All posts by Michael Parascandola

Virtual Celebration

Destany Batista

Destany Batista is an Urban Studies major with a minor in Classical Studies. She currently serves as the Communications Coordinator at the Office of Assemblymember Daniel Rosenthal, where she focuses on community organization initiatives and policy research. She has also interned at Friedman LLP and the offices of Comptroller Scott S. Stringer and Councilmember Paul Vallone.

During her time at Macaulay, she spent three years on the Scholar’s Council where she served as Vice President of Student Life for the 2017-2018 school year. She was also a 2019 recipient of the Meyer Scholarship, which enabled her to study abroad in Florence, Italy. She credits her 2018 Macaulay service trip to Puerto Rico as the most rewarding experience of her college career and hopes to participate in future service trips. After graduating, she will continue to engage in government and politics and intends to apply to law school within two years.

Virtual Celebration

Nanami Kubota

Nanami Kubota is a Biology major and worked as an undergraduate research assistant in two research labs during her four years at Macaulay Honors College. She started in Dr. Anadón’s lab at Queens College as a high school student back in 2014 and continued her independent project on the global drivers of beta diversity in birds throughout her undergraduate studies. During her freshman year at Queens College, she also joined a virus ecology and evolution lab, Dr. Dennehy’s lab, and did her honors thesis and completed her Concentration in Science Honors on the mutations and selection in Erwinia amylovora phages adapting to their host’s codon usage patterns.

Nanami presented her work at the SEA-PHAGES Symposium at Mount Saint Mary College and won second place for her poster in 2018. She also received a travel grant in 2019 to present at the American Society for Virology conference hosted by the University of Minnesota. Nanami will be attending the University of Pittsburgh Program in Microbiology and Immunology in the fall where she will be pursuing a Ph.D.

Virtual Celebration

Joseph Gurbo

Joseph V. Gurbo is a Film Major with a concentration in Screenwriting with double minors in Acting and Television and Radio. In the summer of 2019, he interned at City Lore, a not-for-profit gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that is dedicated to fostering New York City’s and America’s living cultural heritage through education and public programs. He worked as a photographer and videographer documenting the Urban Explorers Program, a program designed to encourage New York City high school students to express themselves through dance, theatre, art, and film.

In the Spring of 2020, Gurbo was a general production intern with The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. This was a multifaceted internship that provided a working understanding of how a contemporary late-night talk show is written, produced, and broadcast within the same day. Over the course of this internship, working in many different departments, Gurbo gained experience in the rigorous undertakings of producing a show that is filmed daily before a live studio audience.

Virtual Celebration

Christian Ralph Buonamassa

Christian Ralph Buonamassa is an Accounting major and Computer Applications in Business minor at Baruch College.

He represented the Baruch Class of 2020 in the Macaulay Scholars Council for four years, serving as the VP of Finance & VP of Campus Affairs. Christian was the President of the Baruch Chapter of the Macaulay Business Club, and Co-Founder of the Macaulay Italian Cultural Society.

Christian recently completed an Assurance Internship with PwC in their Alternative Investments Division. He will be interning with Deloitte this summer as well. Over the past four years he’s also interned at Macaulay, Capstone Capital, C&K LLP, EY, & Goldman Sachs.

Through his studies at Baruch College, Christian has earned the Nathan Glassman Award, the Philip Zimmerman Prize Scholarship, and the NYSSCPA’s “Excellence in Accounting” Scholarship. He also received the Susan A. Locke Award from the Baruch Honors Program, and the NYC Mayoral Service Award.

Christian plans to begin his career in Audit with one of the aforementioned Big Four Accounting firms, and intends to become a CPA.

Virtual Celebration

Rebecca DelVecchio

Rebecca DelVecchio is a Political Science and International Studies double major with minors in Spanish, Legal Studies, Business, and Public Administration. Currently, she works as a Field Organizer at Max Rose for Congress where she started in Summer 2018 as a volunteer. In Fall 2017 and Spring 2018, she was a youth programs intern at the Center for Court Innovation. In Summer 2018, she started working at United Activities Unlimited in the prevention department focusing on social emotional learning for youth. In Spring 2019 she interned at the Richmond County District Attorney’s Office in the executive bureau. In Summer 2019 she interned in Congressman Max Rose’s Washington D.C. office and was a fellow at Biden for President. She studied abroad in Florence in Winter 2018 and in Buenos Aires in Winter 2020. After taking a few years off, she plans to go to law school.

Virtual Celebration

Shelly Zou

Shelly Zou majors in Biology and double minors in Chemistry and Psychology. In Spring 2017, Shelly became a Resident Assistant at The Towers residence hall. In the following Fall semester, she co-founded a service-oriented club called Humanizing that has partnered with City College clubs and Macaulay’s Service and Green Initiatives to encourage greater involvement in community service. Starting her junior year, Shelly began research in Dr. Osceola Whitney’s neuroscience laboratory at the Center for Discovery and Innovation and has achieved Honors in Biology. She serves as the Director of Volunteer Services of the CCNY Biology Club, previously holding the position of Director of Outreach. In Winter 2020, Shelly received the Schor Scholars Opportunities Fund to study abroad in Cape Town, South Africa. Over her gap year, she hopes to gain clinical exposure before applying to medical school. In her spare time, Shelly enjoys gardening, crafting, and piecing together puzzles.

Virtual Celebration

Elijah Maduro

Elijah Maduro is a Jazz Instrumental Performance major, with a concentration on Tenor Saxophone, and has also learned flute and clarinet. In fall of 2019, he interned at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem and was a Student Development intern at Macaulay during the 2017-2018 school years. He was a leader for multiple Macaulay clubs, including the Macaulay Musicians Collective, the Macaulay Triplets and the Peer Mentor organization. He is also a recipient of the Rudin Scholarship.

In the near future, he plans to run his own band and perform more frequently around the NYC area at local clubs and bars. He also plans to return to grad school and get a masters in Music Education.

Virtual Celebration

Annmarie Gajdos

Annmarie Gajdos is graduating as Baruch College’s 2020 Valedictorian with a major in Computer Information Systems, a concentration in Music Management, and double minors in Business Law and NYC Studies. She volunteered abroad extensively, spending time in the Galápagos Islands, Israel, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and the Republic of Georgia. She currently holds several roles on campus, such as the Chair of Graphics for Baruch Student Government and the President of the Baruch Pre-Law Society, while serving as a Senior Campus Ambassador for WiTNY at Cornell Tech and the National Internal Communications Manager for AIESEC United States.

In Spring 2019, Annmarie was granted a Mayoral Service Award for completing more than 1,000 service hours for the year. She is a William R. Kenan Scholar, a Max-Berger Pre-Law fellow, and a Dr. Wendy Heyman Public Interest fellow. She is also the recipient of a 2020 Critical Language Scholarship for Swahili. Annmarie intends to pursue a career as an international human rights lawyer, in addition to working as a legal consultant in the music industry.

Virtual Celebration

Emilia Decaudin

Emilia Decaudin is a 21 year old activist and student in her senior year at the City College of New York, where she studies Political Theory and Intellectual History, as part of the CUNY BA program.

In September 2018, Emilia was elected as the youngest-ever member of the New York State Democratic Committee, representing the 94th Assembly District in Westchester County. She came out as the first-ever transgender member the following Summer, and in October of 2019, she spearheaded a successful effort to amend the rules of the committee to remove unnecessary references to the gender binary and to accommodate the election of gender non-binary members. She is continuing her efforts to foster inclusion of transgender and non-binary New Yorkers through her project Binary-Free NYC.

Emilia was born and raised in Westchester County, New York, in a family of French immigrants. She currently resides in Sunnyside, Queens, where she is now running for Democratic District Leader for the 37th Assembly District, Part A.

Virtual Celebration

Samah Islam

Samah Islam created her own major through CUNY BA in Narrative Medicine and Health Sciences. She was elected to the Macaulay Scholars Council as the CCNY class of 2020’s freshmen representative and went onto becoming VP of IT/Communications her sophomore year, then President for two years in a row–the first time in MSC history.

She was an athlete on CCNY’s Fencing team and two-year President of City College’s Illustrious Mentorship Program (CHiMP), a Macaulay Peer Mentor and Macaulay Ambassador. She’s worked with 596 Acres on removing nonprofit organizations from the tax lien sale list and this year the organization successfully passed a bill protecting those places.

She interned in International Sales and Marketing at Penguin Random House and with Career Development at Macaulay, working on the Healthcare Career Fair.

She is a Laura Schor Scholar and Thomas W. Smith Fellow. And all of this is still probably not enough for her South Asian mother.

In the Fall, she will be studying Occupational Therapy at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.