Author Archive
From Undocumented Immigrant to Immigration Reform Advocate
When she speaks at college campuses across the country, Julissa Arce is often asked why undocumented immigrants in the U.S. don’t do things the “right” way, why they can’t simply “get in the back of the line.”
Her answer is always the same: If there was a right way to come here, if there was indeed a “line” to stand in, then that is where undocumented immigrants would be. That’s where Arce—a former Wall Street executive who came to the U.S. from Mexico with her parents when she was 11 years old, and lived and worked here undocumented for more than a decade—would have happily stood. Unfortunately, “the line is a mythical place,” she says, because contrary to what many believe, there are very few ways for people to legally emigrate to the U.S.
Arce—who spoke earlier today as part of the Penn State Forum series at the Nittany Lion Inn—considers herself “lucky” as far as undocumented immigrants go. Her parents brought her into the U.S. by plane and on a valid tourist visa, and that made things easier for her years later when she married her American boyfriend and applied for a green card, before becoming a U.S. citizen in 2014. But for Arce, the relative ease of the final administrative processes can never erase the torment of being undocumented, of waiting in stomach-churning fear for the authorities to get wind of her status, realize that her social security number and green card were fake. When would they come for her, Arce wondered almost every day, as she successfully completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin (she began studying there the year Texas passed a law allowing noncitizens, including some undocumented immigrants, to pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges), completed internships at Goldman Sachs in New York City, and accepted a full-time job with the firm, rising through the ranks quickly to become vice president?
Inevitably, the ax fell when Arce had every piece of the American dream she’d always wanted, with a phone call informing her that her dad (her parents returned to Mexico when she started college) was seriously ill.
“My mother begged me not to go,” she said, because her undocumented status meant Arce would not be allowed to re-enter the U.S., “but I knew if I did not go, I would never be able to live with myself. Anyway, while I agonized about whether to go or not, my dad died. That was the cost.”
Everyday across the U.S., undocumented immigrants are facing similar dilemmas, Arce—who quit her job at Goldman Sachs after she got her green card—says, and having to take difficult decisions with painful consequences.
Since revealing her incredible story in 2015, she’s been a tireless advocate for proper immigration policy—particularly as it pertains to Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. She is chairman of the board of the Ascend Educational Fund, a New York-based organization that provides educational scholarships and mentoring to young, undocumented immigrants who want to go to college.
“Education was my way up and I’d like for others to have the same opportunity,” she said. “That’s what we come here for—opportunity.”
Arce’s 2016 memoir, “My (Underground) American Dream” has been adapted into a television miniseries starring actor America Ferrera.
Savita Iyer, senior editor
In the May/June issue of the Penn Stater, we’ll feature interviews with experts from across the university on the topic of immigration.
Love at Penn State
We received so many wonderful emails and letters in response to our call for your Penn State love stories, that it was very hard to choose which ones to run in our January/February issue. So we decided we’d share some more of your stories online. And what better time to do that on Valentine’s Day? Happy Valentine’s Day from the Penn Stater!
Lion Lover
My desk in the Sigma Phi Alpha fraternity house was in a bay window facing a woman’s rooming house. Three coeds raised their window, and motioned for me to raise mine. They asked what was gaping at them from my desk. I told them I was the Nittany Lion and kept the head there to keep track of them. I asked one of the girls if she would meet me at a house party the following Saturday. But just as the girls were coming in, the lights went out. Not knowing which girl I’d invited, I gravitated to the tallest girl silhouetted in the dim light from the street. It was her and we danced the evening away. We got engaged on December 11, 1944, married on June 23, 1945 while I was in the navy, and enjoyed 67 years of a happy marriage. Bob Ritzmann ’44, ’46 Sci, State College
This Girl, not That One
I didn’t realize, until I picked her up, that the girl who answered the phone when I called for a date was not the one I met at a square dance the week before, but her roommate. Lorraine Hershey had a nice smile, though, and a wonderful warm personality. I took her to a Friday night dance at my fraternity and I remember a warm, good night kiss on soft lips. We soon became inseparable and were married after she graduated in 1965. Bob Ferguson ’64 Agr, Memphis, Tenn.
Three Credits and a Wife
Burch and I both signed up for a spring break tourism class that took place over a week in Jamaica. We fell in love on the beaches and have now been married for 21 years. Burch likes to say that he really benefited from that tourism class – he got three credits and a wife! Jennifer Wilkes ’94 H&HD, State College
Move-in day Meetup-to-Marriage
We met on move-in day. We quickly became friends and ended up going out a few times, but we thought it was best to focus on our studies instead. Years later, unbeknownst to either of us, we both ended up in New York City. A cousin of mine (who was also a friend of Candace’s from Penn State) reached out to her on Facebook to let her know that we were both now living in the same city and that we should meet up sometime. After some initial trepidation, we agreed it would be good to catch up. Three years later, we were married. Philippe Rouchon ’05 Sci, Washington, D.C.
Bonding over Bagels
During freshman year, I attended Hillel’s “Jewish Speed Dating.” The bagel store was full of guys but one of them, Craig, saw me and it was love at first sight (no joke, ask him). Most people would have said it was “beshert,” the Yiddish word for “meant to be.” Not quite. Craig reached out to me on Facebook, but I forgot to answer. Five months later, we ran into each other on Beaver Avenue during Arts Fest and then at a fraternity party. Eight years later, we got married. It was “beshert” after all. Wendy Cukierman ’12 Edu, Matawan, N.J.
In Sickness and in Health
Steve and I met our very first day as freshmen at the Fishbowl Dance in the Pollock Quad. We became very good friends and hung out all of the time. We gradually fell in love and a few years later, got married and started a family. We lost our first two babies: Kendall was stillborn and Matthew died when he was 16 days old. We were blessed with our son Daniel in 2001 and in 2005, we adopted our beautiful daughter, Alaina, from Guatemala. Our love has endured through the best of times as well as the worst. Alisa Kulchinsky Muir ’90 Bus, Florence, S.C.
A Near Miss
He suggested we meet to the right of the stadium at the SUV with the orange cone on the roof at the Penn State/Ohio State game on October 29, 1994. We didn’t realize, though, that a lot of tailgaters use orange cones to mark their locations, and we didn’t consider which view of the stadium we were thinking of when we said to meet at “the right.” My best friend and I walked through the different lots and as we approached each orange cone, my heart sank. We didn’t find him. After a consolation dinner with my girlfriend at The Corner Room, I went upstairs to use the ladies room. When I came out, there he was. Fate, good timing and an amazing coincidence brought us together again. That night, we exchanged phone numbers. We haven’t parted since and recently celebrated our 20th anniversary. Erica Fetner Keagy ’95 H&HD, Ardmore, Pa.
A Tall Tale
I met the love of my life, René Susan Albrecht, in Waring Dining Hall during Spring Term 1975, and we have one Richard Bartlett to thank for that. René was a 6’ 2” volley baller, and I had a soccer scholarship. She was in McKee Hall, the graduate dorm, and I was in Irvin Hall, both part of the Waring Quad. Simply put, since I was a reputed “leg man” it was inevitable. As Rich was a friend in common, and he sometimes shared a table with René, I prevailed upon him for an introduction. René and I have been sharing bliss now for four decades. Timothy Quentin Unger ’76 Lib, Healdsburg, Calif.
Chemical Reaction
My Chem 101 group project in Abington had that inevitable member who didn’t show up for most of our sessions. She had invited one Alen Chao to join our group without telling the rest of us, and we didn’t know he’d actually worked on her portion of the project. When Alen’s name popped up in my packet of peer evaluations, I gave him a negative evaluation: “I have no idea who Alen Chao is and he does not deserve any credit for this project.” Alen saw the evaluations and introduced himself to the group. He and I collaborated, in person, for the next group project and it turned out we had good chemistry. We started dating by the end of the semester and got married in June 2015. Erin Chao’07 Abgt, Stafford, Va.
Sweet Spot
I was sure that the guy sitting in front of me knew the answer to the last question on the biochemistry exam paper that I didn’t know. He sat there, relaxed with his chair perched back and arms folded, occasionally adjusting his glasses. Awed by his confidence, I tapped him on the shoulder, which led to a little science talk and a three-year friendship. One humid Fourth of July, while watching the fireworks on the lawn of the Hershey Medical Center, he asked me out on our first date. We’re married now. I’ll never know if I got that question right on my first graduate school exam, but I will always be grateful for it because it led me to my future husband and a lifetime of happiness. Now I know why they call Hershey “The Sweetest Place on Earth.” Christine Sibinski ’15 Hershey, Cockeysville, Md.
Lost and Found
At the beginning of my sophomore year, a classmate invited me to a party at his fraternity house. That night, I danced with a guy named Lew. I gave him my number. He never called, and though I wasn’t surprised, I never forgot him. As seasons and semesters passed, I occasionally steered my friends to that frat, always with a remote and secret hope that he might be there. And, then, about a year later, he was! Without a moment of thought, I approached him with “I know you. You’re Lew. L.E.W.” Surprisingly, he didn’t run away. And this time, he even called me back. Turns out, he lost my number the first time around and had been looking for me too. Six years later, we were back at Penn State—this time to get married. Liz Gorman ’07 EMS, Clearwater, Fla.
Award-Winning Writer Susan Miller’s New Play Debuts Off-Broadway
Susan Figlin Miller does not keep a journal. She doesn’t jot down or record interesting tidbits of conversations she might hear on the subway in New York, or at Webster’s Bookstore Café in downtown State College, where she wrote portions of her new play, 20th Century Blues.
“Once I put words down on a page,” says Miller ’65 Lib, “a story hopefully takes on its own original life.”
Sound easy? Well, perhaps so for a prolific and award-winning author, who has written not just for the stage, but for television (Miller was a writer for the ABC series Thirtysomething), the movies (she wrote the screenplay for a short film called The Grand Design, starring Six Feet Under’s Frances Conroy) and the web (her indie web series Anyone but Me—which airs on Youtube and Hulu—has been viewed over 50 million times).
20th Century Blues, directed by two-time Obie award winner and Tony award-nominee Emily Mann, is Miller’s most recent play, and it begins performances at the Signature Theatre in New York on Nov. 12, running until Jan. 28. The play recounts the story of four women, friends for many years, who meet once a year to have their pictures taken in a ritual that chronicles their changing selves as they navigate life—its rewards and challenges. But when it transpires that those private pictures could go public, their decades-long, tight-knit relationships are suddenly tested, forcing the four women to confront their past and prepare for their future.
“This play is called 20th Century Blues because I don’t think any of us are really living in the 21st century yet,” Miller says. “These women lived most of their lives in the previous century. And the things that happened then, seemed to happen in a way that gave us space and time to absorb the huge impact of what had occurred—World War II, the Army-McCarthy Hearings, the fight for Civil Rights, AIDs. Now, because of the 24-hour news cycle and social media, and the awareness of global tragedy, there is no time to take it all in or heal from it.”
In her body of work, Miller has taken on the big themes—race, gender relations, sexuality, communication— and she’s also focused on what she calls “otherness:” She creates characters that, for one reason or another, fall out of the mainstream (one of the four women in 20th Century Blues is African-American and gay), and she places those characters in situations that are unexpected, situations that force them to think about who they are, how they came to be who they are, how they relate to the people around them. And how the world sees or should see them.
“I feel like our country is still very much in denial of otherness—whether that’s race or culture or just people who are uniquely different,” Miller says. “One of the only ways I think that the fear of otherness can be overcome is to define it and then transform it into something human, because we all participate in this world. It’s something important to me that somehow runs through 20th Century Blues and in my other work.”
Miller wrote her first play, No One is Exactly 23, when she was 23 years old and teaching high school in Carlisle, Pa. She won an Obie award in playwriting, and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, for her autobiographical, one-woman play My Left Breast.
Susan Miller and the cast of 20th Century Blues
Award-Winning Poet Hopkins Gifts Libraries His Private Collection
Photo via Ellysa Cahoy
Award-winning children’s poet and author Lee Bennett Hopkins recently informed the Penn State University Libraries that he would be giving them his entire personal collection of children’s poetry books, manuscripts, and correspondence.
A small portion of the valuable collection—boxes and boxes stored in Hopkins’ Cape Coral, Fla., home—has already been sent to the Special Collections Library at University Park, and soon, Karla Schmit, interim head, Education Library and Director of the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, and Ellysa Cahoy, education and behavioral sciences librarian and assistant director for the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, will determine where to house the rest.
Hopkins’ private collection is valued at more than $2 million and comprises, among others, 18,000 children’s poetry books, as well as letters from Dr. Seuss. It’s a significant gift to the Penn State libraries, Schmit says, and will be a huge draw for scholars of children’s literature.
But the gift also cements (more…)
Conversations Around the Hijab
Photo via Savita Iyer
When Maha Marouan, associate professor of African-American Studies and Women’s Studies, was teaching at the University of Alabama, some of the Muslim female students on campus would come by her office to chat about what was going on in their lives. A number of them wore the Hijab, or head scarf, and they confided in Marouan that more often than not, the scarf invited a certain kind of negative scrutiny that made them feel unwelcome on campus.
Marouan documented the experiences of five of these students in a movie entitled “Voices of Muslim Women in the US South.” Produced by New York-based company Women Make Films, the half-hour documentary examines how Muslim women carve a space for self-expression and identity in a part of the country that often has unflattering views about Islam and Muslims. The United Nations Association of Centre County showed “Voices of Muslim Women in the US South” at Schlow Library on Tuesday, and invited Marouan to facilitate a discussion about her film.
Although the documentary was made in 2013, Marouan believes it is even more relevant today, when many Muslims across the U.S. and on campuses feel unwelcome, if not unsafe. It echoes some of what we heard from Muslim students at Penn State in our March/April 2016 cover story. The film is a good conversation starter, she said, to help counter the prevailing narrative around Muslims, Muslim women and the Hijab.
For STEM Companies, Career Fair Offers an Abundance of Potential New Recruits
Photo via Savita Iyer
It was impossible to miss Raychel Frisenda and her friend Brianna Bennett in the melee of formally dressed students thronging the Bryce Jordan Center on Thursday, the third day of Penn State’s annual Fall Career Fair.
Not only had the engineering juniors eschewed the de rigeur suit, their pink (Rachyel) and blue (Brianna) hair set them apart from the crowd.
“Sure, it’s a little intimidating to show up dressed like this and see 4,000 people in suits,” Raychel said with a laugh, “but suits are so not me.”
“I don’t do ties and suits,” Brianna added, “and that’s not going to change, probably not even when I go to work.”
By all accounts, though, attire and hair color are irrelevant to the many companies gathered at the BJC on Thursday, technical recruiting day: Recruiters for these firms said they have positions to fill and they know they can count on Penn State to offer up smart, highly qualified STEM candidates like Reagen Alexich ’16, a chemical engineering major who found her current job at CoverGirl cosmetics at the Career Fair.
