preparing her speech and said she forced herself to “articulate a vision of what my project was, and the process of doing that helped me not only in the Threesis competition, but in my work animating a vision I could later follow.”

Sarah’s advice to future master’s students applying to the GSAS Threesis Academic Challenge? “Put yourself out there, even if you’re scared of public speaking or you think no one will be interested in what you have to say… The thing about Threesis is that it is a competition focused on bringing out everything accessible and exciting in your project….[and] having to go through the steps of the competition will make you fall in love with your thesis again, and we all need that from time to time as we wok on a long-term project.”

Currently, Sarah is working with a literary agent to finish the first part of her book. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without my degree from GSAS, where I was fortunate enough to have professors who were enthusiastic about my project… Threesis was a great launch for this next step in my project, not only in terms of the monetary winnings but also in terms of my confidence in my project and my ability to pitch it to people, including the agent I’m currently working with.”

As a freelance journalist, Sarah has worked with various publications, including San Francisco Weekly, Washingtonian, and New York’s Bedford + Bowery. Her work has been awarded by the Society of Professional Journalists and the SF Peninsula Press Club, as well as featured by The Wall Street Journal and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Sarah, congratulations on your success with your book. We look forward to hearing all about your future achievements!

CAMPUS NEWS: NYU HAS 56 FULLBRIGHT FINALISTS


Exciting news from the Graduate School of Arts and Science: this year, there are 56 Fulbright US Student Program finalists from NYU, 24 of whom are graduate students, and 7 of whom are from GSAS specifically. Congratulations to the departments of Creative Writing, Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement, International Relations, Journalism, and Near Eastern Studies, and the master’s students from these programs who have successfully applied to this competitive fellowship program. We wish you the best of luck over the next few months! 

CAMPUS NEWS: NYU Celebrates Stonewall at 50

In the early hours of June 28, 1969, a few blocks away from NYU’s Washington Square Campus, the Stonewall riots began. NYU celebrates this pivotal moment for the LGBTQ+ movement and its transformative impact on our own campus through various events, including academic programs, exhibits, and performances. NYU alumni are welcome to participate in marking this historic anniversary!

Learn about the journey from Stonewall and featured events: https://www.nyu.edu/about/university-initiatives/nyu-celebrates-stonewall-at-50/events.html

Spotlight on Success: Joshua Kruchten (English, ‘17)

Joshua Kruchten at the 2017 GSAS Threesis Academic Challenge

As Joshua Kruchten reached the final semester of his master’s degree program in English at NYU, he applied to the 2017 GSAS Threesis Academic Challenge and competed as one of twelve participants in the Final Round of the competition to earn third place. Titled, “How to Read a Booke of Bees,” Joshua’s Threesis presentation focused on the work of his thesis — an investigation into the 17th-century book The Feminine Monarchie, an English book about beekeeping and the first book to claim that a beehive was led by a Queen Bee and not by a King. This research challenged him to consider the attitude towards women and power in early modern Europe, which provoked questions in his current research that concerns “scientific” and “literary” experimentation in books during the Renaissance.

“When I had a copy of the book [The Feminine Monarchie] in my hands at the New York Public Library,” Joshua explains, “I realized that this strange hybrid book was not a simple treatise, but a proto-scientific lab notebook, a religious treatise, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, and a cookbook.” His interest in beekeeping manuals stemmed from his background in molecular biology and has expanded into 16th-century French and Italian texts, including “forgotten epic poems about bees, gardening manuals, [and] poems or devotional materials meant to accompany experiments at home.”  


Joshua Kruchten at the 2017 GSAS Threesis Academic Challenge

Joshua is currently earning a double Master’s from the University of Strasbourg and the University of Bologna. During the spring of 2017, Joshua accepted a scholarship from the European Union to participate in a European Master’s program and now takes classes in French and Italian where he relishes the ability to “reach out and touch the past.” He has published an article in French in the Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire and aims to pursue a doctoral program in order to continue his research and teaching in what he hopes will be meaningful and politically engaged. He recently reviewed The Casebook Project which highlights the interdisciplinary, qualitative and quantitative potential digital technologies can offer scholars.

These goals stem from the education he received from GSAS, which Joshua says helped him develop “the intellectual tools [he] had been taught to use — and the confidence that [his] professors and experiences like Threesis helped me to develop.” Specifically, “Threesis forced me to more precisely articulate the questions that drove my research,” he describes, “and more than that, to explain why they mattered to an unfamiliar audience… Threesis was one of the more powerful moments of my time at NYU where I felt myself surrounded by people who, despite the many challenges facing us, were deeply moved and motivated by their own research and wanted to explain why it mattered.”

As we enter our ninth year of the GSAS Threesis Academic Challenge, we reflect on Joshua’s fascinating graduate work at GSAS and look forward to hearing all about his future successes! Watch Joshua’s winning presentation from Threesis 2017.

Campus News: Welcome Back & Cheers to Spring 2019!

It’s a new year and a new semester!

We would like to welcome all new and returning GSAS master’s students to the spring semester! 

Be sure to stay connected with The Master’s College on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn for announcements and information on upcoming programs, such as the annual Spring Fling, continuation of the Master’s Seminar Series, and the 2019 GSAS Threesis Academic Challenge.

If this is your last semester before graduation, make it count! The Master’s College Alumni Association (MCAA) looks forward to welcoming you to the alumni community in GSAS. 

Cheers to the rest of the academic year!