Who I Am

“And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry And lose the name of action” (Hamlet, III, I, 83-81)

It is a difficult task to create action out of uncertainty. Yet, uncertainty often arises when we are in the process of stretching our minds to weigh the relative worth of competing ideas. This combination has unfortunate results; stalling the thoughtful and leaving the action to narrow-minds who argue harshly and move hastily in their world of absolutes.

I have attempted to avoid this dilemma by consistently pairing my educational pursuits with real life experiences and my work as a community organizer with relevant scholarship. As an undergraduate I focused my study on social and political philosophy through multiple disciplines, my interdisciplinary legal studies major and minors in English and classics. At the same time I developed and organized an inner-city tutoring program, interned for a federal senator, provided legal research for a district attorney, and taught an undergraduate service-learning course. Each set of experiences benefited and enriched the other.

Following graduation, I was happy to accept the Honors College’s offer to join the staff as an AmeriCorps ABLE Service-Learning instructor. Working as a community organizer, programming developer, tutor, and instructor, I lead 15 classes and over 350 students through weekly discussions on issues of inequality and civic engagement and over 12,000 combined hours of service- creating and implementing innovative projects throughout the city of Buffalo.

I was drawn to the Journalism and Mass Communication MA at Point Park University because it provided the opportunity to combine my social and political activism with an interdisciplinary curriculum. So far in Pittsburgh I have become involved with poverty legal services, now authoring a weekly blog Justice in the Margins for the Post-Gazette. I am also beginning work on my Masters Thesis, in which I hope to explore the intersection of Communication and Critical/Cultural studies.

I hope to continue with this process, continuing on into a JD or PhD program and ultimately becoming a scholar-activist; an activist resolved never to act without thinking, a scholar determined to act on his ideas.