Tag Archives: alumni

PSY Alumni Advisory Board Virtual Career Panels

The Department of Psychology’s Alumni Advisory Board will be presenting three career panels on zoom in October to provide Miami undergraduates with programming to explore post-graduation career paths in clinical, nonprofit, and corporate sectors. Each panel will be hosted by a subset of the Alumni Board and cover specific topics fitting the panelists’ expertise (with each moderated by two psychology faculty members).

On Thursday, October 15, at 7 p.m. (US Eastern), Stacey Jaffe (Miami ’03; Vice President of Digital Services at Scholastic) and Matt Riesen (Miami ’02; Physician at St. Mary’s Medical Group) will present a panel (moderated by Drs. Robin Thomas and Paul Flaspohler) on how they took their Miami Psychology degrees and transitioned into Digital Marketing and Medicine, respectively. You may join this Zoom event on-line:

https://miamioh.zoom.us/j/89210246880?pwd=eG83aGhEMmk2WmgraU1KQkhrc2ZSUT09

Meeting ID: 892 1024 6880; Passcode: 920257

On Tuesday, October 20, at 1 p.m. (US Eastern), Tre’ Gammage (Miami ’15; Dean of Students and SEL Learning Consultant), Liz Niehaus (Miami ’86; Wealth Advisor & Principal of Truepoint Wealth Counsel), and Maureen Noe (Miami ’85; President and CEO of Indiana United Way) will present a panel (moderated by Drs. Vaishali Raval and Paul Flaspohler) on their career paths into the non-profit, finance, and entrepreneurial space. You may join this Zoom event on-line:

https://miamioh.zoom.us/j/83822290730?pwd=K280WjJqMnE5ckNKeDhDc3p6Z1Y4UT09

Meeting ID: 838 2229 0730; Passcode: 559282

Finally, on Monday, October 26, at 3 p.m. (US Eastern), Michele Grisez (Miami ’89; VP of Human Resources at Standard Aero), Jon Kies (Miami ’92; Director of User Experience, Qualcomm), and Erika Minnick (Miami ’11; HR Project Manager at Facebook) will present a panel (moderated by Drs. Brooke Cropenbaker and Paul Flaspohler) on their career paths into human resources and user experience with some graduate school stops along the way. You may join this Zoom event on-line:

https://miamioh.zoom.us/j/81763270827?pwd=enF2RG5BNnQ5TkVUM1pPRFh6aG1qUT09

Meeting ID: 817 6327 0827; Passcode: 169290

These panels will provide our undergraduates with an excellent opportunity to learn more about how their psychology degrees from Miami can launch one’s career in many directions, and our students will get a chance to meet and network with Miami PSY alums who are out in the “real world” doing great things with their degrees! Special thanks to our entire Alumni Advisory Board and to Dr. Paul Flaspholer (chair of the PSY External Relations Committee) for putting this programming together!


Call for CAS alumni lecture speakers due 20 Sept

The College of Arts and Science is pleased to continue the Alumni Lecture Series. The purpose of the program is to celebrate CAS graduates and give alumni the opportunity to return to campus to interact with students and faculty.

Eligible Lecturers: Departments and programs are asked to nominate CAS alumni who have distinguished themselves in a CAS discipline. It is envisioned that there will be two types of lectures: (1) alumni who have gained popular fame and would appeal to an audience across all disciplines in the College and/or University, and (2) alumni who have distinguished themselves in a particular discipline, whose talk might be of interest to a single cognate group within the College. Nominations of both popularly known and discipline-specific speakers are welcome.

Proposals must include several elements, including a brief biography of the alum that includes statements about credentials and achievements; potential lecture topic (it is understandable that prospective lecturers would not have been contacted before acceptance of the proposal); an indication of the potential audience; and an estimated budget. It is anticipated that alumni will not be paid an honorarium. Proposals should detail how the lecturer will interact with students and faculty.

Units that successfully proposes an Alumni Lecturer will be responsible for hosting the visit and making all arrangements for advertising, housing, meals, and interactions with students, faculty, and appropriate administrators. It is expected that lecturers will be on campus for a period of time longer than just the lecture to allow for such interaction. Additionally, the unit must make Evan Lichtenstein aware of the visit once the date(s) are set.

If you are interested in proposing an alumni lecturer, please contact Allen to explore its feasibility and to get the official documentation needed to start the nomination process, which are due to the College by Friday, September 20, 2019.

Meet our new Alumni Advisory Board!

We are proud to announce that we have successfully constituted our inaugural Alumni Advisory Board. They can be found here as part of our new website. We welcome them and are quite excited about working with them. Please remember that Friday, September 7, we will be hosting our alumni as part of the Open House programming, including a careers panel and more. Thank you to Vaishali for her hard work in pulling this together!

Updates from alumni

I just wanted to pass on the word I’ve recently received from a couple of former students. Kala Allen (B.A., ’16) was just named a recipient for a Fulbright fellowship to conduct a research experience in Nigeria! Kala is currently working at Duke University’s Brain Imaging and Analysis Center studying dementia and macular degeneration, and has also been accepted to the Peace Corps. We are extremely proud of Kala who worked with April Smith, Jay Smart, and me.

I received word from Roger Knudson that Miraj Desai (B.A., ’05) has just published a book, Travel and Movement in Clinical Psychology: The World Outside the Clinic. Miraj is now an Associate Research Scientist in Psychiatry at Yale, and has also been selected for the Melba J.T. Vasquez Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions in Research from the APA Minority Fellowship Program!

Congratulations to both of these recent alumni, making Miami Psychology proud!

Alumna talk on computational lingusitics, 3/28

Computer Science & Software Engineering is hosting Melissa Roemmele, a Miami alumna who majored in Psychology and Linguistics and recently received a doctorate in computer science from USC. Her talk, “Writing Stories with Help from Artificial Intelligence [Human and Computer Interaction in the Writing Process],” will be held in Shideler 001 on Wednesday, March 28, at 1:30pm. Melissa writes:

In this talk, I’ll present my work on a particular application that addresses this goal by automatically generating suggestions to authors for new sentences in a story they are writing. I’ll discuss my current findings on authors’ interactions with this application and show how these findings motivate future opportunities in relevant interdisciplinary research across computer science, linguistics, and psychology.

CAS Alumni Lecture Series: Call for proposals

We are fortunate to have two distinguished alumni visiting campus this semester, Richard Mayer (Sept. 19) and Dustin Wygant (Oct. 20). If you know of other alumni that you would like to invite back to campus this academic year, consider proposing them for the CAS Alumni Lecture series. If you have individuals in mind, see me for submission information; the deadline is Sept. 22.

Help support the department with #MoveInMiami

As discussed some previously in this post, Miami coordinates a one-day fundraising campaign on freshman move-in day, Thursday, August 24. This is one opportunity for individual departments to include individual “projects” for targeted publicity and (hopefully) support.

This year we are focusing on the graduate student travel fund and the neuroscience curriculum. We are asking for your help in publicizing these campaigns in any of several ways:

  • Take a picture in the main office for us to post on social media, with a single phrase of “wisdom” for the incoming class.
  • Post the links to your social media, and be sure to use the #MoveInMiami tag. You might also follow activity of other university entities such as @PresGreg or @miamiuniversity.
  • Reach out to individual alumni, especially former graduate students that might understand the need for graduate student travel support. Every little bit helps.
  • Make a contribution! Again, every little bit helps.

I’m hopeful we can all work a little bit to see if we can make this a success. For relatively little individual effort, flash campaigns such as this can reap tangible (and “record-breaking”) benefits. I understand that the fundraising functions of the department and university are not within our typical routines and appreciate any activity each of you are comfortable undertaking.

Who are your accomplished alums?

CAS is maintaining a list of your most interesting undergrad and grad alumni, for featuring alumni profiles in newsletters, websites, and other communications. The department can also make use of these to benefit programming ranging from events, to class visits, to hosting during conferences.

Think about some of the “success stories” among your academic lineage, as well as undergraduate RAs and other close advisees, who may be in industry, government, or NGOs. CAS asks you to reach out to them and have them complete the information here so CAS can edit them into narrative alumni profiles. The new format can be previewed here.