Posted on Sep 20, 2002

The College welcomes two recent
graduates – Genevieve Mbamalu '02 and Darcy Tuczynski '00 – as new admissions
counselors this fall.

Mbamalu,
who graduated just months ago from Union
College, won't have to look far to
find people who can help her in recruiting students at Union's
admissions office.

“I have friends here who are sophomores, juniors
and seniors,” said Mbamalu, who was well-known on campus through her
involvement in many activities. “I can always call on them to help me.”

Mbamalu, a native of Nigeria
who graduated from A. Philip Randolph High School in New
York City, joins Union's
admissions office as a counselor. She is to visit students at schools in Long
Island; Washington, D.C.;
Maryland; Virginia;
Delaware; North
Carolina and Tennessee.

“We're thrilled to
have Genevieve back at Union,”
said Dan Lundquist, vice president for admissions and financial aid. “She
brings the same energy and enthusiasm to the admissions office that she brought
to her activities as a student.”

A major in sociology with a minor in biology,
Mbamalu did her senior thesis on “The Role of Cultural Tradition and Government
Apathy in Promoting HIV/AIDS in South African Women.” She plans to pursue a
career with an international public health agency.

While a student at Union,
she took terms abroad in Jamaica
and Italy. She
did research fellowships on complementary and alternative medicine, success of
the breast cancer movement, and racial and ethnic differences with informal
care giving.

She was a recipient of the Franklin L. Fero
Memorial Scholarship and the College's Meritorious Service Award.

Among her activities
while a student at Union,  she was a
Science and Technology tutor; a program coordinator for Student Activities;
conference planning chair for the College chapter of the National Association
of Black Engineers; a disc jockey for WRUC, the College radio station; and
co-chair of the Sociology Club.

She was a computer
consultant through the College's USTAR
program, which provides technical support to faculty and students; an assistant
to a vice president at Guggenheim Brothers, facilitating realty funds projects
and organizing scholarships for doctoral candidates; and an atmospheric science
intern at NASA's Langley Research
Center, where she interpreted
global climate change data.

Tuczynski says she is glad to be back at “a place that feels like
home.” The Greenfield Center
native and 1996 graduate of Saratoga Springs
Senior High School returns to her
alma mater as an admissions counselor.

“I was the liberal arts queen,”
said the interdepartmental major in biology and philosophy of her time as a
Union student. She studied for a term in France
(she also had a French minor); played violin in the College orchestra; and
served as editor of Ephemeris, a philosophy
journal that she founded. She was active in the College's Big Brothers/Big
Sisters program, serving as a “Big” and managing a summer camp at Union
to serve the “Littles” while their “Bigs” were away. She played on the field
hockey team. Throughout her four years at Union, Tuczynski worked in the
admissions office – as an office assistant, tour guide, overnight host and
finally, senior interviewer.

“Darcy's homecoming represents a
continuation of the great work she did with us as a student,” said Lundquist.

Since graduating from Union,
Tuczynski has worked for Deloitte Consulting in New York
City, specializing in health care and life science
firms.

She is to represent the College in
visits to schools in New York's
Southern Tier, western Massachusetts,
New Hampshire and Vermont.

Posted on Sep 20, 2002

The press box atop the new seating
complex at Frank Bailey Field may have changed the life of Sports Information
Director George Cuttita and his sports-writing colleagues.

The seating complex was dedicated
on Saturday before the start of the football game against St. Lawrence.

The 55-foot enclosed press box features
lots of things that its predecessor did not: sliding windows that keep out the
wind and weather, electricity, telephone and internet connections, to name a
few.

Gone are the days when brisk winds
shook the open-air plywood box supported by scaffolding. (The “temporary” box
was constructed in the early 80's.) Gone too is the necessity for reporters to
leave the box to file their post-game write-ups; now they can file then
electronically right from the box.

The press box is also a lot
roomier than the old one. Said Cuttita, “We don't even have to put our
sandwiches on the floor.”

Posted on Sep 20, 2002

Union College this fall welcomed 24 new members to the
faculty. Here we introduce 12 of them. The rest will be introduced next issue.

            David Baum,
visiting assistant professor of history, earned his master's and Ph.D. degrees
from Yale University.  His research
and teaching interests include Medieval and Renaissance history.

            Brent Carswell, visiting assistant professor of mathematics,
earned his master's degree from Potsdam College, and his Ph.D. from University at Albany.  His research interests
include complex analysis, and operator theory on spaces of analytic functions,
including multiplication and composition operators on the Bergman, Hardy, and Fock spaces.

            Palma Catravas, visiting
assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, earned her S.M.,
and Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Her teaching interests include development of
teaching methods for basic physics concepts, while her research interests lie
in electron beam diagnostics, novel ultrashort radiation
sources with electron beams, and advanced accelerators. 

            Tomáš Dvorák, assistant
professor of economics, earned his master's degree from Central European University in Praague, Czech Republic, and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College
Park.  For the past two years, Hehas been teaching undergraduate
econometrics and introductory graduate courses on open economy macroeconomics
at Williams College.

            Nixi Cura, instructor of visual arts, earned her master's degree in the history of art and archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she is completing her Ph.D.  She recently served as a Haakon Fellow at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

            Bruce C. Duncan, visiting
assistant professor of physics, earned his master's and Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut.  He taught as a teaching
assistant in the physics department at the University of Connecticut for ten years.

            Amy Gangl, assistant professor of political science,
received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.  Her teaching interests include
American politics (public opinion, political psychology, and political
communication) and methodology (research methods, experimental design, and
measurement theory.)

            Angel
M. González García, visiting instructor of Spanish, earned his master's
and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.  His
dissertation dealt with the creation of a discourse of identity in early modern
Spain.

            Amy. C. Hsiao,
assistant professor of mechanical engineering, earned her master's and Ph.D.
from Carnegie Mellon University.  Hsiao
previously taught at Carnegie Mellon University.

            Anupama Jain, assistant professor in English,
earned her master's and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Her research and teaching interests include
South Asian American literature and culture, postcolonial literature and
theory, and Asian American literature and studies.

            Stephen D. Jones, visiting
assistant professor of anthropology, earned his master's degree from Hunter College of the City University of New York, and his Ph.D.
from the State University of New York at Albany.  His research
interests include late iron age europe, ecology, agropastoral
anthropology, Faunal studies, European archaeology, northeast U.S. archaeology, and ethology.

            Joanne Dora Kehlbeck, assistant professor of chemistry, received
her Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University.  She just
finished working at Yale University at as postdoctoral associate.

Posted on Sep 20, 2002

Perusing the College's course listings just got a lot
easier.

Thanks to a database of the course catalog developed by
the College's web office, finding current information on academic programs is a
snap.

Visit www.union.edu/Academics,
click on “Programs and Departments,” and all of the programs from the 2002-2003
Academic Register appear. Click on a program name, and you will see the most
current program description, course catalog entry, and course schedules. To see
a previous year's course catalog, simply select a different year from the menu
at the top of the page. Catalogs back to 1998-1999 are available. The display
of information is standard across all academic programs, and information from
previous academic years is clearly labeled with the correct year.

Also, you can now reach any academic program's site simply
by entering the program name after union.edu/ in the URL. For example, to see
latest information on Anthropology, visit www.union.edu/Anthropology.
Departments are encouraged to use these “shortcut” URLs in all of
their publications, print and electronic.

Posted on Sep 20, 2002

Ron Burch, curator of art and
architecture for the New York State
Museum, will speak on “Putting
Hindsight First: Collecting Now for the Future” on Monday, Sept. 30, at 6 p.m. in the Mandeville Gallery at the Nott
Memorial.

His talk is part of the exhibit, “Unioniana!
Union College Souvenirs and Memorabilia,” which runs through Oct. 13. The
exhibit contains a number of collectibles – from cups to hats and toys to
prints – from Union's Special Collections.

In his talk, Burch will discuss
the recent collecting of artifacts from the World
Trade Center
for an exhibit by the New York State
Museum, the philosophy and human
nature involved in collecting, and collecting at the museum level. He will also
focus on how a curator determines what will be relevant for a collection for generations
to come.

Burch, who joined the state museum
in Albany in 1983, also was registrar
for the New York State Historical Association and the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown.
He holds a master's degree in museum studies from the Cooperstown Graduate
Program, and a master's in U.S. History from Duke
University.