A Room with a View (And a History)

This fall, three first-year roommates won the residence hall lottery. Abigail Kedik, Sarah Kimball, and Leya Maloney, all freshmen in the Class of 2018, were among the first students to move into the newly renovated Loyola Hall on Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.

Left to right: Abigail Kedik, Sarah Kimball, and Leya Maloney

Loyola, a former Jesuit residence, was converted into a 121-bed freshman residence hall over the last two years, affording all its incoming students comfortable accommodations, but the three roommates got a little something extra: room 415, the old quarters of Fordham’s president, Joseph M. McShane, S.J.

“I feel really lucky, when I first found out (on move-in day) that it was Father McShane's old room,” Abigail Kedik said. “I was so excited, I almost took it as a sign that Despite the nerves I chose the right school.”

Kedik attended Guilderland High School in her home town of Altamont, N.Y. She plans to major in Political Science/International Studies with a minor in History or English. “I absolutely love living in Loyola. Besides the fact that the building is historic and gorgeous, the Manresa community is wonderful,” she said.

Father McShane lived in room 415 from 1992 to 1996, when he was dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill (he lived in Spellman Hall for the last two years of his tenure as dean, after the Jesuit community active in the University moved to Spellman). Father McShane extolled the room’s virtues when he met its new occupants at Move In this fall.

Move In 2014

“The commute could not be beat!  I just had to run down the stairs right outside my room and could be in my office in about five minutes,” Father McShane said. “One oddity of the room: I was awakened every morning at around 5 when the steam heat started up and the pipes banged to beat the band.”

“When I first saw how gorgeous Loyola is and the spacious room I would be living in, I was so grateful,” Leyla Maloney said. “I realized how lucky I was just to be in a newly renovated building, living with a close knit community, with Father Phil and the other RA’s and RD Alex, and most of all being a Manresa Scholar.”

Maloney is a cello player from Westchester, N.Y., and attended Somers High School in Lincolndale. She said Fordham exceeded her expectations. “My roommates are my two closest friends, my entire residence hall is a close-knit community, and my Professors are really devoted to their profession and their students.”

Sarah Kimball is from Simsbury, Conn., and attended Simsbury High School. She said she has already seen I’ve already seen eight plays and musicals since coming to New York, and has been to many different parts of the city so far.

“I am so thankful to everyone who has helped me get here,” Kimball said. “Being in room 415 is particularly special to us because it was Father McShane’s room... Living in Loyola Hall is absolutely wonderful and I will be so sad when I have to move out at the end of the year!”

Jesuits called Loyola Hall home from 1928 to 2012, when the University purchased the building from the Society of Jesus, as it was making a transition to smaller Jesuit communities. In addition to students, the refurbished Loyola houses the residential life office, social and study lounges, a chapel, two Integrated Learning Community classrooms, and a community laundry facility.

“Father McShane said that Fordham is doing its job wrong if we are the same people at graduation day that we were on the first day of school,” Kimball said. “Thanks to Fordham, I have already noticed myself changing into the person I want to become.”

Sex and the Soul and the College Student

A few years ago, while teaching at St. Michael’s College, religion and sexuality scholar Donna Freitas, Ph.D., asked her students what they did on spring break. She heard story after story about hooking up, until one student stood up and objected to the prevalence and superficiality of casual sex. Other students quickly empathized.

“I was watching their passion for critiquing hookup culture once they figured out they weren’t alone, about how before they pretended it was awesome, but how it’s actually kind of awful,” Freitas told to a gathering of Fordham alumni, students, and faculty in Tognino Hall on Sept. 8. “They felt like they had been abandoned by the Catholic tradition to wallow in college without anything useful or practical to [guide] them. They wanted guidance.”

Curious to know if other students felt the same way, Freitas began crisscrossing the country visiting four types of colleges—Catholic, evangelical Christian, private, and public—to study students’ attitudes about sex and faith. She shared her findings in her book Sex & the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses (Oxford University Press, 2008).

As part of Freitas’ study, more than 2,500 college students at seven campuses participated in an online survey, and she conducted one-on-one interviews with more than 100 students. She found that while students were interested in spirituality, and 80 percent of them identified as “spiritual, or religious to some degree, “even at a non-religious affiliated college, they often felt uncomfortable speaking about it outside the classroom setting.

It was much the same way with dating; students were interested in finding romance, but were hesitant to act upon their desires or even talk about it with friends and peers. “Students would say, ‘I want romance but I can’t admit that.’ Or ‘My parents did that, but that doesn’t really happen in my generation anymore.’ It was an anxiety around a wish for dating, but also this anxiety around [dating],” said Freitas, now a research associate in the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame.

Freitas said 78 percent of the students she surveyed saw romance as “virtually asexual.” “Students very rarely—I can’t tell you how very rarely—talked about sex and love together,” she said. For these students, sex was a casual act, and they thought their peers thought the same thing: 45 percent of students at Catholic colleges and 36 percent at nonreligious private and public schools said their peers are “too casual” about sex; an additional group, 35 percent at Catholic colleges and 42 percent at nonreligious private and public schools, reported that their peers are “simply casual” about sex.

“It’s become a hookup culture,” Freitas said, noting that a hookup, according to students, meets three criteria: It involves some form of sexual intimacy, anything from kissing to sex; it’s a brief experience; and it’s free of emotional attachment. Freitas found that students often described hookups as “efficient,” feel they are too busy in college to develop and maintain relationships, and so they consider hookups “efficient.”

Nevertheless, 41 percent of those students who reported personal experiences with hooking up said they were “profoundly upset about this behavior,” and used words such as “awkward, dirty, miserable, empty, alone, disgusted, ashamed” to describe those occurrences. An additional 23 percent expressed ambivalence about hooking up, saying, “‘Hooking up is whatever; it makes me feel whatever,’” leading Freitas to term that group the “whateverists.” The remaining 36 percent labeled it as “fine.”

Students are not against hooking up, said Freitas, but “they’re unhappy with the culture” that breeds ambivalence and indifference “[Students] today are learning to steel themselves against connection, learning to shut down in order to be sexually intimate,” she said. “They are getting better at hookup culture, but I’m not sure we should be happy about that.”

Freitas raised concern about the relationship of hookup culture to sexual assault. If students are hooking up, “to have ‘efficient’ sexual intimacy, and to not get attached,” communication between the two individuals involved can be limited or even disregarded, “[making] the idea of consent very complicated,” she said.

“What does consent look like in a culture where when we are sexually intimate we are also discouraged from communicating?”

And yet, Freitas said, students who are propagating the hookup culture “want love and they want meaningful sex.” said Freitas.

Many hope to find that connection through spirituality, which they consider “much more forgiving, much more open, much more inclusive than religion.”

She heard over and over from students at Catholic colleges that “sex and religion don’t mix” and “religious teaching on sex are outdated.” In the face of peer pressure and mainstream American cultural attitudes about sex, she said students are struggling to reconcile their sexuality with their faith.

Freitas suggested that Catholic colleges, with their “extraordinarily rich history in spirituality and practices” be more creative and open in offering retreats, spiritual direction, social justice programming, and other resources to encourage students to examine the relationship between sexuality and spirituality—particularly within the campus community.

“When you start asking those questions in your own community, you have to contend with hookup culture, you have to contend with sexual assault,” said Freitas. “The tradition obliges you.”

The event was sponsored by the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education.

—Rachel Buttner

Fordham's Career Services & Buzzfeed's Tips for Millennials New to the Workforce

Whatever you do, don't be like the main character in the movie,  'Office Space.'

We’re roughly one month away from most college and university commencements, and this means college graduates, including some of ours, are settling into their brand new jobs. “The real world” of work may be a rude awakening for some since not all of its survival tips are taught in the classroom. Luckily, today’s new workforce has the Internet.

Buzzfeed, a site which bills itself as the "first true social news organization," and is well known for publishing listicles, coo-worthy images of cats, and even in-depth analysis of the U.S. economy, has tips for those new to the workforce. In fact, “13 Important Tips For Twentysomethings In TheirFirst Jobs,” includes a tip from Fordham’s very own office of Career Services:

DON’T: Spill personal details to Mandy the PR girl just because she sits next to you.

When you’re a young person at an office filled with lots of young people, it can be tempting to cross the friend–colleague line and talk to your co-workers just like you would your pals at a bar. But even if you just went through a heart-wrenching breakup AND you just got in a fight with your mom AND you’re stressed because you just bounced a check, it might be best to save the cathartic chat for your BFF.

“Leave your life at home,” says Stefany Fattor, director of Career Services at Fordham University. “Yes, I know that girl in marketing is such a good listener. But it’s not the time or place.”

Fattor also adds the following tips, which she shared with us here at Fordham Notes:

BE REMARKABLE

Remember that moment before finals when you’d calculate exactly what you had to do to pull of a ‘B’ or ‘C’? Then you’d study the minimum amount possible to make that grade.  Those days are gone my friend. The great thing about the workplace is that you can almost always count on the hardest working, most talented people getting the respect, promotions and best compensation.  Everyone wants a team of talented, generally awesome people. It’s your job to be the most awesome.  Regardless of what you do, whether it’s putting together pitch books for a managing director or picking up latte’s for the queen editor, make sure you’re better at it than anyone else. No matter how menial the task, nothing better will come your way until you're the best at what you do. 

BE PROFESSIONAL

Much like the "leave your life at home," piece of advice, if you’re interested in your supervisor being enchanted by you, it’s simple: Close your personal social media and email, stop texting your mom, and show some personal interest in them. And you know those work events with cocktails. They are still work events.  2 drink maximum!  You're not funnier with a buzz and no one wants to see you put your fist in your mouth. They really don't want to see you hit on the bartender, or worse, a workmate.  Seriously, two drink maximum.  

BE INDISPENSABLE

Have you noticed the job market is tough?  Perhaps you heard there was a recession. People are losing their jobs and having trouble finding jobs. They also aren’t getting big raises. Guess who gets to keep their jobs—people who are indispensible. That’s right, if your boss can’t live without you, or their job would be significantly harder if you weren’t around, you aren’t getting laid off.  In other good news, this is also exactly what you share when it’s time to ask for your first raise. Don’t be that guy that asks for a raise because guys at other firms make more, or your rent is too expensive, or you want new Ferragamo loafers. No one cares. Ask for a raise because the value you add every single day and the value you can add next year is far more than what they have to pay you.  

Read the rest of Buzzfeed’s tips for twentysomethings in their first jobs, including the number one tip, DO: Negotiate your starting salary, even if you’re afraid, here. 

And since it’s #ThrowbackThursday, check out this 2013 piece in the Chicago Sun-Times “The Grid,” in which Erin McLaughlin, the assistant director of experiential education at Fordham’s Career Services, doles out advice to a twentysomething who asked if she should be taking free candy from a man in her work building. (Yes, it was a real question.)

Remember that Fordham’s Career Services offers several services for students (and some for alumni), including Fordham Futures, a career planning and professional development program that integrates the values of a Jesuit liberal arts education with contemporary society. Learn more here.

-Gina Vergel

Help Wanted: The Fordham Fund Student Philanthropy Committee

Fordham University is seeking students to join the Fordham Fund’s Student Philanthropy Committee. Students from all years, majors, and campuses, are welcome.

Members of the Student Philanthropy Committee are ambassadors for Fordham who help raise monetary support for their school. By being a part of this group, members strengthen their Fordham experience while enhancing the value of their degrees.

It is an opportunity to learn how institutions and non-profits work. It will also help students hone business acumen, marketing, and event planning skills.

Applications are being accepted until Oct. 15: http://bit.ly/SPC13app

For more information, contact Sarah Waino, assistant director of the Fordham Fund at: wainio@fordham.edu or 212-636-7638.

Fordham Pride on ABC's 'Good Morning America'

Fordham is going to be represented on "Good Morning America's College Week" and you can be a part of it.

The ABC morning show is celebrating "back to school" at colleges coast-to-coast with a special week of shows. The "Fordham Pride" episode airs live on Monday, Sept. 9, from 7 to 9 a.m. 

Proud students and alumni are urged to show up outside of the Good Morning America's New York City studios to give their school a shout-out. Wear your favorite Fordham and Fordham Rams shirts, hats, and gear. Bring signs that celebrate Fordham. 

Again, Fordham Pride on Good Morning America will take place on Monday, Sept. 9, from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., at the GMA Studios, West 44th St. and Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

-Gina Vergel

Fordham Theatre Student Shines in Global Humanitarian Competition

My name is Brandon Jackson. I am a sophomore theatre major at Fordham University. I was recently selected to participate in Faces of Transformation, a global humanitarian competition sponsored by Nations United, a Toronto-based humanitarian company.

The goal of Faces of Transformation is to raise awareness about humanitarian and developmental projects around the world and to move forward Nations United’s mission of bringing nations together through social media.

Participants were chosen from more than 6,000 nominations from 40 different countries based on previous humanitarian and developmental work. For the final rounds of competition, Nations United selected 11 men and women from 11 countries. I am honored to represent the United States. 


The program launched in September 2011 and will continue for the next six months.


Each month, Nations United gives participants a challenge, which is designed to benefit our individual humanitarian and developmental projects. At the end of each challenge, the participants with the lowest three scores are sent to the “Red Zone,” where online viewers vote on which red-zoner is allowed to return to the competition.

The winner of the contest will become the 2012 face of Nations United and help implement the project he or she developed during the competition.

Before the competition, Nations United asked me to focus my project on media. I am currently creating an interactive app tailored to children in early development that deals with collaboration and multiculturalism. Once complete, the app will serve as a tool for teachers and parents to make children more aware of the world around them and to show them how to become better citizens

I have worked in the humanitarian field since 2006, when I started as a fundraiser for the Hope for Honduran Children Foundation. I raised more than $200,000 for the organization. Since then, I have served in many advisory positions and have many projects in the works.

For more information about Face of Transformation, click here.

You can also join the Faces of Transformation in the USA Facebook group here. 


—Brandon Jackson

Generous Student Now on Teixeira’s Dream Team

Fordham student Catherine Menta has been named the first member of Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira’s “All-Star Dream Team” in support of Harlem RBI, a nonprofit youth-development organization.

Menta, who will be a junior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center in the fall, was chosen from those who have already donated over $25 to Teixeira’s Dream Team 25 campaign, which challenges New Yorkers to match his $1 million donation to the East Harlem program.

As an “All-Star Dream Team” member—the first of 9 who will eventually be chosen—Menta will have lunch with Mark Teixeira and get a behind-the-scenes tour of Yankees Stadium. She and a guest will also watch a game from a luxury box, and Menta will be given on-the-field recognition before the game begins.

First started in 1991, Harlem RBI helps inner-city youths develop their potential and pursue their dreams by providing them with year-round sports, educational and enrichment activities.

The goal of Teixeira’s campaign is to help fund the development of a new mixed-use community facility in East Harlem, which will house Harlem RBI and its DREAM Charter School as well as provide affordable housing, a public park and more than 500 jobs for the community.

Menta, an avid Yankees fan, found out about the “Dream Team” contest by following Teixeira’s Twitter posts. To enter, Menta submitted a short written statement explaining why she should be considered for the team.

In her response, Menta, who is originally from Ridgefield Park, N.J., expressed her desire to give back to the New York community that is helping her further her education. She also drew upon her experiences in past community development work, teaching Sunday school, tutoring and baking for a local soup kitchen.

As a communications and media studies major, Menta was particularly pleased that she was recognized for her writing. Her statement is now featured on the Harlem RBI website, a fitting honor for Menta, who is also a writer for the Fordham Observer.

When Menta got the call on May 13 letting her know she had been chosen for the team, she had just finished her last final, a philosophy exam, and was waiting for her dad to pick her up to take her home for the summer.

Along with her excitement upon hearing the news, Menta felt pleased that she would have the opportunity to spread the word about Harlem RBI, particularly its DREAM Charter School.

“I’m a big believer in everybody having a chance to have a good education and recognize their talents and explore them,” she said.

“I have had really great teachers who encouraged me and I feel like charter schools help kids have opportunities they might not have otherwise. Every kid should have that opportunity.”

Menta now hopes to become a volunteer or tutor for Harlem RBI.

While she has not yet heard what game she will be attending, Menta knows for certain that she will be bringing her dad, another big Yankees fan, to her big day.

“I’m really happy and flattered that they chose me at all,” she said. “And the fact that they felt compelled to pick me as the first person—I just can’t believe it—it’s exciting.”

—Nina Romeo

President's Ball is a Bright Night for Students

Photos by Bruce Gilbert

It's the dance that brings students from the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill campuses together each fall. Fordham’s own version of a homecoming dance, the annual President’s Ball was held the Lombardi Field House on the Rose Hill campus on Sept. 24. The party, which drew nearly 3,000 students decked out in stylish, semiformal attire, included music, dancing, refreshments and fun.

—Gina Vergel