Over their four years at Conn, the members of the Class of 2023 joined Pathways and Centers; interned with Microsoft, Google, David Dorfman Dance and the Connecticut Fair Housing Center; and studied abroad in Brazil, Cameroon, Belgium and Japan. They conducted research with faculty on artificial intelligence and biodegradable 3D-printed reefs, and partnered with community organizations to address homelessness in New London and poverty in Peru. They debated in Arabic in Turkiye, played chess in Seattle and won an NCAA Championship in men’s soccer in North Carolina. They’ve won Watson and Fulbright fellowships and Beinecke and Critical Language scholarships. They’ve been accepted to graduate programs at Harvard, Yale and Oxford, and will soon begin careers at Microsoft, Disney, Bank of America and the National Institutes of Health.
Despite the immense impact of the first global pandemic in nearly a century, these tenacious seniors are leaving Conn with the liberal education they came for and the skills they need to make their mark on the world, just as they have on our campus.
Meet six of the indomitable seniors from the Connecticut College Class of 2023.
Admirabilis Kalolella
Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology major
Center/Pathway affiliation: Toor Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts
In the lab: My favorite academic experience has been working in Professor Timo Ovaska’s organic synthesis lab, where we worked on synthesizing Frondosin D, a natural product initially isolated from the marine sponge in Micronesia, Dysidea frondos, that is of interest for its potential anti-tumor and anti-HIV properties. As a junior, I traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, to conduct research at the Holistic Drug Discovery and Development Centre. There, I worked on repurposing and repositioning a compound known as AZD0156 from an anti-cancer to anti-malarial drug therapy. In addition to increasing my scientific knowledge, I was inspired by the tireless efforts of African scientists to change the narrative of a helpless Africa to one of innovation and scientific discoveries.
Rising Black scientist: I was honored by Cell Press, Cell Signaling Technology and the Elsevier Foundation with a 2023 Rising Black Scientist Award. As part of the award, my essay, “My Christmas Holidays,” was published in the February 2023 issue of Cell, a leading life sciences journal, and I received a $10,000 research grant and $500 travel grant. In the essay, I wrote about how, as a child, I would travel with my family from Dar es Salaam to spend the Christmas holidays with my grandmother in my family’s rural home village of Mngeta, Tanzania. Every year, my father, a physician, set up a mini-clinic and absorbed me in his work. People would come in from afar; some had never seen a doctor in their lives. I took blood pressure and temperature readings and rode my bicycle to deliver medicines. This Christmas tradition brought a powerful revelation; it revealed how important giving back is. It formed the basis of who I am, wanting to use science to reach many.
Drugs for neglected diseases: For my senior integrative project, I looked at drug discovery for tropical and neglected tropical diseases. This topic is personal for me because some of the diseases that impact my community are preventable, yet still kill many. I want to be a physician-scientist and heal people while simultaneously understanding the underlying mechanisms of diseases to design better drugs. I want to make medicines that will benefit many people around the world.
Alice Volfson
New York, New York
Slavic Studies and Government double major
Center/Pathway affiliation: Global Capitalism Pathway
Favorite book: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Change of course: I came to Conn with the intention of majoring in government and pursuing a career in law or politics. But after I learned about Conn’s Slavic Studies Department in my first year, I felt an urge to explore and understand more about my heritage, as both my parents were born in the Soviet Union. Professor Petko Ivanov has been my favorite professor. I took his advanced Russian language course, “Russia Today,” in which I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion for the celebration of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Novaya Gazeta, a Russian-opposition newspaper, as well as “Russian Art and Culture of the 20th Century,” in which I presented on the underlying Jewish themes of a beloved Soviet children’s cartoon, Cheburashka.
Black American migration to the Soviet Union: In Professor Eileen Kane’s “Soviet Union and its Legacies” course, I came across a reading in which Langston Hughes briefly mentions a small Black-American community residing in rural Soviet Uzbekistan, which I found interesting. Then in Professor Laura Little’s “Migration in Eastern Europe,” I learned even more about the Black-Soviet community. Last spring, I studied abroad in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and was able to further research the topic, and decided to do a historical study on the migration of Black Americans to the Soviet Union between the World Wars for my senior thesis. After spending the last year digging through archives, I am focusing on three distinct groups who migrated to various Soviet republics, tracking and exploring their motivations for coming—and oftentimes staying—in the USSR. I found, that overwhelmingly, Black migrants left America to discover the truth of Soviet antiracism, and stayed in the USSR because they found it to be a safer place for them than 1930s and 1940s America.
Professor Volfson: This spring, Professor Little invited me to guest lecture for the same “Migration” course I had taken two years before. I greatly enjoyed speaking about my own research and about Langston Hughes and his sojourn around Soviet Central Asia. I have spent only a few semesters on campus, due to COVID and study abroad, but that helped me realize I truly thrive in an academic environment. I now intend to become a Slavic studies professor specializing in Yugoslavia and market socialism, the influence of the Communist International on international political thought, and the culture and art of the Soviet Union.
Jack Howell
Durham, Connecticut
Neuroscience major, Psychology minor
Center/Pathway affiliation: Public Health Pathway
Keeping busy: Since 2019, I have been a mentor for neurodiverse middle school students through Eye to Eye, a national nonprofit organization and campus club. I am also a member of Active Minds, the Pre-Health Club and the Nu Rho Psi honor society, and I work as an educational assistant at Middlesex Community College tutoring mostly first-generation college students of diverse backgrounds in English, biology and chemistry.
Favorite class: My favorite course at Conn was “Methods and Theories of Ethnobotany” with Professor Manuel Lizarralde. Our professor made our discussions come to life with Arboretum walks and stories of the Barí people of Venezuela. I wrote a paper on the anthropological, botanical and neuroscientific aspects of ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew used for millennia in indigenous South American cultures. Ayahuasca’s therapeutic potential for PTSD, depression, and other psychiatric and neurological disorders is a promising area of research.
Biofeedback and self-compassion: I am completing an honors thesis under the mentorship of Assistant Professor of Biology Mays Imad. Last summer, I worked closely with Professor Imad in Conn’s Summer Science Research Institute. Our group completed a pilot study on biofeedback training, and the results inspired me to replicate the study on a larger scale. I am passionate about the science of mindfulness and recently became interested in the benefits of self-compassion for reducing anxiety and promoting wellbeing. This led to my study, which tested the effects of biofeedback and self-compassion training to discern their benefits and determine potential synergistic effects for students who met the criteria for moderate to severe anxiety. In February, my coprincipal investigator, Sophie Barr ’23, and I presented our preliminary results at the Inaugural International Society for Contemplative Research Conference at the University of California, San Diego. We plan to publish our research in an academic journal.
Future psychiatrist: I plan to attend medical school and eventually become an integrative psychiatrist incorporating complementary and alternative approaches to mental health care. Along with clinical work, I wish to develop new and more effective treatments for patients through research, especially to address health disparities.
May Kotsen
Princeton, New Jersey
History and American Studies double major
Center/Pathway affiliation: Holleran Center for Community Action, Museum Studies Program
Favorite quote: “History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.” —Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Un-writing American history: My honors thesis reimagines what constitutes evidence in the historical method. I explore the ways in which the present-day prioritization and overreliance on written evidence is prioritized not because it is the most “accurate” or useful method of historical preservation, but because it can best justify and silence histories of settler colonialism and enslavement. I argue historians must turn toward methods that have been used by overwhelmingly non-white communities, such as oral histories and material culture. Each chapter is a case study on a particular method, including African American quilting, Hodinöhsö:ni’ wampum belts, Latin American testimonios, Black American freedom songs, community museums, and oral traditions at the dinner table among Italian American immigrants. Writing this thesis has been one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done, but also the most rewarding.
Seneca Nation: With Conn’s Lowitt-Lear fellowship, I interned at the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum on the Seneca-Allegany Reservation. This experience shaped me in astronomical ways as an American citizen, as a historian, as someone interested in museums and as a human being. Working in a museum and living on a reservation, I developed an arsenal of new skills, new ideas and new viewpoints. I walked out of that internship with a new conceptualization of what history was, how community museums could serve as a liberatory force and how to better approach teaching accurate American history.
Space for truth: I believe that spaces in which truths are spoken and histories are revealed can be liberatory. Mybdream is to run a combination community center, historical society and museum that would both meet the needs of the community (including food, housing and employment) and serve as a space for community members, especially youth, to learn about their family histories and better understand the problems their communities face.
Adham Khalifa
Kafr El Sheikh, Egypt
Computer Science major
Center/Pathway affiliation: Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology
Favorite campus hangout: I like to go to the Shain Library basement to finish homework with friends.
Tech savvy: In high school, I was the kid that other kids would come to when they had problems with their phones and laptops. I have long been interested in the field of computer vision and its applications and always wanted to take a computer vision class—I even mentioned it in my personal statement when applying to Conn—and finally got the chance to with Professor Ozgur Izmirli. I also took a mobile development class. It was a bit challenging in the beginning, but I surprised myself by managing to build and publish my first mobile application on the App Store within three months.
Making life easier: I enjoy coding anything that can solve problems. As a software engineering intern at the Yale Center for Research Computing, I worked on a web application to share private keys. I then interned at the startup Sourcegraph, where I worked with the Search Product Team on a universal code search platform. On campus, I worked with other members of the Computer Science Department on an algorithm to help the Registrar’s Office assign classroom space based on maximum capacities and social distancing requirements during the pandemic.
Music to the machine: I am working to create machine learning software that can audio-visually understand the scene of a musical performance—what instruments are being played, what the musicians are doing, who is singing—and describe it in different modalities like text or visuals. This software could be used for a variety of purposes, including video retrieval on streaming services, movie annotations and accessibility. I’m very interested in using technology to empower others.
Catja Christensen
Dunn Loring, Virginia
Dance and English double major
Center/Pathway affiliation: Media, Rhetoric and Communication Pathway
Co-editor-in-chief of The College Voice: I started writing my sophomore year and quickly fell in love with journalism. I’m proudest of our reporting on the Occupy Conn Coll movement and the protests throughout the spring semester this year. The College Voice team was incredible, working 12+-hour days and devoting ourselves to breaking news reporting, analysis, investigation, photography, social media outreach and more.
Exploring embodied transgenerational trauma: For my dance honors thesis in costume design and construction, I am reconstructing my grandma’s traditional Filipino terno dress to explore what it means to wear the weight of family history and deconstruct the traumas passed down from mother to daughter. I have always been fascinated by genealogy, psychology and movement, so I am combining all of my interests into my research.
Dancing in Ghana: I had the incredible opportunity to travel for two weeks with Professor Shani Collins and five other dancers to study West African dance with national companies in Accra and Kumasi, Ghana. We were immersed in Ghanaian history and culture, visiting Cape Coast and Elmina slave castles, the Assin Manso last bath ancestral grounds, the Kakum National Park, and several villages and schools along the way. We practiced Twi, the Akan language, and made incredible connections with people who guided us in our research. It was a life-changing experience for all of us.
Fulbright-Roehampton Award winner: I will spend the next year in a dance performance and practice master’s program at the University of Roehampton in London, one of the leading institutions for graduate studies in dance. The Fulbright Study/Research Award covers full tuition and provides me with living and travel stipends. I plan to focus on the ethical preservation of dance, how postcolonialism and multiculturalism impact arts performance on modern stages, and how dance preserves cultural identity. I didn’t think I would again consider a performance career after I left The Washington School of Ballet’s pre-professional program in 2019, but dance has offered me so many opportunities since then that I am rekindling that childhood dream.
This article was first published on that media
In the latest edition of Connecticut College News, a special series known as ‘Senior Stories’ was featured. This series is a collection of stories and reflections from four graduating seniors of Connecticut College as they look back on their time as students and prepare to move into the next phase of their lives.
Senior Stories was comprised of in-depth conversations with JuneAnne Maloney, Madison Gutowski, Niki Brown, and Mateo Zapata. Each of these seniors offered personal perspectives and reflections about the experience of being a student at the college and what their plans are for the future.
The article took readers through their day-to-day activities and challenges, as well as how their personal interests and goals evolved throughout their years of studying at Connecticut College. JuneAnne, a geology major, discussed her passion for the sciences, her interest in mapping, and what she plans to do after graduation. Madison, a molecular biology major, talked about her desire to explore the idea of ‘smart medicine’, particularly in regards to 3D printing. Niki, a psychology major, discussed her work with the college’s Center for Research and Scholarship, her commitment to social justice, and her passion for therapeutic horseback riding. Finally, Mateo, who studied economics, talked in detail about his time as a student representative in the college’s student government and his aspirations to become an educator and a researcher.
These stories of our outgoing seniors leave a lasting legacy at Connecticut College. By learning more about their journeys, we as a community have an opportunity to reflect on the accomplishments and experiences of these four graduates. Their stories also offer a glimpse of what is to come, as they begin to pursue their post-graduate goals.
All in all, the ‘Senior Stories’ featured in the Connecticut College News offer a fascinating look at the students graduating from here at this very moment. They demonstrate the power of courage, resilience and ambition of those who have worked hard to achieve their dreams.
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