CUNY Newswire

Thanks to one woman and a community trust, many students at BMCC receive the academic and financial support they need to succeed.
Here’s the backstory: In 2008, Pat White, the Program Director for Children, Youth and Families at The New York Community Trust, arranged for a grant to be donated to BMCC on behalf of The Trust, which was used to fund The Odyssesy Pro

Every year, BMCC celebrates Poem in Your Pocket Day in which the spirit and beauty of the poetic word is appreciated throughout campus.
“April is Poetry Month and we never let it go by without recognizing it,” said Michael Gillespie, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, at the 2013 Poetry Awards Ceremony held recently in Richard Harris Terrace.

Tria Case, University Director of Sustainability for The City University of New York, was the plenary speaker in BMCC’s recent conference, Sustainability and Technology: New Directions in Teaching and Learning.
BMCC Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Michael Gillespie welcomed participants to the conference, quoting Albert Einstein’s still-timely observation, “If we do not harness technology, technology will harness us.”
For CUNY and BMCC students, harnessing the technology for sustainability, or building a career in the field, starts with choosing a related major.

Jobs for certified medical assistants are expected to grow by 31% in the decade from 2010 to 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That’s good news, and here’s more: The BMCC Center for Continuing Education and Workforce Development is piloting a Medical Assistant training program that will enable people to take advantage of that trend.
“Certified medical assistants are more employable and earn more than their counterparts in the workplace who are not certified,” says BMCC Dean of Continuing Education, Sunil Gupta.

Dr. Goldstein stated: “Serving this exceptional university alongside so many extraordinary colleagues has been the greatest privilege of my professional life. I am deeply grateful to the trustees, members of the chancellery, presidents, faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends, who, every day, work so diligently to support and fulfill CUNY’s historic mission. As the first CUNY graduate to lead the University (City College, Class of 1963), I take enormous pride in what we have accomplished, together, to ensure an unparalleled educational experience for every CUNY student.”

BMCC’s President Dr. Antonio Pérez recently met with a very captive audience—who happened to be sitting on the floor.
BMCC’s youngest students, the pre-schoolers of the Early Childhood Center, were treated to a special visit from President Pérez, who stopped by the read the 3 to 5-year-olds a book he pre-selected: Lola Reads to Leo by Anna McQuinn.
“Do you know this book?” Pérez asked the kids as he held it up while sitting on a classroom chair. The group of about 20 children slowly shook their heads. “No? Good, so if I make a mistake no one will know!”

One way to attract a college student is with freebies, food, and fun.

Or, you can attract college students when you’re seeking employees for your business—and that’s exactly what makes the BMCC’s annual career fairs so popular.

As any biologist will tell you, “Birds float.”
“They’re designed to be light, so they can fly,” says science professor and paleontologist David Krauss.
The downside of buoyancy, though, from a paleontologist’s point of view, is that birds are less likely to sink to the bottom of a body of water, where they become covered with sediment, and fossilize—meaning less evidence exists, regarding the world in which they lived.

For many Americans, April 15th is the most stressful day of the year—federal taxes are due.
Tax prep can be daunting and overwhelming, but not an impossible task with the right guidance.
This semester, 12 accounting students at BMCC wanted to give back to their communities by helping others file their taxes.

A “queer lit” class starts out like any other. Instructor Jaime Weida writes homework on the board—finish reading The Color Purple, by Alice Walker—along with a reminder of when the students’ midterm essay is due, and dates for spring break.
Where the class begins to feel less typical, maybe is here: in the “queering” of a work of literature, which includes, Weida explains, “the comparison of censored and unaltered works by authors whose homosexuality was deemed unsuitable content, in their day.”

“I wrote like fire. This was all done in a year. I took all of these documents everywhere I went. I was obsessed.”
That’s how Cheryl Wills describes her experience writing Die Free, A Heroic Family Tale, which tells the story of her great-great-great grandfather, Sandy Wills—a teenager who ran away from the plantation where he had been enslaved, to join the Union Army and fight with the United States Colored Troops in the American Civil War.

Assistant Professor of Art History Megan O’Neil has such an affinity for Mayan Art she’s been on archeological excursions to Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.
“So many artifacts have been destroyed over time,” she says, “but we can better understand their culture through their artwork.”

As it turns out, one of Professor Ally’s students was a half-second later for class than he thought.
The other students in Great Issues in Philosophy were responding to a question their professor, Matthew Ally had posed:What are potential problems with the belief that consciousness causes our actions?
One of them commented, “Our brain is always working with a half-second delay, so consciousness isn’t immediate,” and this brought up another question: Where do consciousness and matter come together?

His name is “Angel,” and to one New York resident, he lived up to his name.
“There was one woman who was so happy with the service I provided her, she sang me some opera,” laughs Angel Arroyo, a recent BMCC graduate who currently attends CUNY John Jay. “You get some good-hearted callers here.”
The “here” Angel Arroyo is referring to is the CUNY 311 Call Center, located in Lower Manhattan, where he works part-time as a representative.

Science, according to Prof. Barry McKernan, is basically a social activity.
“The most important work takes place when smart people come together to argue, exchange ideas, and present alternative viewpoints,” he says.
Colleague Saavik Ford puts it even more plainly: “Science is about getting a lot of us in the same room and banging our heads together until something good comes out.”

“This has been a great year for us, our best year ever,” BMCC President Antonio Pérez told BMCC students, staff and faculty filling the tiered seats in Theatre II, as he opened his annual State of the College Address.
“Fifty years ago, when BMCC began as a small business college on two floors of a midtown office building, it would have been hard to imagine our future. Now we are the largest undergraduate college in all five boroughs,” the President said.

Hannah Vaughn plays the role of Anne Frank, and Phillip Burke is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Letters from Anne & Martin, a new stage production co-sponsored by The Anne Frank Center USA and BMCC, and presented recently in BMCC’s Richard Harris Terrace.

“Can someone hit the house lights? Can I have all the actors in the house?”
Marcus Dargan, an alumni of the BMCC theatre program—as well as an award-winning playwright and co-founder of the NuAfrikan Theatre in Harlem—is directing the dress rehearsal for The Negro Speaks, A Celebration of African American Poetry, Prose, and Music, in BMCC’s north-wing theatre space.

In late January of this year, Professor and Deputy Chair of the BMCC business department, Carmen Leonor Martínez-López, presented a paper in The Third International Conference for World Balance.
The conference was sponsored by UNESCO, through the José Martí Project of World Solidarity, and was held in Havana, Cuba.
“I was there in 1992 and after 20 years, Havana is changing for the better; the energy is different,” she says. “People are doing many things with very few resources, and by using their creativity.”

BMCC Science professor David Krauss, whose areas of research include vertebrate paleontology and urban ecology, was just elected as one of the 24 Councilors of the Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR).
CUR, a national, non-profit organization, supports and promotes high-quality, student-faculty collaborative research and scholarship at the undergraduate level, and represents over 900 colleges, nationwide.
BMCC shares the CUR mission to support student/faculty research projects.