Seamus Heaney's "Verses for a Fordham Commencement"

Seamus Heaney at the 1982 Commencement.

It was a rain soaked commencement in 1982 when Seamus Heaney delivered the 137th commencement address to students of Fordham University on the Rose Hill campus. Heaney read a 46-stanza poem written in metrical verse, "Verses for a Fordham Commencement," to a wet crowd of 3,000 graduates who had been moved from Edwards Parade into the gymnasium. Fellow honorary degree recipients former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Muppet creator Jim Henson accompanied him onto the stage. 

In the days that followed The New York Times ran a picture of the soaked graduates on Page 1 along with a selection from Heaney's verse. The commencement made national headlines, including in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner under the headline, "Fordham Flash--or, sure things get bad but they rarely get verse."

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Cowboy Musical Earns Top Honors at Fringe Festival

A musical comedy written, directed, produced, and performed by Fordham students and alumni has won Best Book, Music, and Lyrics at the 2013 New York International Fringe Festival.

FringeNYC, the largest multi-arts festival in North America, honored Cowboys Don’t Sing: A Western Musical during the festival’s awards ceremony at the Cutting Room in Manhattan on Aug. 25.

“It was enough of an accomplishment to be accepted into Fringe,” said Johnny Kelley, FCRH ’13, co-creator and composer of the musical. “To win was very humbling.”

Cowboys Don’t Sing, comprised entirely of Fordham students and alumni, was selected by FringeNYC as one of 200 shows for the festival’s 16-day run in August. The musical, both a tribute to and a parody of the Western genre, sold out all five performances at Theatre 80 on St. Mark’s Place.

From L to R: Alcalá, Rozmus, Van Orden, Burns

After a rowdy train heist opens the show, the lone cowboy in this musical, TJ Alcalá, FCRH ’13, wanders into the “Singin’ Town” of Tombstone Junction, and much of the plot hangs on his resistance to sing along. And while Cowboys Don’t Sing has lots of spirited songs (and dance numbers), the show’s program offers fair warning: “There is racism, violence, and some pretty terrible singing. We only apologize for the racism.”

One highlight from the witty show features the cowboy’s trusty steed, Shadow, played by Tim Rozmus, GSB ’13, who sings a pun-filled tune about how hard it is to be a horse “who just can’t saddle down” in a “One Horse Town.”

Directed by Dennis Flynn, FCRH ’12, with music by Kelley and Alcalá, Cowboys Don’t Sing originally opened in the Blackbox Theater on the Rose Hill campus as part of the Fordham Experimental Theater’s spring 2012 season. Four months later, the show was selected for the West Village Musical Theatre Festival, where it picked up awards for Best Overall Musical, Best Overall Lyrics, Best Overall Director, and Best Overall Script.

Flynn and Kelley crafted the idea for Cowboys Don’t Sing after taking the late Fordham artist-in-residence Meir Ribalow’s class on Movies in the American Experience. “He taught us about the Western code, the characters, the genre,” said Kelley. “He loved it.”

The musical is dedicated to Ribalow, who passed away in August 2012.

Cowboys Don’t Sing will return for an encore of five performances on Sept. 12, 15, 25, and 26 at the Players Theatre in Greenwich Village.


The cast and crew of Cowboys Don’t Sing:
Fordham students Justin Clark, Mike Dahlgren, Nora Geraghty, Emily Pandise, Jeffrey Sharkey, Steve Tyson, Pam Zazzarino; and Fordham alumni T.J. Alcalá, Cashel Barnett, Matt Burns, Joe Farrell, Stephen Federowicz, Johnny Kelley, Devin Kelly, Tim Luecke, Terence Petersen (all FCRH ’13); Michelle Flowers, Claire Joyce, Tim Rozmus, Steve Scarola (all GSB ’13); Izzy Menard (FCLC ’13); Joshua Briseño, Dennis Flynn (both FCRH ’12); Megan Beaty, Matt Van Orden, (both GSB ’12); and Amie Chase Radanovich (FCRH ’11).

—Rachel Buttner

Fordham Marchers a Part of History

On Aug. 28, 1963, Fordham students and faculty traveled to Washington, D.C. to take part in the famed March on Washington, which marks its 50th anniversary today. More than 250,000 people gathered on the National Mall to call for nationwide racial and social justice. The afternoon of songs and speeches featured Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s renowned "I Have a Dream" speech, given from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Father Paul S. Hurley, of Fordham, a chaplain for the Catholic Interracial Council of New York, led the diverse group of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates.

Below are images from The Fordham Ram coverage of the march.

Students reported that the infamous legacy of "Uncle Tom" was
"trampled beneath 200,000 marching feet" on Aug. 28, 1963.

WFUV student broadcaster John Franchetti interviewed marchers and politicians,
including New York Rep. John Lindsay and Minnesota Sen. Hubert Humphrey.

Images courtesy of Fordham University Archives and Special Collections.

— Joanna Klimaski

Hughes Hall Wins Construction Award

Engineering News-Record (ENR), a weekly trade magazine for the construction industry, announced the winners for its annual Best Projects Competition, and Fordham took home an award of merit for the renovation of the Gabelli School of Business' new home in Hughes Hall. 

The renovation of the 50,000 square foot, 19th century building in the heart of the Rose Hill campus was completed in the summer of 2012 with the aid of a $25 million gift from Mario Gabelli, GSB '65. It involved a complex process of dismantling everything but the walls of the original structure, and constructing a new building inside it. 

The award of merit in the Higher Education/Research category was shared with Connecticut College’s Hall Life Science Building. SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering’s NanoFab Xtension in Albany, was the winner. 

—Patrick Verel

IPED Students Visit South Africa

Fordham IPED students gather in
Mandela Square after visiting
the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
Photo by Henry Schwalbenberg

Henry Schwalbenberg, Ph.D., professor of political science and Director of the Graduate Program in International Political Economy and Development, shares with us this dispatch from Johannesburg, where 27 students are currently enrolled in Fordham IPED's Emerging Markets program in South Africa:

"They have completed the first two weeks of the program and have one more week to go. Twelve of these students are regular Fordham students from New York, while the remaining 15 students are sponsored by various South African institutions such as the University of Pretoria, the Reserve Bank of South Africa and the DeBeers Mining company," he writes.  

"Besides regular classes, students have received briefings from key policy makers representing South African businesses, government and labor as well as officials representing American businesses and the US Embassy.  

At the conclusion of the class, the students who have traveled from New York will go on safari in South Africa's famous Krueger National Park."

Can't wait to see those safari pictures!

—Patrick Verel

Changes to Pedestrian Access at the Lincoln Center Campus

The New York City Department of Design and Construction (DDC) will finish work on the sidewalk near 60th Street and Columbus Avenue before the start of Fall classes at the Lincoln Center campus.

The DDC will move the Columbus Avenue north crosswalk approximately 10 feet North, and will place a handicapped access ramp to the Lowenstein entrance on the Columbus Avenue side of the entrance Plaza.

During work hours, 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., a portion of the sidewalk on 60th Street near Columbus Avenue will be closed. The West crosswalk of Columbus Avenue will also be closed during work hours ONLY.  All street work excavations areas will be covered with steel plates at the end of the work day, and opened to pedestrian traffic between the end of the work day and the beginning of work the following morning. The sidewalk will be returned to normal by the end of the day on Saturday, August 24, 2013.

If you have any questions regarding the work, or access to the campus, please contact the security supervisor at the Lincoln Center campus at: (212) 636-6076.

Fordham Business Professor Honored with Award from IBM

A hearty congratulations goes out to W. “R.P.” Raghupathi, Ph.D., professor of information systems and founding director of the Center for Digital Transformation at the Fordham Schools of Business, who took home an IBM Big Data and Analytics Faculty Award today. 

The award, which was given to 14 university professors around the world, honored Raghupathi for his role in developing new ‘big data analytics’ an applied practicum course elective at Fordham that helps students understand strategic issues surrounding big data analytics such as governance, ethics, privacy and security, and data quality.

The award comes with a $10,000 prize. Winning proposals included programs focused on computer science/electrical engineering, business administration, economics, strategic management, and math and statistics.

The award is part of a larger partnership between the company and academic institutions called the IBM Academic Initiative, which was launched in 2004. The global program facilitates the collaboration between IBM and educators to teach students the information technology skills they need to be competitive and keep pace with changes in the workplace.

For more information, visit http://ibm.co/16KJVQG and http://bit.ly/16JuacB.

—Patrick Verel

Cyber Skills Were Crucial in Exposing Online Cannibalism Plot

“It all started with a broken laptop,” according to an FBI forensics expert who helped expose an online kidnapping and people-eating conspiracy that involved a New York City police officer.

The investigator was Stephen Flatley, senior forensic examiner with the Computer Analysis Response Team in the FBI’s New York City office. He spoke on the second day of the 2013 International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS), hosted by Fordham and the Federal Bureau of Investigation from Aug. 5 to Aug. 8.

He discussed the technical challenges in building the case against Gilberto Valle, the so-called “cannibal cop” convicted in March of taking part in the plot to kidnap, torture, kill, and cannibalize several women, including his wife. The intended victims included friends he had known since high school or college, Flatley said.

The broken laptop that prompted the investigation belonged to Valle. His wife lent him hers, but when she happened to glimpse what she thought were online dating sites on the screen, she installed spyware that took screen shots and e-mailed them to her.

When she realized what her husband was really up to, she fled the family’s home with their one-year-old daughter and took the computer to the FBI, Flatley said. With her help, investigators copied data from his laptop while he was at work, discovering dozens of folders labeled with women’s names.

“Jaws hit the floor” when agents saw the number of folders, since they had thought that approximately 20 women were targeted, Flatley said. They set about making sure that none of the women had been reported missing.

His team gathered e-mail addresses from the laptop, sent subpoenas to internet service providers to obtain the messages, and saw their investigation spread to multiple computers, cameras, SD cards, floppy discs, game consoles, and CDs and DVDs. Six alleged conspirators were arrested: four in the United States, three of whom are awaiting trial, and two others in Canada and the United Kingdom.

“We found this really ugly thread and started pulling it and all kinds of weird stuff started coming out,” said Flatley, who also teaches in Fordham’s Department of Computer and Information Science.

The trial brought out various Internet-related questions, such as whether images in Valle’s web cache could be used to show his state of mind (not if there’s no way to prove he saw the pages, the judge ruled). At one point, the defense showed parts of a deposition conducted via Skype, because a subject—the proprietor of a website Valle visited, a hobbyist living in his mother’s basement—was in Russia. As Flatley described it, the video showed a man sipping a drink and answering questions with a terse, Russian-inflected “yes.”

“It was quite the deposition,” he said.

Flatley referred to online communities of people interested in cannibalism. “It was one of these things that we never knew existed until we bumped into this case,” he said.

During the question-and-answer period, an audience member asked how corporations should respond if an employee is found to be frequenting a disturbing site. While visiting the site may be against corporate policy, Flatley said, a lawyer should be consulted about whether to call the police.

“There’s no easy answer to that,” he said. “It’s going to have to be a judgment call every time.”

                                                                                                                          --Chris Gosier

Simulation Showcases New Technique for Cyberwars

Cyber warfare is in many ways similar to traditional warfare in that there are techniques one can practice in “war games” to gauge whether you are prepared against your enemies.

At a breakout session on day two of ICCS2013 Kristin E. Heckman, D.Sc., lead scientist at MaClean, Va.-based MITRE Corporation, and Frank J. Stech, Ph.D., principal investigator for MITRE, described a simulation they conducted in January 2012 that tested a new technique for defense: Denial and Deception.

The concept behind “St. Louis Experiment II,” was to utilize a new program dubbed Blackjack to detect when a team of hackers infiltrated the target, (C2 Mission System). Instead of kicking them out, it redirected the hackers to another server and rewrote, in real time, the content they were seeing—mimicking the Trojan Horse concept where hackers think they are getting something they aren’t

“This is an enormous task, dynamically rewriting the content based on policy, and doing it in real time, and trying to ensure there are no time delays or any other issues with delivery,” Heckman said.

The test pitted teams from a fictional Republic of New England against the Republic of Virginia, with Washington D.C. stuck in the middle of what was dubbed the “Borderlands.” 

The results, which the team published as “Active Cyber Network Defense with Denial and Deception,” in the journal Computers & Security, where mixed. 

Even though Blackjack was unsuccessful because hackers were able to infiltrate the target undetected and therefore saw content being altered, Heckman said the Denial and Deception concept is still very promising. 

And, the other side, said Heckmann, believed they had a “double agent”, which was not true and which “we could have used to our benefit.”

—Patrick Verel

Princeton Professor Champions Secure Hardware at ICCS

Ruby B. Lee, Ph.D.

 

Even though security for computers has gone to the forefront of conversations from boardrooms to halls of congress, little has been done to the hardware to prevent infiltration, said Ruby B. Lee, Ph.D., the Forrest G. Hamrick Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Princeton University.

"Computers are the engines of the information age, but security was never part of the basic computer design," said Lee.

Speaking at the final day of ICCS2013, Lee said that the drive behind designing computer architecture was to lower cost and increase performance. As a result, the response to computer threats has been to slap protection software on top of other software, as opposed to building security into the hardware of the machines.

Lee added that cloud computing and smartphones have only complicated an already-complex problem. As users access cloud-based programs, can the programs be trusted to not send out sensitive information? When users download new apps, they're frequently asked to provide access to an address book or GPS. Can those third-party developers who often write code for the apps be trusted? Today, Lee said, the hardware is not designed to protect from such challenges.

This inability to trust operating systems could be mitigated through data safety incorporated into the machine. Encrypted data packages could allow coordinated users to share data, but seal it from hackers. Only data-safe machines with authorized users would be able to communicate the information. Of course, with only data-safe machines being able to communicate, the users' base would be very limited. To make it commercially viable, Lee said, consumers need to press hardware vendors to build security into the foundation of their products.

On the cloud level, Lee envisioned enhanced data protection via "secure enclaves." But as it stands now, the risks remain high.

"It could be that you'd be running your machine on the same server as a hostile user," said Lee. "We must make the cloud as secure as your own dedicated facility."

-Tom Stoelker

What Not to Do If Sept. 11 Were to Happen in Cyberspace

The possibility of a terrorist attack ranks high among Americans’ worst nightmares. Few realize, however, that a 9/11-type attack that occurred in cyberspace could be equally, if not more, devastating.

During an afternoon session at ICCS, Martin Libicki, Ph.D., senior management scientist at RAND Corporation, described how in 2010, top U.S. officials conducted a simulated cyber attack in which smartphone-based malware took down the cellular system and the power grid.

What followed, Libicki said, was “a panoply of poor ideas.”

In his talk, “Cyber 9/11: Race to React,” Libicki outlined the proposals that came out of the cyber attack simulation. These ideas—which he said are examples of what not to do on a cyber 9/11—included:

• a national “kill switch,” which would allow the president to shut down the Internet in order to curb further spread of malware. Libicki warned that clever hackers could easily hijack such a kill switch. “Why do hackers’ job for them?” he asked;
• a national firewall, or an intrusion detection and protection system mounted on the nation’s Internet service providers. This idea, though, would be not only exorbitant—implementing it could cost $20 billion per year—but also ineffective, since it wouldn’t protect against insider attacks and would instead create a false sense of security; and
• an Internet user license that would require users to be certified prior to being able to use the Internet. Libicki pointed out that this would bar many people from using the Internet, and it focuses too much on user behavior rather than on improving the architecture of the Internet itself.

In the event of a cyber 9/11, Libicki said, it is critical that officials take the time to fully understand the problem, despite the urge to mount a response as quickly as possible. Acting on incomplete or erroneous information about a sophisticated cyber attack could ultimately worsen the problem.

It is equally important to craft the right narrative about a cyber attack, he said, by calling these attacks crimes rather than acts of war. On the practical side, there are established legal and financial structures in place to handle crimes, whereas wars tend to be ill-defined and costly.

Avoiding talk of war also has an important rhetorical upshot.

“Do we want [cyber] terrorists to think of themselves as criminals? Or do we want them to think of themselves as warriors?” he said.

—Joanna Klimaski

Internet Content Delivery Exec Details Security Techniques for Web

When you visit your local bank’s website, the chances are very good that what you are seeing is not hosted on the bank’s computer servers. 

Rather, what you’re seeing is most likely stored on one of a thousand different servers around the world that are maintained by Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai Technologies.

Only when you try to say, transfer funds from one account to another, will you be directed to the banks’ server. But even then, you are only interacting with it via a proxy server that is also maintained by Akamai, which maintains 127,000 servers in 81 countries around the world. 

That, said Bruce Maggs, Ph.D., is an example of how the company’s perimeter cloud computing design helps ward off distributed denial of service (D.D.O.S.) attacks. 

Maggs, the Pelham Wilder Professor of Computer Science at Duke University and Vice President of Research at Akamai Technologies, described Akamai’s role in protecting computer systems at the 2013 International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS), hosted by Fordham and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

He used his talk on Tuesday, "The Big Target: Content Delivery networks Under Cyber Attack," to walk through case studies of four phases of “Operation Ababil,” a series of cyber attacks against American financial institutions that started in September 2012. 

The goal of having such a decentralized design is to make it harder for D.D.O.S. attacks, which subject target servers to a torrent of data requests, to take down the entire system, while legitimate queries are redirected to unaffected servers. Maggs noted that for this reason, Akamai is entrusted to host the websites for the FBI and the White House.

It’s important to have systems such as these in place, because he pointed out that the number of major D.D.O.S. attacks, (those over 100 gigabits) is rising, with a record 768 incidents last year. 

“You can cause multi server disruptions for a small number of users, but you would really need a tremendous number of attackers to take out a fraction of our servers at once,” he noted. 

“In fact, it’s our belief that if anyone had enough fire power to bring a large number of servers down through denial of service attacks, at that point, they would have melted down the whole internet anyway, and there would be bigger problems than breaking down Akamai.”

—Patrick Verel

Pair of ICCS Speakers Call for Coordinated Cyber Security

Melissa Hathaway

In back-to-back talks on Aug. 7 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, Melissa Hathaway of Hathaway Global Strategies and Sandra Stanar-Johnson of the National Security Agency called for coordinated efforts to combat cyber terrorism. 

"When we’re talking about cyber security, it’s not the United States versus the world and it's not the private sector versus the public sector," Hathaway said. 

Their talks were part of day two of 2013 International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS), hosted by Fordham and the Federal Bureau of Investigation

She added that since there are more devices in the U.S. than there are people, almost every aspect of daily life is effected by technology. This will only increase, she said, as everything from medical files to drinking water relies on some form of digital infrastructure. 

As technology evolves, innate tensions are becoming more pronounced, such as the need for information sharing versus data protection, or freedom of expression versus political stability. 

"Along with the changes, we're seeing the challenges of democracy," she said. "People are using the Internet to overthrow governments." 

Sandra Stanar-Johnson

She said that that while leaders wrestle with complex problems, they will also be called upon to communicate the issues into everyday language. 

"We have to be able to describe the problem to my mother and my son," she said. 

The risks are too huge not to face the problem, she said, with the U.S. already losing $300 billion annually to intellectual property theft. She added that 10 percent of American children under the age of 18 have already had their social security number stolen. She cited the example of one 16-year-old who cannot get a college loan because cyber theft marred his credit and put him $750,000 in debt. 

"I would argue that all of us are victims," she said. "But enough complaining, we need heroes." 

Stanar-Johnson concurred with several of Hathaway's key points, and also called for a "unity of effort" not just among nations, but among government agencies as well. She cited Ed Stroz's talk from Tuesday who said that an organization's approach to security often relies on its culture. 

Stanar-Johnson said that even cohesive organizations like the FBI or the NSA have a diversity of cultures within their organizations. To that end she cited the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) as a presidential directive that merges cybersecurity efforts between and within agencies. 

Stanar-Johnson, who worked on developing the CNCI, also stressed the importance of needing a clear communicator at the top. Though she had very limited expertise in the technology, she said was chose by NSA director General Keith Alexander because of her communication skills. 

"What they needed from me was to speak English," she said. "I don’t speak cyber or even sub-cyber, but the challenge was to de-cluster that language."

-Tom Stoelker

ICCS Breakout Session Dissects Russian "Mule" Network

The term “mules” is often used to describe a criminal who carries illegal drugs on their person across an international border. But in an ICCS breakout session Mauro Vignati described how the United States Postal Service, as well as several unwitting Americans just looking for work, are being exploited by Russian organized crime as mules to ship stolen goods to Russia. Vignati is a senior analyst with the Reporting and Analysis Centre for Information Assurance in Bern, Switzerland.

Vignati loosely described a cross-continent saga that begins with a criminal injecting himself into a product website, that person is referred to as an ‘injector.’ Then a ‘dumper,’ usually the same person as the ‘injector,’ collects personal data of website customers. Finally a ‘stuffer’ uses the stolen information to buy products.  

But herein lies a dilemma for the thieves: “How do the crooks get products stolen in the United States back to Russia without being detected?” Enter the recruiters. They hire the "mules," who will purchase package labels from dubious companies with ties to Russian criminals, often thinking it's a legitimate job.  The recruiters go so far as to create familiar job applications that include requests for three references, to make the companies seem legit to the mules. But not all the mules are naive. The mules break down into two groups: the unsuspecting job seeker and the knowing criminal--and both are used to transport stolen goods.

Vignati described how a 'panel' of mules print the labels and send the stolen products to Russia, typically through an United States Postal Service’s online mailing service. A ‘control panel’ keeps tabs on the mules to make sure they’re following up on their responsibilities, making calls and leaving messages on cell phones. All of this requires a team of translators and organizers to keep the product flowing to its final destination in Russia, where a much larger organization will then take over for distribution.

Vignati said there was an important key to dissecting the network's operation. 

"Instead of following the money, we followed the package."

-Tom Stoelker

Alumni Spotlight: For This Marymount Alumna, Service to Others Is Second Nature

For Christina Pinder, MC ’05, participating in community service has always been a family affair. She and her younger siblings (including Nadia, a rising junior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center) learned early on about the value of helping others.

“My parents have always been huge advocates of giving back to the community,” she says. “We were always doing projects for school or our church.”

In April, Pinder, a board member of the Fordham Alumni Chapter of Washington, D.C., shared that spirit of service with members of her Fordham family. She led the D.C. group’s involvement with Fordham’s Chapters for Charity program. She and 15 other alumni were among the more than 8,000 volunteers who took part in Servathon 2013, an annual event sponsored by HandsOn Greater DC Cares, a nonprofit that mobilizes volunteers to build a stronger D.C. community. The Fordham group worked at Stuart Hobson Middle School organizing library books and cleaning the hallway and storage room.

While Pinder, a project manager with Greater DC Cares, managed a different site during the Servathon, she kept in contact with the Fordham group throughout the day. “I got nothing by positive [feedback]. There was excitement going into and leaving Servathon,” she says. “I thought that was such a wonderful day.”

Christina Pinder, MC '05

Pinder has been volunteering with Greater DC Cares since 2008. The projects she works on vary—from mentoring and reading to children to playing cards with senior citizens—but they always have one thing in common.

“I think the spiritual fulfillment you get from painting a school, or cleaning a park, or helping restore a landmark makes you feel not only more connected to the community,” she said, “but also more connected to your innately good self.”

At Marymount College of Fordham University, Pinder majored in communications and Spanish, and had two big plans in mind: study abroad in Spain and prepare for a career in broadcast journalism. She grew up learning Spanish in school and from her Panamanian grandmother, but she wanted the cultural immersion. She got it in the fall semester of her junior year, when she lived in Toledo, Spain, studying the city’s renowned architecture and honing her Spanish skills.

As often is the case during college, when students are still discovering and developing their interests, her career path shifted. She had her sights set on a career in broadcast journalism, but after an internship with the booking department at ABC’s Good Morning America, she lost interest in the long early morning hours and a future in journalism.

“It wasn’t for me, but it was still a really great experience and GMA holds a special place in my heart,” she says. “God bless morning news crews!”

She returned to her hometown of Washington, D.C., after college and turned to the nonprofit sector, working at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for five years in various administrative roles. Now she’s refocused her career on event planning. At Hill Country Barbecue Market, she’s coordinating events for the restaurant and maintaining its social media presence—and putting her Spanish fluency to use every day in her interactions with Spanish-speaking staff members. She’s also enrolled in the event management certificate program at George Washington University School of Business. “I love it,” she says. “It’s built for the working professional.”

When she returned to D.C., she also sought out a way to stay connected to Fordham and found it with the alumni chapter.

“Lots of alumni move down here from New York. The alumni may not have had the same experiences as you, but they went to the same school,” Pinder says. “It’s a nice way to keep connected.”

One of Fordham’s oldest and most active alumni chapters, the D.C. chapter hosts an array of activities for local Fordham alumni and their families, including trips to sporting events and museums, Third Thursday happy hour and networking nights, and a Summer Send-Off reception for incoming Fordham freshman students and their families.

The chapter’s biggest annual event is the Congressional Reception on Capitol Hill, hosted by the Offices of Alumni Relations and Government Relations. All proceeds go to the D.C. Scholarship Fund, which is currently funding scholarships for three Fordham students.

“It’s a great event to catch up with fellow Fordham Rams, meet new ones, and see the reach of support for Fordham. When [Father McShane] speaks, he lights a fire under you that makes you so proud to be affiliated with Fordham and want to give all you can to help see it flourish,” says Pinder.

“It’s been really cool to be involved.”

—Rachel Buttner

Fordham Alumni, Students Represent at ICCS

Fordham security chief John Carroll. To his left is a confiscated Warhol forgery,
part of a Center Gallery art show on display for the conference.
Photo by Tom Stoelker

With nearly 500 guests representing 35 countries, this year’s International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS), hosted by Fordham and the FBI, got underway on Aug. 5. On arrival at the Lincoln Center campus, guests were greeted by a welcome sign plastered with a sold out sticker.

Though the registration area filled quickly with conference visitors, there were plenty of Fordham security experts on hand as well. Kevin J. Kelly, FCRH '84, was among a handful of students who were the first to major in computer science during the early 1980s. He studied under ICCS co-organizer D. Frank Hsu, Ph.D., the Clavius Distinguished Professor of Science and professor of computer and information science. 

Kelly went on to work for the NYPD and  for Citibank. He teaches computer and information science as an adjunct professor at Fordham and points out the importance of the academy joining the cyber security conversation.

"It's a whole new paradigm and the University plays an important role in training future security experts," he said.

Cody Brown, FCLC '13 confers with D. Frank Hsu, Ph.D.

"Having something of this scale here at Fordham is major," said Cody Brown, FCLC '13, another alumnus who is assisting Hsu at the conference. "There are other conferences like this, but the stature of this is second to none."

Junior Katy Venizlos, a communications major at Fordham College Rose Hill, is one of several student volunteers working ICCS. Though her major slightly veers from the security interests of the attendees, she too understood the importance of the venture.

"It's good for Fordham to integrate education with the government and it's a great opportunity for the students," she said.

Asked if she was a little awed by the sheer number of G-men and women filing into the building, she shrugged.

"My dad is in the FBI, so I'm used to it."

-Tom Stoelker