November 2021
Cooke Scholar Alumni Buzz
Hello Cooke Scholars and Alumni!
We hope you all are enjoying the end of autumn and had a great Thanksgiving Day with loved ones. We’re excited to share the latest news from the Foundation and our community, as well as some updates on what your fellow Cooke Scholar Alumni are doing. Alums, if you’d like to be included in an upcoming edition of the Buzz, we’d love to hear from you at alumni@jkcf.org.
Foundation Buzz
Introducing Compass – a New Cooke Foundation Content Platform Coming Soon!
The stories and experiences of our Scholars and Alums have connected, inspired, and informed us all since the Foundation began its work more than 20 years ago. We are excited to announce the upcoming launch of Compass, the new content platform home that shares these stories and experiences. Whether you're a Young Scholar trying to make a college decision, a College or Transfer Scholar thinking about grad school, or any Scholar or Alum thinking about their career goals and personal growth, there's a pathway here for you to explore. Check out the trailer now and stay tuned for more details in the coming days!
2022 Cooke Graduate Scholarship
The Foundation is currently accepting applications for the 2022 Cooke Graduate Scholarship. This scholarship program is available only to Cooke undergraduate scholarship recipients and recent Cooke Alums who plan to pursue a graduate degree. The application deadline is January 10, 2022. Educational Advisers are hosting online group chats to help you think about how to maximize your Graduate Scholarship application. If you would like to attend one of these sessions, please sign up here. Contact your Educational Adviser or gradscholars@jkcf.org with any questions.
Community Buzz
New Blog - Catchin' Up with a Cookie: Bérénice Sylverain
Originally from Haiti and born in the capital, Port-au-Prince, Bérénice is a librarian conducting much of her scholarly research on Haitian literature and the arts. Currently, she works as an administrative professional at the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, which houses the greatest collection of Judaica in the Western Hemisphere. To learn more about Bérénice and her passion for reading and expanding her perfume collection, click here.
November Alumni Virtual Chat: Financial Fitness - Practical Advice to Manage Your Money
Open conversations around money are extremely important, and financial matters can get particularly confusing and challenging when we get our first full-time job after college. On Tuesday, November 16th, Cooke Scholar Alum Jennifer Lyu hosted a conversation with fellow alums Aida Rodriguez, Anastassia Goidina, Dzung Nguyen, and Nandjui Richard Koutouan to share practical advice and tips for managing your money. We covered topics including budgeting as a new full-time working professional, thoughts on financial traps and liabilities to avoid as a young adult, and balancing priorities when it relates to money such as familial obligations, self-care, and pursuing a professional passion. You can check out the video from the event below.
December Career Pathways Virtual Chat: Social Impact - Exploring Careers in Policy and Advocacy
Join us on Tuesday, December 14th as the Alumni Engagement Council hosts a conversation on creating Social Impact and Exploring Careers in Policy and Advocacy. Cooke Scholars and Alums are passionate about making positive impacts on our political systems and governmental institutions. A career in policy and advocacy can put one right in the center of these conversations and decision-making capacities to influence policy that shape and govern our everyday lives. We will discuss Alums’ experiences working in these spaces creating and managing policy and advocating for policy change. Also, we will explore how to prepare for a career in this field while in undergrad, through internship experiences, and graduate school education. A formal invitation will be sent soon, but you can register for the event right now here.
Do you have a topic you are passionate about and want to share with the community? Consider serving as a panelist in an upcoming Career Pathways Chat by completing this survey.
Alumni Buzz
2010 Undergraduate Transfer Scholar, Stanford University; 2016 Graduate Scholar, Stanford University
The short story about David is that he cannot get enough Stanford in his life. David recently graduated from his JD/MBA program last year at Stanford. Since then, he has studied for and passed the California Bar and set aside a healthy amount of time to work on figuring out what was next. Recently concluding that search, David is headed back to Stanford! This time, however, he’s not returning not as a student but to help launch and scale the brand new Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation as its inaugural Assistant Director.
2007 Young Scholar; 2012 College Scholar, Williams College; 2018 Graduate Scholar, University of Michigan
Join us in congratulating Chris for recently graduating from his Master of Public Policy and Urban Planning! Recently, he started a new job as the Special Assistant to the President at the Kresge Foundation, a private and national foundation that works to expand opportunities in America’s cities through grantmaking and social investing. Previously, Chris worked as a policy analyst for the City of Detroit and most recently worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Chris also exhibits his commitment to giving back and paying it forward with his work as cofounder of two nonprofits: BankBlackUSA, a nationwide grassroots organization that works to promote financial inclusion and wealth building through research and advocacy, and M-Years, an education enrichment program that teaches STEM, social studies and urban planning to middle school students in northeast Detroit. Additionally, Chris and his high school history teacher recently started the LeFlore Fund, which will help students with financial need cover costs outside of tuition at Detroit Country Day School. To date, they have built a fund of $30,000, which has aided students throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic.
2018 Undergraduate Transfer Scholar, University of California - Berkeley; 2021 Graduate Scholar, University of California - Berkeley
As a current graduate student at UC Berkeley, Elda describes herself as a “Data Scientist and Machine Learning nerd with a passion for driving projects to the finish line.” After completing her studies, she hopes to work in data science, where she can combine her undergraduate studies in mathematics with her passion for storytelling and use technology to help alleviate poverty in countries like Albania, where she’d spent most of her childhood. Elda was recently featured in a UC Berkeley article about the Data Science program’s aims for community college transfers’ success, which you can read here.
2016 College Scholar, Northwestern University
David recently started a new job as a researcher and communications manager at The Policing Project, a think tank for police accountability and structural transformation hosted by New York University School of Law. He is also a writing fellow at Data for Progress, the progressive polling firm. In the recent past, David has served in local, statewide, and national politics, and has over two years of experience in communications, speechwriting, and organizing. He has written in the voices of President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and national voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams, among others.
2008 Undergraduate Transfer Scholar, University of California at Los Angeles; 2010 Graduate Scholar, Princeton University
Nasra, a New York-based architect and portrait photographer, recently became one of 17 recipients of the inaugural Next to Leader program by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) that supports diverse future female leaders in the architecture profession. She describes “architecture as her team sport, portrait photography is her individual experience and art of expression that affords her the opportunity to combine nuances of the human experience with a sense of space.” This past summer, Nasra won the Alpha Female+ Grant and will be using the award to create "a thought-provoking photo essay that combines photography and storytelling to explore themes exploring and challenging perceptions of womanhood and identity." To view more of Nasra’s work in photography, click here.
2010 Young Scholar; 2015 College Scholar, University of Maryland
Rex is not only a member of the Alumni Engagement Council, but he is currently working with fellow Cooke Scholar Alum and Co-Chapter Leader Ana Parra Vera to strengthen the connections in our alumni community in the Bay Area. Check out a few of the recent and fun hangouts they’ve had below! Rex currently works as a software engineer at Elementl where he is building Dagster, an open-source data orchestrator with the mission to empower every organization to build productive, scalable data platforms. Previously, he was a software engineer at Airbnb, where he designed payments integrations for new acquisitions. In his non-working hours, he explores the intricacies of Chinese economic policy, the politics of stakeholder governance models, and the innovations of crypto-native organizations.
2021 Virtual Mr. Cooke’s Birthday Celebration
Alums Rex, Jonathan, Branden at Happy Hour
Throwback Photo of the Month
Young Scholars at Scholars Weekend 2012