Harry Fred Herbrandson, an assistant professor of chemistry from 1947 to 1949, died Nov. 12 in Lenox, Mass. He was eighty-one.
Adelaide B. Oppenheim, director of the Women in Management program at the College in the late 1970s, died Oct. 6 in Schenectady. She was eighty-nine.
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The College's Board of Trustees welcomed three new members at its February meeting:
Kelly joined IBM in 1980 and assumed his current position in September of 2000. He is responsible for developing, manufacturing, and marketing of IBM's microelectronics and storage technology products. A physics major at Union, he has an M.S. in physics and a Ph.D. in materials engineering, both from Rensselaer.
Pedowitz is a former chief of the criminal division of the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office. Since joining Wachtell Lipton in 1978, he has specialized in corporate litigation, regulatory, and white collar criminal matters. He received his B.A. in economics and political science and has his law degree from New York University.
Ritterbush is a partner in
Fairfax Partners, a family of companies that provides
private equity investment, management, and professional services. He received his undergraduate degree in political science and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in international economics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts and Harvard Universities.
In 1996, at a College commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr., sophomore Rachel Graham '98 announced that she had a dream: COCOA House, an after-school mentoring program that would team Union students with youngsters from Schenectady's Hamilton Hill.
Seven years later, Graham is overseeing COCOA's move to a home of its own at 869 Stanley St. in Schenectady.
“I'm overwhelmed by the favor, kindness, and generosity that this community has shown our program,” Graham says. “People and donations have just appeared. It's more than I could ever have dreamed.”
Until this year, COCOA
(Children of Our Community Open to Achievement) had been housed in the basement of Grace Temple Church of God and Christ at 30 Steuben Street, where Graham's father, Marvin, serves as pastor.
Graham started the program with the idea of offering an alternative. “Having been involved in my father's church, I became acquainted with a lot of kids, and education was not a high priority in many households,” she recalls. “I knew a few girls my age who dropped out and became teenage mothers. I was thinking of a way not so much to intervene in their lives, but to promote education as an alternative for them.”
The house cost about $10,000, most of which was raised through a campaign at the church. Most of the materials and labor for the renovation of the building were donated under the auspices of the Schenectady Inner City Ministry, Graham says.
Union has been closely associated with COCOA House from the beginning. The College supplies the students who volunteer as tutors, about ten to twenty each year who spend one or two afternoons a week with the kids. Last year, Union tutors logged about 700 hours at the center. On campus, COCOA House is a funded student activity with a slate of officers. It also provides funding for field trips including hockey games, museum visits, and plays. Alumni and students account for about half the members of the advisory committee.
Did Graham ever have doubts? “All the time,” she says, “especially after a bad day at the center. But there was enough support and encouragement from others to keep me in it. So many people helped us get
where we are.”
Graham's words on Martin Luther King Day seven years ago still speak to the mission of COCOA: “On Hamilton Hill, we have a role as a College to help them along the way, to show them that life is much broader than what they see.”
Read MoreHe was cited for his leadership in College-city relations and community revitalization.
Shortly after his inauguration in 1990, he joined with business and government leaders to create Schenectady 2000, a revitalization effort based on the premise that a city in which residents take pride will be better able to lure and retain businesses. A largely volunteer organization, more than 1,000 residents have volunteered with business and civic leaders chairing a variety of task forces. Schenectady 2000 has also been responsible for the organization of the Union community service day, in which students, faculty, and staff take part in repainting bridges, picking up trash and planting shrubbery.
President Hull was a driving force in the creation of the Metroplex Development Authority, which has concentrated on large-scale redevelopment in downtown Schenectady. Among the authority's successes have been the construction of a new headquarters for MVP (an area HMO) and a new office building for the state Department of Transportation.
Under the Union-Schenectady Initiative, the College has invested some $11 million in the College Park neighborhood west of campus. The College has acquired and renovated a number of properties to house about 200 students, provides incentives for homeowners and Union employees to purchase homes (including low-interest mortgages, tuition scholarships and closing costs), assisted in the formation of
a neighborhood residents association, and created the Kenney Community Center, which offers a variety of programs for children and residents of College Park.
The College also has created the U-Start Business Incubator Center, which provides professional space at below-market rates to high-tech start-up businesses and such services as a mentoring program with experts from local businesses and organizations as well as Union faculty.
“Union College can play an important role in the revitalization of Schenectady,” Hull says. “I believe that individuals and institutions alike have an obligation to make a difference in the communities of which they are a part.”
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Alumni interviews reached
a record-breaking 729, far surpassing the previous record of 530.
“It's an easy and fun way to serve the College,” says Kris Gernert-Dott '86, associate dean of admissions. “And it is very successful in stimulating students' interest in Union. We regularly see that more than eighty percent of the students interviewed by alumni wind up applying.”
Getting involved in the program is as easy as sending an e-mail to Lilia Tiemann, the coordinator of alumni admissions and event planning
(tiemannl@union.edu). Once the preliminaries are out of the way, a volunteer will get a packet of information containing everything from a primer on how to conduct an interview to brochures and background about academic and extracurricular programs. Alumni are kept up to date by a variety of means-a guide for alumni volunteers, an alumni admissions newsletter, fact sheets, the Web. Many return regularly for such events as ReUnion or Homecoming, and Tiemann responds to a steady stream of e-mail to answer such questions as, “I talked with a student who wants to take a year off to do volunteer work in South America; what's the College's policy on deferred admissions?”
The increase in the number of off-campus interviews has not come at the expense of on-campus interviews; in fact, campus programming has also increased substantially in recent years, to the point where the Admissions Office now employs a dozen interviewers from the senior class to help meet the demand from potential applicants and their parents.
Nearly all of the requests for alumni interviews are initiated by the students, with about two-thirds of those requests coming from students who have been on campus, perhaps for a tour or an open house program. “We know that finding the time to get back on campus can be a challenge for them, since so many are carrying AP classes or are heavily involved in activities,” Gernert-Dott says. “So the alumni effort is a great service
-and the students know that we place the same value on an alumni interview as we do on an on-campus interview.”
Alumni are asked to do two or three interviews a year, although some do far more. Bill Vallee '74, an alumni admissions volunteer for many years, did fourteen interviews last year and helped out in the Hartford, Conn., area at school visits and college fairs. (Vallee was one of three alumni recently honored as a “volunteer of the year”-the others are Gary Starr '72, co-chair of the Hartford Alumni Admissions Committee, and Trey Wehrum '92, who volunteers from his home on Long Island.)
To be effective, the admissions volunteers need to be current. Each student who is interviewed fills out a questionnaire, and the most common complaint is that their interviewer presented Union the way it was, not the way it is. It may be for this reason that students generally prefer to talk with alumni who have graduated in the last ten to twenty years. As Gernert-Dott says, “The students tend to relate more to someone who is closer to the college experience.”
Complaints are relatively rare, however. More common is the student who said his alumnus interviewer was “thorough, complete, honest, and knew a lot about where Union is headed.” One student said that her interviewer, Jennifer Papazian '94, “changed my mind about the school,” and another student commented that he “couldn't say enough about my interviewer (Marc Weintraub '93 of Charlestown, West Va.).”
It was a year of records for the College's admissions effort: