Alumni Experiences - Rachel Alexandria Vicente - Teaching America

Rachel Vicente is a recent graduate of Syracuse (2012) and will be coming to Chicago soon to work in the public school system as a result of her Teach for America placement. Rachel, who hails from the Boston area, is the youngest of five siblings. She even has a brother and a sister who attended SU.

She did not choose SU because her sister and brother attended. Initially, she did not want to follow in their footsteps. However, she wanted to study pre-med, and she was very impressed with the program that Syracuse offered. SU also provided the best financial aid package.

While at Syracuse, she worked in the Mary Ann Shaw Center for Public and Community Service her freshman year. She also worked with the Literacy Corps, a mentoring/tutoring program in the Syracuse City School District. She soon began managing 180 tutors and planned diversity and mentoring training.

Rachael refers to this as the defining moment in her life and career path that peaked her interest in teaching: “Being from the suburbs of Boston I was not really familiar with urban education, and I didn't really see what was going on. Syracuse was instrumental in helping me find Teach for America.” She learned about many of the struggles and critical problems urban school districts face, including a lack of funding and resources and outdated technology and materials.

“It just kind of made me realize that education was always important to me,” she said. “I had the benefit of going to an amazing school system. I was able to flourish in that environment. I kind of saw the disadvantage that just because of your circumstances you can't do well or you can't do as well as someone from an urban school, which is the whole idea of the achievement gap that Teach for America approaches.”

Now Rachel is in the Windy City for the first time. She admits that she is nervous about being in Chicago, but she welcomes the experience. “I know I could have gone anywhere,” she said. “I like having challenges when I move to new places, so I guess that is what I'm going to get.”

Syracuse and Teach For America have both been really supportive in helping Rachel with the transition. “I would say thanks to the staff that I worked with at Syracuse University, Bobby Gillen and Colleen McAllister my bosses, and the department/center that I worked with,” Rachel said. “I could call them today and be like, "‘Oh my god, I need this,’" and they would definitely be there.”

Rachel will be teaching at the Youth Connection Charter School, an alternative high school starting this fall.

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Alumni Experiences - Mark Blane

Recently, I had an opportunity to catch up with Syracuse alum Mark Blane.  He talked a little bit about his new play and the inspiration behind it. 

Mark has been working on The Rock and the Ripe for about three years.  “I didn’t know I was working on it for three years because it’s been something that’s been developing in my mind for a while” he said.  He talked about how during his junior year at SU he took a course called Queer Kids, Straight Schools.  It was a queer sexuality class, and he ended up doing a lot of research in the Syracuse school district by going into schools and talking to teachers.  Mark explained: “I was learning a lot about gay/straight alliances and how certain teachers perceived students who were not traditionally masculine or feminine. This was really eye opening because I was learning about why I was bullied by interviewing all these people.  It was just about kids being misunderstood.”

During that time, there was a rapidly increasing suicide rate in the U.S.  There were 10-15 kids that committed suicide across the country, including Tyler Clementi from Rutgers University.  This happened because they were being bullied, taunted, or harassed for being gay or being perceived to be gay. The really interesting thing about bullying is that kids are being bullied for something they might not be.  Because the subject was such a taboo one, being called gay was the worst thing these kids could imagine. Sadly, they ended up taking their own lives. 

After graduation in 2011, Mark moved to London.  There he continued to research and write about the lives and struggles of victims of bullying.  “I started to write down my stories about myself in middle school and high school,” Mark said.  “I wrote down what had happened to me and a lot of these things were things that I had forgotten even happened because I suppressed them. I went to Syracuse after high school, and I was able to just forget all these things that happened because Syracuse is a pretty liberal place. I didn’t have to worry about expressing myself. I wasn’t going to get taunted walking across campus like I was walking down the hallway in my high school in Indiana.”
Mark decided to turn these stories into a play in October 2011: “So I decided to write this play and kind of use the stories of these kids and give them a voice so people could learn to move forward.  People find it uncomfortable, and my thing about it is that I think if we don’t’ talk about it how can we learn from it?  How can we make it better?”  

While working on The Rock and the Ripe, Mark has became somewhat of an activist.  He traveled across the country to talk to teachers and families of victims of bullying.  He would also called reporters and journalists that covered the stories in various cities.  “Some reporters were getting hate mail because people don’t even want them reporting on a kid dying for the fact that he was gay,” Mark said.  “A child has died, but people actually are so close minded that they don’t even want to recognize the tragedy.  There are so many stories that I have personally investigated; I wouldn’t say they inspired it, but are where most of my material came from for the play.”

Mark wants people to know that the play tackles issues not just about sexuality, but about race and class as well.  It’s set in a waiting room outside of a principal’s office.  Several kids are waiting to see the principal, and there’s a boy who enters at the beginning.  He’s really, really upset, and the other kids seem to have been there a little bit longer than him.  They’re all waiting, and slowly you begin to figure out what happened to each kid.  

The setting of the play is particularly significant for Mark.  He explains, “I was punished as a teenager for seeking help when I was being harassed.  I would go ask for help, and I was being hurt more by the teachers and administrators because they wouldn’t take my cries seriously.  It was just so strange because things would be turned back on me because even though I was pretty quiet and a good kid in school, they would think that I was trying to skip out on class, even though I was getting great grades.”

The Rock and the Ripe runs from June 7-17, 2012 at Teatro Luna, 3914 N. Clark St.  To purchase tickets, visit http://www.therockandtheripe.com/


There are 6 shows this weekend. Thursday-Sunday at 8pm, and Saturday at 2pm and Sunday at 3pm. Adult Tickets are $15 and the Book is $12. Just use the code "OrangePride" at the door before the show, and get your ticket and the book for $20.

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Syracuse University in Chicago & DC - Orange Beginnings

Brandies: I’m Brandies Dunagan, a social media specialist here at i.c.stars. I’d just like to take a moment to introduce Mr. Dave Edelstein. He’s the chair of the Chicago region for Syracuse, and we also have Anthony Noble, he’s the head of the Syracuse efforts in DC. So I’d like to start out with a question just to find out a little more about you. Dave, can you tell us a little more about your background and the year that you commenced from Syracuse?

Dave: Sure, I’d be happy to. I am a graduate of Syracuse University’s class of 1978, where I earned a Bachelor of Science in a field called Systems and Information Science from the School of Computer Science, a lot of science in that. Along the way I had different positions in computer programming, and then management of computer programmers and most recently was the CIO for a division of Siemens. Back in October, I retired and so now I’m living a very different life and having a good time with it.  A big part of my new life is spending a lot of time with Syracuse University. I’m a trustee; I chair the Dean’s Advisory Counsel at the College of Engineering and as you say, I’m running the Chicago Regional Council.

Brandies: That’s great. And Anthony, how about yourself?

Anthony: I graduated from the Syracuse College of Arts and Sciences in 1999. I majored in political science and economics with minors in African American studies and history, and after Syracuse I went on to the Woodrow Wilson school at Princeton where I received my masters in public affairs and urban planning. And then I guess wanting more knowledge, information, intellectual stimulation I decided to go to law school at the University of Pennsylvania, graduated from the…

Brandies: Well, that’s quite intellectually stimulating I’m sure.

Anthony: I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005 and after graduation went to work in the real estate department at a law firm named Holland and Knight, and I was there for about two and a half years, and then I got a call from a client at another real estate development company, the Louis Dreyfus property group. The head of the Washington office called me and asked me to consider joining their group to lead what’s now called capital crossing.  It’s the development of air rights above a section of interstate that runs through DC. So if you can imagine there’s a tunnel that runs under the national mall, and that tunnel daylights and then it becomes a tunnel again.  At the portion where it daylights, it’s about 6.5 acres of space, that 6.5 acres we’ve gotten entitled for 2.2 million square feet, 2 million square feet of office and 200,000 square feet of residential. So now I’m officially a real estate developer.

Brandies: Okay that sounds like quite the journey. Okay so Dave, you were saying that you graduated with a computer science degree and so where does that lead you? I know you said you ended up at Siemens, but what kind of roles and positions have you had over time?

Dave: Sure, I started as a computer programmer at IBM.  They had invented a programming language called APL, and I learned it at Syracuse and so that got me my first job.  I don’t think anybody knows what APL is anymore, but it was interesting at the time. After a little while at IBM, I went to work for my dad who had a small business in Paterson, New Jersey which sold office furniture, and while he enjoyed that quite a bit, I really never did.  So after about a year working there, I said, “Dad, this has been fun; but it’s time for me to do something else.”  We parted ways, and we still very much love and respect each other but it was an interesting experience.

I went back into computer programming at Bristol-Myers in New York and then started climbing the ladder. Took a couple of transfers within Bristol-Myers for more responsibility and then after a period of time I realized my career probably wasn’t going in the direction I wanted it to go, I wanted to be CIO and decided to look for a job somewhere else. My wife is from Evanston Illinois, and I think we had a pre-nuptial agreement that at some point we’d end up in Evanston and so that’s where we moved, and I’m very happy here, so no problem.

I got a job up in Deerfield, Illinois called Dade-Behring. We sold medical diagnostic equipment to hospitals around the world, and I was their CIO.  We were a small, relatively small company, about a billion and a half in sales when I started and we went through some interesting experiences, including a bankruptcy and then we went public and it was really kind of cool.  And then in 2007 we were acquired by Siemens, and we became the Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics division, and I was still the CIO of that group. And then after about four years of working for Siemens, in an acquisition like that, sometimes the acquired company sometimes gets absorbed into the acquiring company and my job got absorbed, and it just seemed like the right thing to do is to take the opportunity to try something different and so that’s what I did. So that’s kind of what my journey was.

Brandies: That’s really interesting. So how did you end up being connected to Syracuse again?

Dave: It was, I guess about 10 years ago or so, I wanted to start getting involved in things outside of work, volunteer kind of things and stuff like that and one of the areas I wanted to get involved in was Syracuse University. So when I decided to do that I got in touch with the dean of the college of engineering which is where the school of computer science now resides. I said I want to get involved and he said come to a meeting, we’re having a board meeting come and see what it’s about and I got involved with that and ultimately was asked to be on the board of the college. And as I said, I’m now the chair of the advisory counsel, which is a lot of fun. We kind of steer the direction of where the college is going, and along the way as I got more involved with Syracuse University and had a stronger desire to get even more deeply involved, people started to talk to me about my interest in becoming a trustee and ultimately I said, “Yeah it’s something I’d like to do.”

In November I was installed I guess you call it as a trustee and then since I’m from Chicago, and Chicago is one of the regions that Syracuse wants to raise its profile in, I was asked if I would mind being the chair of the regional counsel here in Chicago, and I said, “Sure I’d love to do that, so that’s how I acquired that responsibility.”

Brandies: And so Anthony you’re all the way in DC and you’ve kind of traveled the globe a little bit in that area and figured out where you’re going to be in Pennsylvania and DC and starting out in Syracuse and going to a couple other universities, how can you get reconnected with Syracuse in this capacity?

Anthony: Well actually as an undergrad I was pretty involved at the university. I was a member of the Student Government Association as a student representative and as a member of the finance board within the Student Government Association, and the finance board is part of the group that determines the budgets for the various student groups. And when I left and went to Princeton, I was fairly involved in the student affairs and also at Penn.

What I noticed was at Princeton, it was a smaller group so you always had alums that were around and they were always willing to offer help and guidance and then when I went to Penn there was an interesting story. So what happened was I was looking around and there were no African American, Latino or female judges on the walls. So in the law school there are portraits of judges. So there was no diversity in the portraits that were displayed in the law school and so a friend of mine, we got together and we said well we’d like to have more diversity in the portraits, and we went to the dean and told the dean that we had this idea that we would go and we would raise money for at least one portrait and hopefully maybe two portraits. And so the dean connected me with an alum who was a fairly active alum at the University of Pennsylvania. They have a board of overseers, and he was a fairly active member of that group and he really supported us in making sure that the portraits on the wall were more representative of the student body at the University of Pennsylvania law school, but also the world that we live in.

In seeing that and sort of interacting with high profile individuals who still had a passion for, in that case for the law school but for school in general made me feel like I wanted to be involved in my undergraduate institution and hopefully help Syracuse in whatever way I could. At the time I think I was probably 26 years old and I was at a Syracuse event at the Greenberg house in Washington DC, and I had mentioned to Mary Anagnost who is like one of the deans of the Greenberg house, and I said at some point I’d like to be more involved in alumni affairs at the university, and she said oh that’s great we need more young people who are interested in that, and she connected me with Lil O’Rourke, who is now I believe the secretary to the board of trustees. At the time she was the head of development at the College of Arts and Sciences. And Lil and I got together; we had lunch sort of talked about the things that I was interested in doing with the university. And at the time she and I had lunch, I was the president of my law school class, so I had interacted with a number of the members of the board of overseers and the dean and so I understood kind of how alums interacted with the ongoing operations of the university, and we talked about it and she recommended that the College of Arts and Sciences Board of Visitors consider me for membership. And that was, I think, in 2006 and so I joined the College of Arts and Sciences board in 2006 and sort of as part of that group have picked up other responsibilities and am looking forward to continuing to grow the outreach efforts in Washington.

Brandies: That sounds really interesting. It sounds like you and Dave have a natural progression and gravitation back to the university, which is always good to hear. And so Dave if you could tell us a little bit more about the local alumni here in Chicago, because Syracuse is not based here: why is having such a connection to the university so important to you and maybe something that other alumni might not be aware of?

Dave: Sure, I guess the short answer is I’m proud of Syracuse University, I’m proud to be a graduate of Syracuse University. I think that the university is doing some things that are important for I think the Chicago area to learn about and participate in. We have this theme of, we call it scholarship in action, and what that means is what our students are learning is not only theory or ivory tower kind of things, which there’s value in that, but it’s scholarship that people can act on. It’s learning about the world and learning to help the world, and I think as I’ve gotten involved in volunteer organizations in Chicago and Evanston, there’s clearly an appetite for people to get involved and to help their communities and help the areas they live in.

The kind of things that we’re teaching our students at Syracuse prepares them for that, so I just find it’s very rewarding when I think about the things that Syracuse is doing as a university that the different colleges are doing, that the students are doing and I think about the Chicago area and it’s a lot of areas where we can work together and where what we’re learning at Syracuse and teaching at Syracuse can be of use here in Chicago. And I’ll give you just a couple of examples of the things I’ve done to try to raise awareness and some other people in the Chicago region have done.

For example, right here with you Brandies, with i.c.stars, as we started to wrap up the Chicago region and try to raise awareness, I thought a good way to do that would be through social media, so I thought that by myself since I’m involved with i.c.stars, and i.c.stars has a social media enterprise. I figured wouldn’t it be neat for i.c.stars to do the social media for the Chicago region on behalf of Syracuse? And that’s what we’re doing, and I think it’s working really well. I’ve also worked with a couple of the local community colleges, the City Colleges in Chicago and Oakton where we’ve created what’s called an articulation agreement so that students who study in what’s called the STEM curriculum, science, technology, engineering and math at the community colleges, if they decide they want to go to Syracuse to get a four year degree, their credits will transfer completely.
So that’s a win for the student, it’s a win for the community college, it’s a win for the university.  And finally one of my colleagues on the regional counsel works for a company called Gogo, and people who travel know that Gogo is the way that airplanes provide WiFi to airline passengers.  They’re hiring many engineers here in Chicago, and so he’s working with the College of Engineering to see if there are people who are going to be graduating from Syracuse University who might want to work in Chicago. There’s all kind of ways to reach out, to connect, to show all the good things that Syracuse is doing, and make a difference here in Chicago.

Brandies: Those all sound really appealing, especially considering in this economy ways to find employment and not just employment, but meaningful employment that someone has an interest in and it sounds like Syracuse employs really creative ways of creating partnerships and engaging its alumni community in opportunity.
Dave: I think that’s right.

Brandies: And so Anthony, another role you recently stepped into was a leadership role for the DC area, but can you talk a little bit about the initiatives in DC and why staying connected to Syracuse is important to you?

Anthony: Sure, we actually, so the DC regional counsel was instrumental in fundraising activities in the campaign for the endowment and during that time we had a number of events. One of the events that I was fortunate enough to host with David Falk was basically a rooftop event for alumni who were between 10 years and 20 years out of graduation. What was great about that was you got to hear someone like David Falk, and I think for folks in Chicago, I think he’s probably best known as Michael Jordan’s agent, but to folks in my generation at the university he sort of was the standard of sports agents and kind of his various involvement at the university were things that we all looked up to and admired. So we had an event of about I think it was probably 50 or 60 people at a rooftop in Washington that overlooked the White House and that was well received, and then we started to talk about the things that members of the regional counsel and alumni in Washington kind wanted to see more of. And there were sort of three signature events in Washington that we’ve started. One is the Paul Greenberg speaker series, and the Paul Greenberg speaker series is really dedicated to current topics in public policy. So for example I think about a month or two ago Paul hosted a group of leading experts in health care at the national press club to debate the affordable care act, and that was well attended. Had Uwe Reinhardt, who is a professor at Princeton but is also a leading health scholar who focuses on health care, and we had a few folks from the Cato Institute participate as well, and that was well received. Back in March we had a community partnership, and a community partnership was really an event that was sponsored and facilitated by the Greenberg House, we have a great staff at the Greenberg House. Ann Donahue Yockey leads that effort along with Mary Anagnost and Joy Yoo, and what we did was we went to the Carmelo Anthony Center, which is based in Baltimore, Maryland and we had an event called “Be healthy, Be fit, Be more,” and a group of SU alumni including former stars of the Syracuse football and basketball teams participated in the event. We got to sit in and teach kids who were I guess between the ages of 6 and 13 about the benefits of being healthy, being active and really focusing on trying to achieve whatever your goals are and to set your goals high, and so that was a very good event and then we also have something and I’m sure you have this in Chicago, Dave, is the SUccess in the City event.

Dave: Yeah we do that; we have that.

Anthony: Where young alumni come in and they get to pick the brains of older alums and those older alums are typically established in their careers, and the success in the city event also has another component along with the networking and getting to know each other. It also provides other tangible benefits like the resume review workshops, how to use social media in your career and in your personal life and those types of things, and so those are the three big events that we have going on, or should I say signature events in Washington. And then of course being in Washington we’re fortunate because of all of the reach of public policy in the various industries. So we’ll have forensics panels, we’ll have panels focused on media, panels focused on the law, etc, and I think those types of events help alumni to be more engaged. And not only is it intellectually stimulating, but it also allows alumni to reconnect with friends they have in the area but also to meet new friends and to reestablish or to strengthen their connection to the university.

Brandies: Okay I learned so much, I learned about the alumni David Falk. I didn’t realize that he was a ‘72 alumni, and I understand that Carmelo actually attended Syracuse for about a year before he was drafted first round for the Denver Nuggets.
Anthony: That’s right, and I should mention, we mention David Falk, but also Paul Greenberg has been instrumental in DC. From donating the Greenberg House, which is kind of the center of activity in Washington and actually in mentoring other folks, I know that Paul Greenberg was a mentor, or is a mentor to David Falk and has been one of the reasons why David has been so involved in the university. I know that he was a member of the College of Arts and Sciences Board of Visitors, but also on the board of trustees with Dave, and when you have people like that who are around and engaged in affairs at the university it’s hard not to want to be a part of that and not to want to be a part of the university to make it a better place.

Brandies: Absolutely, it sounds like you have really good models of how to give back. Paul Greenberg is giving back in a substantial way by sponsoring localized space for initiatives to be headquartered and just serving in multiple ways and because we do talk to leaders here today from Syracuse, I just wanted to know what is in the turnpike for you guys?

Dave: Well I know I’ll be at Syracuse this weekend for graduation. So that’s the next stop on the turnpike, I’m looking forward to building up Syracuse’s presence here in Chicago. We’ve got a big event coming up in a couple of weeks for the graduates of the Newhouse School, and that’s some of the things planned for later in the year and then reaching out to the alums in the area to help do all the great things we can do on behalf of Syracuse. Where I go from there, I’m sure the school has all kinds of exciting things ahead. As a trustee it’s a really cool organization to work with. The trustees are wonderful people and the university is really dynamic. As a student you get one view of the university and when you work with one of the colleges, as I had with the college of engineering, and now as a trustee I get to see the whole university and it’s really fascinating. I think the administration is very capable, trustees are very good, folks like Anthony coming up and getting involved it’s really a lot of fun so I’m just looking to keep wearing my orange clothes and bleeding my orange blood and maybe paint Chicago a little tinge of orange if I can.

Brandies: Speaking of painting Chicago orange, I think that you recently gave a cool stat that Syracuse beat out Northwestern for the first time in history I believe.

Dave: Are we talking about women’s lacrosse and the first time they were ranked higher than Northwestern? And since I run around the Northwestern campus a few times a week, it’s very good to run with Syracuse clothes these days.

Brandies: How about you Anthony? What’s on the turnpike for you and maybe some of the things coming out of the DC region?

Anthony: Well actually I know that Dave mentioned he’s going up to Syracuse for graduation. I’m headed down to Hampton University for a relative’s graduation so that should be fun to participate in those ceremonies. As far as with Syracuse, we have obviously the success in the city event that’s scheduled for next month which should be well attended and a lot of fun and beneficial to the attendants. But also going to, I think for me, I’m going to focus on engaging some of the alums and alumni groups in Washington who have probably participated in the events in Washington in the past but for whatever reason, be it professional reasons or personal reasons they have families now etc, to try to get them reengaged in the efforts in Washington because what we want to focus on is we want to have a regional counsel that is representative of the folks that are located in Washington and plan events for those folks. And a lot of the things don’t have to be formal events, but just making sure that people know that we’re around and that the alumni network is there for those who want to participate in that and who want to continue to be intellectually stimulated by the university.

Brandies: Those things sound great, and it sounds like the alumni benefit would be that there’s tremendous networking opportunities, there’s professional development, it sounds like there are opportunities to also give back in a very meaningful way to an organization or a university, I should say that has given so much and that it would be a natural progression to some of those relationships that they have built up to actually invest back into the organization. So I just wanted to thank you both for taking the time to give us a little insight into the great work you’re doing at both of the local initiatives here, and to say that I’m pretty sure that this message will get out to the alumni and they can get inspired to participate and figure out how to get active. And so until next time.

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