Philosophy

Alumni News Archive

The Department of Philosophy welcomes news of its graduates and will be happy to post information about the comings and goings, activities and achievements, and happenings and high points of former students. Please e-mail us at: heathe@newpaltz.edu

CLASS of 2006
Don Bunk
has been granted admission to the graduate program in Physics at Syracuse University. He will be a teaching assistant for the next couple of years and looks forward to working on a Ph.D.  He writes that he “may end up working on anything from quantum computing to gravitational physics.”

CLASS of 2005
As of this Fall 2005, Damian Masterson is beginning his first semester of graduate study in the Masters Program at the State University of New York at Albany where he is studying Logic, 19th Century Continental Philosophy, and the History of Political Philosophy. He remains very fond of lemurs. In the early Spring of 2006, Erik Scorelle was accepted into the masters program in Logic at the Amsterdam Institute of Logic, Linguistics, and Computation. Thomas W. Brown has crossed the Pacific and is now in China teaching English to school children. As of November 2005, he is situated in Jiamusi City, Heilong Jiang Province. He may be reached at neonguru100@yahoo.com.

CLASS of 2004
Since graduation, Elizabeth Burhans has been working for LexisNexis Mathew Bender, a leader in legal publishing. Elizabeth, better known to the world as "Ellie," assisted in the acquisition of Gould Publications and thought that it was great fun. She is still very much in love with the craziness life has to offer. Jason Gagnon has moved to Seattle where he is working at Washington Mutual Bank, reading Plato on his commute, and very much enjoying things. He is contemplating law school. Jason writes, "Seattle is an amazing city, and just wandering around aimlessly has me stumbling upon remarkable things all the time. Seattle passed a 1% ordinance in the Seventies (1% of all construction funds must go towards public art), so the city is just crawling with sculpture. Some of it is actually good." Nicholas Reynolds is currently enrolled in the MA program at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and plans to continue in a doctoral program (perhaps in Eugene, perhaps elsewhere.) He is also working as an Administrative Assistant in the Philosophy Department. Earlier this year Oregon hosted the Conference of the Merleau-Ponty Circle, and Nick helped organize it. His main project, this semester, has been the Scholar's Bank, an on-line library resource that allows the public to view publications by Oregon professors. He will soon begin training to teach, next fall, in the English Department. But if he is accepted to the doctoral program in Philosophy, he will abandon teaching in the English Department.

CLASS of 2003
After graduation, Michael Termini remained in New Paltz, becoming a publishing associate for Codhill Press. There his responsibilities included research and analysis of philosophical and literary texts, advertising, and grant-seeking. He also worked at Vassar Brothers Medical Center assisting in physical therapy and in helping to heal bedridden patients. In the past year he has decided to study international relations and diplomacy. This fall he will begin the Masters program in International Law, with International Relations, at the University of Kent, Canterbury, England. He writes that, "After this program I will continue my path to the United Nations, or a like-minded international organization to mediate negotiations between warring states, while again applying what I have studied.in the New Paltz philosophy program." Alexandra Brown is a production editor at Pearson Publishing. She acts as a liaison between the editorial and production groups in the development of e-books and other digital media for all disciplines of Pearson Higher Education. She now lives in the town of Shady, just outside of Woodstock, with her two children Seth (11) and Lilith (8 months). She relates that there are more deer and turkey in Shady than human beings.

CLASS of 2002
Currently back in his hometown, Athens, Greece, Spyros Thomopoulos has just finished an intense workshop on film-making, and he is now in the process of filming his first independent short, titled "An I for an I". Sometimes he works as a freelance editor.

CLASS of 2001
Theresa Morris is currently working towards her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the New School University, New York.

CLASS of 2000
In 2004, Tim Weidemann completed his Master of Science degree in Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School. Upon graduation, Tim began working with Deloitte Consulting, LLP as a public sector consultant and has since been promoted to the level of Senior Consultant on an information systems project for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He travels back to the Hudson Valley weekly, where he lives with his long-time girlfriend, now fiancee, Cheryl, in Port Ewen. Despite the long hours of travel and work, Tim has also received publication in two major trade journals and is looking forward to presenting his research on spreadsheet quality control to the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences this fall.

CLASS of 1999
Dan Kameny, a math major at New Paltz but a regular in several philosophy courses-thereby rendering him the title, "Honorary Philosophy Alumnus"- is now in medical school at Charles University, Prague (or Karlova Univerzita v Praze). He writes, mysteriously, that he is trying to produce the thunderbolt ("It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow" -Voltaire).

CLASS of 1997
Having graduated from New Paltz in 1997 and from Brooklyn Law School in 2000, Ray Sprowls is currently a solo practitioner in Orange County, New York, concentrating in criminal defense practice. He is getting married in October, 2005 to Trupti Prajapati, a New Paltz alumna from 1999. Congratulations and best wishes!

CLASS of 1995
Julie Gilmore has been working for Novartis Pharmaceuticals for the past ten years, most recently as a Quality Manager for the I.T. department where she specializes in FDA compliance and validation of Novartis' global SAP Enterprise Resource Planning systems. Julie commutes between work sites in NJ, NY and Canada and has temporary & permanent households to help avoid too many long hours on the road. She writes, "I have two grown children. My son is a music producer and DJ in the city of Middletown at Roundtable Entertainment, and my daughter just graduated from SUNY Brockport with a major in Communication Studies and works as an Account Executive for Transwestern Publishing."

This page will be updated periodically.

Last updated: August 2006