CUNY Newswire

BMCC’s Mathematics Major Committee recently hosted a Welcome Orientation, where math professors provided new students with graduation and career advice.

“We’re here to help you become mathematicians,” said Annie Han, Chair of the Mathematics department.

“I started before my sister did, and I kind of knew the ropes at BMCC, so when she came here, I was like ‘Little Mother Hen’ over her,” says Francisca Campos, BMCC alumna and Deputy Chair of the college’s Business Management department.

This semester, all 37 CUNY and SUNY community colleges participated in Completion Day, which encourages students to utilize campus resources in order to expedite their graduation requirements.

“We are teaching you standard Italian,” modern language professor John Means told a packed audience of students in Richard Harris Terrace.
From 400 to 1400 AD, he explained, “Italy was a collection of city states; the ‘Kingdom of Florence’, the ‘Kingdom of Pisa’ and so on,” and their inhabitants spoke what became dialects of Italian.

October 11, 2012 was National Coming Out Day, which in turn, made it the perfect day for BMCC to kick-off its celebration of LBGTB Awareness Month.

This year’s theme is “Evolving Toward Equality,” and BMCC staffers, faculty members and students attended the Opening Day Luncheon in Richard Harris Terrace.

Daughters of the American Revolution, or the DAR, is a non-profit women’s lineage organization founded in 1890, with 170,000 current members. There are over 3,000 chapters across the United States and the world, and new members are inducted all the time.

Recently, BMCC’s Office of Career Development and ASAP program teamed up to host a Retail Career Fair in the college’s gymnasium.
More than 30 companies seeking part-time employees set up booths, and hiring managers met with BMCC students, all dressed in business attire.
Many students engaged in practice interview sessions with staffers from the Office of Career Development before attending the fair.

BMCC has moved on up—and it’s a cause for celebration.
Right on the heels of the opening of BMCC’s The Miles and Shirley Fiterman Hall, on September 23rd, a ribbon ceremony officially launched BMCC’s other new building.
Called ‘CUNY in the Heights,’ the unveiling of 5030 Broadway is exciting news for students who reside in Upper Manhattan, giving them the option to take classes closer to home.

U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis visited BMCC on Monday, observing a Health Information Technology computer lab in the campus’s main building at 199 Chambers, and holding a press conference in Fiterman Hall.

Fiterman Hall’s path from Point A—when it first opened in 1993, to Point B—when the new Miles and Shirley Fiterman Hall officially re-opened on August 27, 2012, wasn’t an easy one.

However, Fiterman Hall would have never been rebuilt after 9/11 if it weren’t for New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the Community Advisory Committee, who willed Fiterman Hall to thrive.

On September 19, students, staff, faculty and friends of BMCC gathered in Icarus Plaza at the entrance to the college’s main campus building on Chambers Street, donned cobalt-blue BMCC T-shirts and walked in a procession down Greenwich Street to The Miles and Shirley Fiterman Hall.

BMCC continues to proudly offer classes uptown, at a brand new location: 5030 Broadway (Inwood), also known as “CUNY in the Heights” (CITH).
“‘CITH rocks with energy and is the shining star of learning on Upper Broadway,” says Professor Golda Solomon, who teaches speech courses at CITH/Inwood. “Our new building is testament to the fact that CUNY cares, and is on par with private colleges where updated classroom technology is a given.”

Odette Geraldino lives just blocks from another community college, but chose BMCC, she says, “because it’s close to the financial district, and I like the diversity at BMCC.”

Having moved from the Dominican Republic at age 16, Geraldino graduated from Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx the month she turned 17, and entered BMCC that fall.

I enrolled at BMCC as a stepping stone to a music career,” says Liberal Arts major Ngozi Maduakolam, who previously attended SUNY Delhi. “I studied marketing in the past, but after taking some time off from school, I decided to pursue what I really loved, and that was music. I wanted to go for it, full-throttle.”

BMCC’s infamous motto is, “Start Here, Go Anywhere.” That applies to any aspect of the college, including theatrical productions.
A version of the play Woyzeck—Georg Büchner’s 19th-century expressionist drama—started at BMCC in 2010, and featured BMCC students.

Inside Bless Couture, a fashion boutique decorated in hot pink, black, and white, customers can find everything from sundresses to sequined tops to lavender jeans. They can also find the store’s cheerful owner and president, Carmen Torres. A fashionista and recent graduate of BMCC, Torres co-owns Bless Couture with her sister, Monica.

“I’m majoring in Communication Studies because I want to go into journalism,” says a BMCC student in a short video about the college’s newest academic offering.

“I’m majoring in Communication Studies because I want to go into public relations,” says another student.

“I might want to go into corporate training, counseling or teaching,” a third student says.

Her point: communication lies at the heart of every area of human activity. The acquisition of strong communication skills—not just the ability to convey messages, but to listen, write, speak and think critically—“will give me a great foundation for all these fields and more,” she adds.

What do artist Sarah Haviland and fashion gurus Stella McCartney and Giambattista Valli have in common?
This summer, their creative talent shared the same window at Saks Fifth Avenue.
“I loved my window,” says Haviland, an associate professor in BMCC’s Music and Art department. “It was very elegant.”

In a myth dating back to pre-Columbian times, the world is robbed of its colors by a villain. A butterfly turns into a young girl named Are, who sets out on a magical journey through numerous “kingdoms of color” with a single mission: to wrest back the colors and restore them to the world.

A new model co-developed by BMCC Science Professors Saavik Ford and Barry McKernan shows how an elusive type of black hole can be formed in the gas surrounding their supermassive counterparts.