Anne Burley’s Adventures in Shanghai

January 31, 2014 by mhc2010

Anne Burley‘s Adventures in Shanghai
By Elizabeth DuMont-McCaffrey

Anne Burley and I met for drinks on Dagu Road in Shanghai at a bar that was spray painted with Christmas decorations and broadcasting Fight Club on a projector. She lives a few blocks down the road in Jing An, a central Shanghai neighborhood filled with expats.

Anne has been in China for a year and a half and has loved her experience so far. The pollution is the only downside of living in Shanghai for Anne, otherwise she enjoys stepping out of her comfort zone and exploring a new place. In Shanghai, Anne works as an SAT teacher at a relatively new company called New Pathway.

When Anne isn’t working or gallivanting around Shanghai, she is studying Chinese, reading about China (she recently read Postcard from Tomorrow Square) or watching Walking Dead. According to her friend, Liheng, Anne has a pretty good accent in Chinese and is excellent at karaoke. Since I have heard Anne sing karaoke, I admittedly have doubts about her Chinese.

China isn’t Anne’s first adventure. Since graduation, Anne has taught on the French Riviera and organized events at the French Embassy in DC.

Directly after graduating, Anne did the TAPIF Program, a program sponsored by the French government to host English teachers in France. She stayed for one academic year teaching English, hanging out on the beach and drinking French wine.

After France, Anne moved back to DC, her hometown. Her brother was doing a gap year before college so her whole family was temporarily reunited. While in DC, Anne worked as an event coordinator for the French Embassy. It was exciting because she got to meet with the French Ambassador and his wife frequently, but also a very stressful job.

Even though Anne is doing all of this cool stuff, she can’t help but miss good old MHC. Anne especially misses spending time in the library stacks and dessert dilemma at Prospect. She is super excited to come back to campus for our 5 year reunion. At our 2 year, Anne roomed with Rena Schwarz, Tory Cwyk and Aviva Elzufon and she is looking forward to catching up with them as well as many other friends and classmates.

Anne is not sure what the future holds. For the time being, she plans to stay in Shanghai and learn a bit more Chinese. I wouldn’t be surprised if our next interview is across the world.

A Chat with Leah Dion

December 5, 2013 by mhc2010

A Chat with Leah Dion
By Elizabeth DuMont-McCaffrey

Leah and I had the chance to catch up on a phone interview. As soon as we began our chat, memories flooded back to me from our first year together in 1837 Hall. It’s amazing to think that we started our time at MHC seven whole years ago. Since our graduation in 2010, Leah has accomplished quite a bit!

Directly after Mount Holyoke, Leah went on to get her Masters in biomedical sciences at Midwestern University near Chicago. She then moved to Marlborough, MA where she now lives and works as a biocompatibility scientist at Boston Scientific. Basically, Leah assesses medical devices for any potential hazards which means she’s responsible for the safety of medical devices used across the globe. She loves the fact that she learns new things at work every day and gets to utilize a lot of knowledge she obtained at MHC.

“Oh my God, everything,” was Leah’s response when I asked her what she missed about Mount Holyoke. She loved having so many amazing women all on one campus and finds it challenging to keep up with all of her friends. She loved her coursework and specifically mentioned The Brain/Mind, a class taught by Professor Joseph Cohen. Leah thought this course perfectly combined her love of biology and interest in psychology—her major and minor at Mount Holyoke.

Leah is currently reading the World According to Garp by John Irving. Her friend and fellow Moho, Becca Gauthier who now attends Harvard Law School, recommended the book but so far it is a bit boring and Leah hasn’t really gotten into it. She describes what she is watching lately as “the trashiest, most terrible TV.” It’s not that bad though. She loves Modern Family.

When I asked Leah if any information was missing from our interview, her sassy reply was, “well, I am dating someone.” She is dating Jeremiah, a UMASS Amherst graduate and engineer in Shrewsbury, MA. Recently they took a walk down memory lane: Leah showed Jeremiah around MHC and Jeremiah gave Leah a tour of his life at UMASS. They also visited a Korean restaurant in Hadley that happened to be both of their favorite when they were in school.

It’s unfortunate that our conversation was just a phone call. But, since Leah is based in MA, she has no excuse to miss our 5-year Reunion, which is closer than you think. I look forward to actually catching up with her then and reconnecting with my entire first year crew from 1837.

No Greatness Comes Without Risk: Carycruz Miriam Bueno

August 26, 2013 by mhc2010

No Greatness Comes Without Risk: Carycruz Miriam Bueno
By Natasha Payés

Everyone had a hand in crafting her name. From her Indian-descent grandfather to her older sister Cruz, it was a familial effort in carefully selecting the name Carycruz Miriam Bueno. Combining her grandmothers’ names—Caridad and Cruz—which means charity and the cross, Cary’s grandfather chose Miriam, the older sister of the prophet Moses. As for her last name…well Cary must be inherently good. For many of us, it would not be an easy task to live up to such a name that sounds like it should be reserved for the Mother Teresas in our world; however, it seems as if Cary does this with ease.

As a self-identified Afro-Latina, Cary straddles two cultures, two languages and two worlds. The Dominican pitted against the American culture; the Spanish versus the English; the U.S. nationality and the immigrant experience. When she’s in the Dominican Republic visiting family, fellow Dominicans detect and point out her “American” accent. When Cary is in New York, she’s often asked, “No really, but what are you?” For some reason, her mocha complexion, her long tresses and the ability to speak Spanish throw people for a loop. “It’s a catch 22,” said Cary, “I’m neither here nor there.”

Though it’s cumbersome to balance all of her communities and identities, Cary’s insight and her Mount Holyoke education help her bridge communities and tackle some of the most complicated issues plaguing our nation.

As a rising high school senior, Carycruz had her sights set on the Ivy Leagues: Harvard, Yale, Brown—you know the type. But her sister who was studying at the University of Massachusetts Amherst told her about these amazing schools in the Pioneer Valley that were only for women.

“Cary,” said Cruz, “this is the place where you need to be.”

Although skeptical at the thought of attending a women’s college, Cary trusted her sister’s opinion and applied to Mount Holyoke and Smith. Choosing which admitted students’ weekend was a challenge—Mount Holyoke’s and Smith’s fell on the same weekend—but she chose MHC. After befriending some cool gals like Natasha Payés, Geraldine Rodriguez, and Kristin Tucker, she realized that if MHC was anything like her visit, she wanted to be there.

Fall of 2006, Carycruz jumped right in. She joined the Association of Pan African Unity and La Unidad and became the social chair, treasurer, five college representative and historian for both organizations.

“As a Black Latina, I felt very connected to both organizations and I wanted to bridge those connections,” said Cary.

Not only was it important to Cary to make meaningful connections between the two groups, but also by being a member it was her way to pay homage to those that came before her. “A lot of alums fought for us to be here…we deserved to be there [at MHC].”

When asked about classes that left lasting impressions, she joked, “Well it wasn’t my probability class.” Interestingly, it was a course she took to fulfill a distribution requirement her senior year titled Immigration Nation.

“As a senior, I thought I knew and learned everything, but that class taught me about laws and theories that have shaped our American society. I realized that there’s still more work to do.”

And she knew one area that certainly needed more work: our American education system.

Following graduation, she was placed in Hawaii as a 7^th grade special education math teacher for Teach For America.

Her days began at 5 AM and concluded around 12 AM or later.

She was tasked with teaching her students 7^th grade math, but many of them had learning disabilities.

Some students were at 5^th grade level math, others were at the 2^nd grade level.

How would she make 7^th grade math accessible to all of her students who all have varying degrees of comprehension?

The pressure was on and at times Carycruz questioned why she was doing this work, but her doubts would always disappear whenever her students understood the material and Cary could see incremental improvements. Though she realizes that Teach For America is not the answer to upheave the U.S. educational system, it is an attempt to chip away at the flaws and work with the resources that they have.

Now that she is three years out of college, Cary is going back to her original plan: earning her PhD in economics. With a full-ride to Georgia State University, she plans to link her passions for economics and education in hopes to solve social issues through an economic lens.

With crafting such a name, Cary’s family set the tone for what she would experience and how she would use her gifts in this world. She would need compassion and love for others; she would need to be bold and courageous like Miriam; and she would need to take up the cross during times of darkness and uncertainty. Or as Cary would sum up in a less flowery, but powerful way: “No greatness comes without risk.”

Guest Post: Becca Tarnas

August 12, 2013 by mhc2010

We asked for submissions, and you answered!

Here Becca Tarnas shares an essay and artwork from her blog, which houses a selection of Becca’s paintings, academic essays, poems, stories, and plays for the enjoyment and hopefully inspiration of others. Her writings explore diverse topics from philosophy, to ecology, imagination, mythology, archetypal cosmology, and religion. The following essay discusses the work of philosopher Anne Conway, a relatively unknown contemporary of the Cambridge Platonists.

The Infinite Dynamic Stairway: Exploring Anne Conway’s Philosophy

A WOMAN PHILOSOPHER

A sole treatise is all that the world has inherited of the philosophical thought of Lady Anne Finch, Viscountess of Conway, yet aspects of her unique system and cosmology can be traced in quiet echoes through the work of several of the great names that came after her, from Leibniz, Blake, and Goethe, to Bergson and Whitehead, to contemporary feminist and ecological thinkers. Her legacy is obscured, it seems, primarily by her gender, for she lived in a time when a university education was denied to women and her name was not even included on the title page of her only publication.[1] Except in rare cases, such as in the work of Leibniz, Anne Conway’s influence on subsequent thinkers can only be traced by a shadowy similarity of content, rather than directly by name. Yet she has been called “the profoundest and most learned of the female metaphysical writers of England”[2] by James Crossley, and “the most important woman philosopher in seventeenth century England” by Sarah Hutton.[3]

Read on…

Becca Tarnas ’10 is an artist, writer, and doctoral student at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program in San Francisco. She uses art and storytelling as a means to reconnect with our planet Earth in this critical time of ecological crisis. Becca was educated at the San Francisco Waldorf School for thirteen years before pursuing Environmental Studies and Theater Arts at Mount Holyoke, and she also holds a master’s degree from CIIS in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. She is currently working on an ongoing project entitled ”Women of Words,” in which she is reading the works of 35 female authors from Mary Wollstonecraft to Toni Morrison and writing engaging analyses that can be read.

Interested in submitting your work? Any style, any form, and thing at all may be submitted – articles, essays, short stories, video, etc. Just fill out the submission form!

The Adventures of Elyse Bova

August 1, 2013 by mhc2010

The Adventures of Elyse Bova
By Elizabeth DuMont-McCaffrey

Elyse Bova has “1837” tattooed on her ass. There are many ways for people to show their love for Mount Holyoke, but not everyone can be as awesome as Elyse Bova.

Elyse lives in San Francisco with Cam McCaugherty and Jackie Kajos, fellow Mohos. There, Elyse manages a fashion boutique in Haight Ashbury founded by a recent immigrant who supported three daughters on her own. The boutique started out as a fashionable yet affordable clothing shop, however, over the years, the owner was able to save enough money to establish her own clothing line, Audrey 3+1, that is now sold in stores nationally.

Before working at the boutique, Elyse didn’t realize that fashion was her passion, but now her career goal is to be a part of the fashion industry. Elyse’s next step is to move to NYC. She plans to attend SUNY FIT and hopes to become an assistant to an international buyer.

Elyse also met her girlfriend, Mahsa Matin, in San Francisco and it is a creepy/adorable story. On a crowded bus one afternoon, Elyse spotted Mahsa and recognized her from a newspaper article she read about Mahsa’s one woman show. She stared like a creeper. Mahsa noticed. Because Elyse was so distracted by Mahsa’s beauty, she forgot her wallet on the bus. Mahsa found the wallet and sent Elyse a Facebook message to tell Elyse she had it. She then went over to Elyse’s to return her wallet and they have been in love ever since.

In her spare time, Elyse takes fashion classes at a local community college, does yoga with her girlfriend and models for photographers and artists. She is also obsessed with Sabrina the Teenage Witch and is currently rewatching all the seasons and can’t get enough of all of the ‘90s references. Although she knew her roommates would be embarrassed for her, she also admitted that her guilty pleasure is Pretty Little Liars.

She also hangs out with a slew of Mount Holyoke women including Chloe Kramer Baldwin, Stephanie Halstead, Ginnie Venuto, Carlo Butler and Natalie Chang. She even hired Emily Juarez ‘10 to work at one of her Audrey 3+1 stores for the summer before she heads off to Stanford this fall! The last thing they all did together was SF Pride which she described as a “weekend of debauchery.” However, usually, when they get together they are pretty low key. They like to make food, drink wine, and talk about world issues that are upsetting them.

Like all Mount Holyoke alumnae, Elyse misses her time in college. She mentioned that she loved the safety and security she felt on campus compared to her life in the city these days. She also misses some of her professors and noted, “Paul Staiti was pretty bomb.”

If you are a 2010er in NYC, look out! Elyse will be there soon enough as fashionista extraordinaire. We can only hope that one of the first trends she sets is 1837 butt tattoos.

Prisons, Kittens and Climate Change: An Interview with Page May

July 12, 2013 by mhc2010

Prisons, Kittens and Climate Change: An Interview with Page May
By Elizabeth DuMont-McCaffrey

Page May is going to change the world if it’s the last thing she does. Whether we were discussing her work educating students about climate change or her prison activist book group’s reading list, passion poured from Page and inspired me 1,000 miles away throughout our phone conversation.

Directly after college, Page received the Bill Emerson National Hunger Fellowship, a prestigious fellowship that teaches budding activists about issues of hunger and poverty facing our country and places the fellows in non-profit organizations working to eradicate those problems. The fellowship sent Page to Washington, D.C (where she got to hang out with nuns all day) and Chicago (where she found love.)

Because of Debbie, Page’s girlfriend, Page decided to stay in Chicago after the end of the fellowship. It took time for Page to feel settled, but eventually she found a great community and adopted two stray cats, Charlie and Bazil. She began working for the Alliance for Climate Education in Chicago as the Education and Media Manager. At work, she mainly writes blogs, speaks at school assemblies and conducts trainings about the climate. She is thrilled to be working in a job that combines science, media and public speaking—just a few of her passions.

Speaking of passions, since graduating from MHC, Page has become a prison rights activist. After reading The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Page was so inspired that she hosted a holiday party where attendees wrote holiday cards to LGBTQ prisoners. The holiday party was such a success that the group established a chapter of Black and Pink, an organization that supports LGBTQ prisoners. So far the group has been involved in protests, organized movie screenings and read many relevant books including Queer (In)Justice, Captive Genders, and Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline. Assata, an autobiography by Assata Shakur, is next on the group’s list.

Another reason that Page founded this book group is because she missed the level of reading and learning she had at Mount Holyoke. She mentioned that at Mount Holyoke, political education was so normalized that she thought that was how life would be outside of college. However, it was hard to keep up with that same level of reading independently, so a politically-minded book group helped to form the same kind of community.

On a lighter note, Page also noted that she misses Mount Holyoke food. “I don’t cook so that sucks,” were her exact words on that subject.

I asked Page what she is hoping to do next and she replied that she wants to tear down the system. “We can’t go on this way,” she said.

Catch Her if You Can: Caitlin McDermott

June 18, 2013 by mhc2010

Catch Her if You Can: Caitlin McDermott
By Natasha Payés

Caitlin’s two loosely braided pig-tails sway from left to right as she whips around the track, one foot crossing over the other. She attacks the curve and relaxes on the straight-away, attacks the curve and relaxes on the straight; her black and lime green roller skates make a soothing zzzzzzzzzz sound. After an hour of ramming her body into others, breaking through packs of aggressive skaters, and completing timed intervals, Caitlin peels off her high waist black and white polka-dot mini skirt and strips down to her red paisley-print boy shorts and black tights. She takes a sip of water and gets back on the track.

That was just the warm-up.

Playing on the Quabbin Missile Crisis and Western Mass Destruction roller derby teams of the Pioneer Valley is just one of the activities she discovered since graduating from Mount Holyoke in 2010. She is known as Rocky Raccoon #594—that’s police code for malicious mischief. As for the Rocky Raccoon, it is the title of her favorite Beatles song which highlights persistence and tenacity—two characteristics that are a must for such a high-impact sport. Roller derby is more than just women in risqué, DIY costumes on skates. This is a sport that defies notions of femininity, encourages men’s participation, and is becoming increasingly popular and widely respected.

“Roller derby has been a wonderful community to get involved in, both locally and nationally,” said Caitlin. “It’s such an eclectic group of people; there are nurses, single mothers, computer programmers, college students, construction workers, doctors. We’re interested in this national grassroots sport and we all have something to bring to the table.”

Finding such a community that resembles anything like MoHome is cumbersome, but somehow Caitlin has managed to find her niche right in her own backyard.

Caitlin is an Easthamptonite through and through. She attended the Williston School as a day student and though Mount Holyoke is only minutes away, she did not discover the college until the application season.

At her mother’s suggestion Caitlin applied—begrudgingly—to both Mount Holyoke and Smith, but was convinced that she would never go to an all-women’s college. Caitlin was admitted to both colleges, but automatically said no to Smith as it was too close to home. And despite Mount Holyoke being dead last on her college list; she attended Experience MHC, the College’s admitted student weekend.

She didn’t want to.
She didn’t want to like MHC.
God forbid she would admit to her mother that she was right all along!

But Caitlin could not deny her feelings, nor could she lie and say she had a horrible overnight experience. She played Apples to Apples with her host for goodness sakes!

The following day, Caitlin submitted her deposit.

Over the course of four years, Caitlin joined a handful of student organizations such as the Mount Holyoke News as the health and science editor; track and field as a thrower; and stage crew. Oh stage crew…so many hours spent setting up and dissembling sets, staying up until the wee hours of the morning with Lauren Darby as they waited for A/C Day and Variasians rehearsals, Las Vegas Night, UnDressage, a capella jams, Thursday Night Live performances, Noche Latina, China Night, [you fill in the blank] to end.

“It was a shared pain experience,” she joked, “But I loved it.”

Following graduation, Caitlin traveled to Australia and worked as a research assistant at the Australian National University with Professor Jochen Zeil, a renowned vision scientific researcher. While there she worked on two projects that consisted of tracking bull ants and studying escape responses in fiddler crabs.

Once the year was up, Caitlin made her way back to the U.S. and worked as an early childhood music teacher in Los Angeles and then as an administrative assistant at the Office of Student Programs at Mount Holyoke.

So what’s next for our fellow Pegasus?

Starting August, Caitlin will teach science at the Peddie School, a private boarding school located in Hightstown, NJ. Although she does not like to admit it, Caitlin is following her mother’s footsteps by becoming a teacher. She plans to pursue a Master of Education degree in a few years. Though she is slated to have a hectic schedule this academic year, Rocky Raccoon #594 is definitely ready for the challenge!