Class Notes, January/February 2000
Wednesday March 01, 2000 Category: Archives Permanent Link
If you can even think about raising a glass after all that (drunken) millennial madness, it’s cheers to the dozens of classmates who are writing to tell us how nauseatingly adult they are, with important-sounding jobs and degrees, weddings, and, yes, kids. Yikes! You guys are scaring me.
Anna I. Castro, a health educator for the Massachusetts Dept. of Public Health, and (judging from the sheer amount of boldface names in her letter) the de facto head of our Boston bureau, writes that she’s “happy as a clam in Boston.” Anna goes on to say, “I love seeing Cornell buddies Claire A. Hogarth (who always has great stories about the Boston Public School kindergartners she teaches), Maureen C. Mellett (who has all the answers about birds because she works at Franklin Park Zoo), Pablo G. Garcia ‘97, and Julie B. Ross. Daniel J. Caffarelli just graduated from Boston U. law school and will move to New York City this fall to work at a corporate law firm in the World Trade Center . Ariella P. Benger, a ‘missing classmate,’ is also in NYC, working for a human resources firm.”
Tara (MacLean) and husband Kevin Sweeney are living in Alaska with their 2-year-old daughter, Caitlin. Kevin is a public relations specialist at Natchiq Inc., Alaska’s largest oil field support company, and Tara is putting her ILR degree to good use as the labor relations manager at Houston Contracting Company, the state’s largest pipeline construction company. Wendy J. Verret, a clinical research associate at Genentech in San Francisco, reports that Tamar Y. Duvdevani is at Fordham law school and Maureen M. Richardson just graduated from Georgetown law. Erin E. Sullivan is a human resources manager at Procter & Gamble in Mehoopany, PA. “This is quite a different path from a civil engineering degree,” she writes.
Haseeb Ahmed is working toward a PhD in econ at the U. of Minnesota. “I really have something going for cold weather,” he jokes. Emily R. Luskin, Karen M. Apollo, and Levina Wong, MS E ‘98, are back in Ithaca for a second tour of duty: law school. Levina reports that she’s “glad to see that most things are the same, sad to see Straight from the Oven gone from the Ivy Room .” She also says that Brian Wolkenberg is completing his MS/MBA at MIT.
Kim (Ackerman) and John Koepke ‘95 recently celebrated their third wedding anniversary. They’re in Wisconsin, where John manages the family business, Koepke Farms, a dairy operation with more than 300 cows. Kim just switched jobs. She’s now working for Morgan & Myers, a marketing communications consulting firm. Keri A. Salzillo is an investigation supervisor at Georgetown law school’s criminal justice clinic. She writes that Jason Schick is at Microstrategy in Vienna, Va., Juan P. Uribe is working for FMCG in New York City and Jessica R. Paige ‘98 is also in NYC. Other classmates in the Big (wormy) Apple: Nicholas Grego, a financial analyst at Salomon Smith Barney; Jennifer M. Tishman, at PricewaterhouseCoopers; and our class correspondent extraordinaire Allie Cahill, whose new job as an exalted associate editor for TV Guide Online actually involves getting paid to watch television. And you thought liberal arts degrees were useless.
Public service announcement (at least for the women): If your engagement ring squeal isn’t in top form, you’d better start practicing. No doubt half your friends are going to get engaged this year or next, since I could easily have filled this entire column with Wedding Watch. For those of you flaming me for not mentioning your engagements, let me remind you once again that magazine policy says we’re mum until the rings are safely on your fingers; in other words, news of engagements will never appear in this column. Sooo, zap me a note after the reception, and I will gladly print every last Cornellian guest and whether the bridesmaids’ dresses matched the tablecloths. Or whatever.
And here we go: Jennifer (Hale) married Jarret Rackoff September 4 in New Jersey. Jennifer is an associate at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett; Jarret is a senior product manager in the technology department of Big Star Entertainment, an Internet company that sells videotapes of movies. Catherine S. Simpson married John Bueker, JD ‘97 on August 7 in NYC. Lora L. Levy, Deb Huret, Lisa E. Heuer, and Ilana Preuss were bridesmaids. Catherine’s getting her PhD in sociology at Brown.
Lori (Giovina), BS HE ‘97, and Jeffrey Haubrich ‘97 married in E. Northport, NY, on July 25, reports Jeffrey’s grandfather, John Leslie ‘35. Ashesh Badani married Radha Mehta on July 18 in Tarrytown , NY. Bride and groom are getting MBAs at Penn. Prumeh E. Lee married Eumin Kim on June 26 in Chicago. Guests included Suzannah S. Park ‘97, Jan Kim ‘97, Young Rok Shin ‘98, and Eugene Oh, who showed up in full second lieutenant uniform. Prumeh is a recent DC transplant; she’s getting a PhD in American history at American U. Selena (Veach) married Eric Crandall on Mar. 6, ‘99 at Bear Trap Ranch in Colorado Springs. Elizabeth I. Bard reports that she saw Joanna F. Citron and Wendy Meredith Hunter at the summer 1999 wedding of Maya R. Holmes and Daryl Merritt.
New Year’s Resolution: Keep the news coming.
—Courtney Rubin, Class Correspondent
