Class Notes
CGS alums are doing all kinds of things: coaching swimming, making movies, raising awareness for social causes, reporting breaking news, studying Urdu, traveling the world….See what’s happening in the lives of CGS alums, and submit your class note here.
1960s
Cheryl (Goldberg) Rudin (’64) completed a BA and an MS while living in Florida. She recently retired from teaching, but continues to assist children with exceptionalities.
1970s
Arlene Rubenstein (’73, Wheelock’75) says her time at CGS “was the best two years of my college life. The war in Vietnam was still raging, we didn’t have to feel guilty for lighting up a joint, our poets and musicians made history, and a college education was actually affordable. We could breathe gently into our studies, and ‘stress’ was not the number one word on the tips of our tongues!” She writes that at CGS, her favorite professor was Milton Kornfeld, “a humanities teacher I loved as a professional and a mentor. He was honest, forthright, and willing. He exemplified the kind of creativity and openness that I try to instill in my students and clients today. Most memorably, he challenged me and made me feel excited about college, growing up, and finding my new life as an adult. I will remember him always.” When she wrote, her only daughter was heading to college, where Arlene hopes she will have an equally transformative experience “in an intimate learning environment, with wonderfully supportive teachers, and a diverse student body to both learn from and contribute to.” She sends “a special ‘Hello!’ to Jason D., Kay S., Jeff C., and Lorna L.”
1980s
Brenda Straker (’81, COM’83) is head swimming coach at the University of Saint Joseph.
Dirk Baker (’89, COM’91, Wheelock’93,’98) of West Boylston, Mass., is the head baseball coach at Worcester State University. He recently released a bestselling instructional baseball video, Burning Up the Base Paths (Championship Productions, 2015).
1990s
Fadia Nader (’92, SAR’94, CAS’94) of Westlake, Ohio, recently earned a postprofessional Doctor of Occupational Therapy from Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions.
Tony Shortway (’94, COM’96) of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., released The Puddle Jumper Escape, an instrumental concept album that he wrote and produced, in February 2015. The album draws from many themes he originally composed for television ads and documentary films and “sounds like it should accompany an avant-garde sci-fi crime thriller,” Tony writes. He is also a designer at ADK Studios, a design and custom fabrication company that creates show sets for entertainment and theme park industries. Tony recently was the graphic production designer for the Diagon Alley expansion Universal Studios Orlando’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter and for the Fast & Furious: Supercharged attraction at Universal Studios Hollywood.
Zafeiris Haitidis (’95, COM’96) lives in Greece, where he is a director, filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer. His projects include innovative theater productions, commercials, fashion videos, music video clips, documentaries, television cultural shows, educational programs, and award-winning short films that have competed in local and international film festivals. Footage of Zafeiris’ ongoing documentation of the Greek crisis has been broadcast by media news groups and has been included in international short and feature films and documentaries. He works with VICE Greece as director-filmmaker on topics of sociopolitical interest and recently began collaboration with National Geographic. He is now preparing back-to-back feature film projects bound for European coproduction and international release. Learn more at Zafeiris’ website.
Daniel Cohen (’98, COM’00) is a design manager on Facebook’s social good and goodwill team. He was previously a producer on the creative services team at the ridesharing start-up Lyft, and worked in the design department at Apple in Cupertino, Calif., for nine years. Daniel runs Collective Good, an organization that connects designers with nonprofits to create projects and events that raise funds and awareness for a variety of social causes. He is also a passionate photographer. Follow his adventures on Instagram (username: @cohen) and email him at danieltoddcohen@gmail.com.
Edward Welch (’98, CAS’00) of West Palm Beach, Fla., an associate at the Miami office of the law firm Broad and Cassel, was recently appointed to the advisory board of Florida Atlantic University’s College of Education. Edward is a member of Broad and Cassel’s health law, commercial litigation, construction law and litigation, and real estate litigation practice groups. His work focuses on complex business issues, bankruptcy, consumer transactions, and the construction industry.
2000s
Duci Goncalves (’00, SAR’02) of Dorchester, Mass., earned a JD from Northeastern University School of Law, and is now the attorney in charge at the Quincy office of the Committee for Public Counsel Services’ Youth Advisory Division (YAD). Duci began working at the YAD Roxbury office in 2005, where she represented juveniles in delinquency and youthful offender matters in the Dorchester, West Roxbury, and Boston juvenile courts. From 2010 to 2011, while on a leave of absence from YAD, she worked as a staff attorney at Suffolk University School of Law’s Juvenile Justice Center (JJC), where she supervised law students representing juveniles in the Boston Juvenile Court, assisted in teaching the Juvenile Defender Clinical Class, and maintained a small caseload of juvenile delinquency and youthful offender cases. Duci received the Massachusetts Bar Association’s 2012 Access to Justice Defender Award.
Jen Sotolongo (’03, COM’05) of Portland, Ore., embarked on an eight-month European bicycle tour in May 2015, with her partner, Dave, and Australian Shepherd, Sora. They are cycling from Oslo to Athens; when Jen wrote, they were planning to visit Patagonia in January and cycle back to Portland. You can join them on their journey here, and via Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook by following the handle LongHaulTrekkers.
Mark DiCristofaro (’06, COM’08,’09) is a television and film producer based in Los Angeles, Calif. He recently took part in producing Naked and Afraid: XL for the Discovery Channel, Hellevator for the Game Show Network, and Lip Sync Battle for Spike TV. In 2015, Mark produced the feature film The Escort, which acquired a North American distribution deal prior to its world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Mark is an active BU alumni volunteer and has served on the Alumni Council since 2012.
Barbara Rodriguez (’06, COM’08) is celebrating her seventh year at the Associated Press. She has worked in North Carolina, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio, and now covers state government and breaking news as a reporter in the Iowa bureau. Barbara encourages aspiring journalists to email her at bcrodriguez.mail@gmail.com.
Stephen Ohl (’09, COM’11) is earning an MFA as a first-year directing fellow at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, Calf.
2010s
David Alessi (’10, Questrom’12) moved to Dallas, Tex., after graduating from BU to become a support engineer at Microsoft, where he helped fix servers and other Windows machines. He then moved to Cambridge, Mass., where is he a service engineer on Microsoft’s Intune team. Intune is a cloud-based service used for business customers to manage their devices, apps, information, and content on a wide range of devices from iOS, Android, Windows, and KNOX. David collaborates with development, test, and program management to translate customer, business, and technical requirements into features, processes, and service architecture. He writes, “My primary goal is to create awesome customer experiences through engineering, instead of trying to react to bad experiences after they happen.”
Scott Batchelder (’10, CAS’13) studied Urdu at the American Institute of Indian Studies in India for a year after graduation. He is working on his master’s at Georgetown University. When he wrote, he was planning to return to India in fall 2015 to continue his Urdu language studies on a David L. Boren Fellowship, which is annually awarded to 100 graduate students nationwide for the study of critical languages through the US government’s National Security Education Program.
Chelsea Bray (’11, CAS’13, GRS’22) recently returned to BU for a PhD in Editorial Studies after earning a master’s in English literature at Boston College. In summer 2015, Chelsea completed a 200-hour yoga teacher training program with the Boston Yoga School.
Gunita Singh (’12, CAS’14) writes that she is a second-year law student at Georgetown University, where she has “refined my analytical skills and built upon my preexisting passion for social justice.” When she wrote, she was planning to begin an internship with the Humane Society of the United States and to use legal and policy principles to fight for farmed animals. She writes, “For those of you who do not know, roughly nine billion land animals are raised and killed for food every year in the US alone. The fate these animals suffer is indescribable: horrible physical conditions, egregious torture and abuse, and immense emotional suffering, to name the basics. I would love to encourage my fellow alumni to try reducing their consumption of animal products in favor of a more compassionate diet, as eating plant-based foods is not only better for farmed animals, but for the environment and our own health, too. In light of findings that factory farming is the number one cause of climate change, and upon recognizing the dismal conditions that animals are forced to experience in industrialized animal agriculture, I hope we can come together as a community and abstain from participating in the process that commodifies living, feeling, innocent animals. Thank you for reading this.”
Rebecca Ulrich (’12, COM’14) is a digital media planner on the US Army account at Universal McCann.
David Danesh (’13, Questrom’15) moved to San Francisco, Calif., to help scale the five-year-old technology startup Rev.com. His position encompasses hands-on selling as the frontline representative for Rev, from prospecting leads to closing customers; sales automation to increase the efficiency and impact of the sales team; and business strategizing to discover new markets and customer segments. David is also collaborating with BU to enhance the BU Alumni Network in the Bay Area.