A Highly Decorated Bunch Brooklyn College congratulates the scholars, fellows, and others with distinguished recognitions among its student body and recent graduates. Here is a look at some of this year’s dynamos.
SARAH DELAPPE, a graduate student in the M.F.A. program in playwriting, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her much buzzed-about play, The Wolves, about the complicated lives of a girls’ high school soccer team. ☛ “It’s overwhelming,” she says of the honor. “I can’t think about it too much, honestly; I get vertigo.” ☛ It’s a pretty big deal for the first play that DeLappe ever staged, to enjoy very successful off-Broadway runs, and to pick up nods from the Pulitzer committee as well as the American Playwriting Foundation, which gave her its inaugural Relentless Award. She was also a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Yale Prize. ☛ DeLappe started writing the play while on the subway a few years ago. Despite the success, she says she still takes inspiration from the community of writers she meets in her courses. ☛ “I feel so lucky to be in the same room with all these other smart, brave, really curious and imaginative writers,” she says.
PETER LEE ’17, in the Coordinated B.A.-M.D. Program, nearly became Brooklyn College’s fourth Rhodes Scholar. He was on the tight and prestigious shortlist of college seniors who underwent the Rhodes selection committee’s famously rigorous panel interview before being notified last fall that he was not selected. ☛ An anthropology major and a member of the Scholars Program, Lee was not, however, short on awards. He was a 2015 Rosen Fellow, received a research grant from the Golden Key International Honour Society in support of fieldwork he is conducting in Nicaragua, has been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and received its Propylaea Award, along with the Brooklyn College Alumni Association’s Student Award. ☛ Lee is the son of immigrants and grew up in Queens, but says he has been impacted deeply by his travels, first on a trip to rural India as a Tow Fellow to conduct health-worker training and community development, then to Nicaragua with the Global Medical Brigades to help implement an anti-parasite medication campaign. ☛ “Medicine has become for me a way to aspire toward social justice,” he says. ☛ After graduation, Lee conducted fieldwork in India over the summer before pursuing other scholarly opportunities, including graduate school.
MAISHA KAMAL, a sophomore and business economics and English major, won a Jeanette K. Watson Fellowship, a threeyear program that provides funded summer internships— among other perks like networking seminars and mentee opportunities—to promising undergraduate students. ☛ “I’m excited about being able to push myself outside my comfort zone and explore a lot of the things New York City has to offer,” she says. ☛ The scholarship will allow her to try out a different internship each summer—including the possibility of a summer abroad—at vastly different organizations in various fields. ☛ Kamal is a student in the William E. Macaulay Honors College, and also serves on its student government body. She’d like a career that combines her passion for human rights and her economics background.
ANUMTA RAHEEL, a sophomore and student in the Macaulay Honors College, was named a Fulbright Summer Institute Scholar and spent June at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, where she studied the transAtlantic slave trade. ☛ “I learned about a really horrific time in history where, based on the color of your skin and where you came from, you were treated like goods,” says Raheel. “It was a really monstrous time in our history and I think it’s important we don’t forget it.” ☛ Raheel, an anthropology major, is in the B.A.-M.D. program. She plans to be a physician and would like to work on public policy in the health-care field.
BROOKLYN COLLEGE MAGAZINE | VOLUME 5 • NUMBER 2 33