Washington Square News | Up & Comers 2019

Letter From the Editors 02

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uccess can be a tireless job.

Your parents call you on the phone to say “Congrats!” Your friends boast about your constant hustle. Your local paper reports on your infinite success. Your mom cuts out the article. She sticks it on the fridge — you’re a success.

(Oh geez, we really hope this happens for these 10.)

Success radiates from this year’s 10 Up-and-Comers — you can see it in the photos. Up-and-Comers — those nominated by their peers, faculty and members of the NYU community — are taking their skills out of the classroom and making waves in their fields. They sit next to us in our classes, rush uptown for their late night show internship or jet across the world to improve urban green spaces.

They make the rest of us try to size up to their accomplishments and question, “Am I good enough?”

Thanks to all the students featured in this issue for working with our staff

and letting them probe into your life, whether that be watching you make a video or trailing behind you on the subway.

This issue wouldn’t exist without our great WSN staff — all of which are Up-and-Comers in their own right. To Sam Klein, Bela Kirpalani and Akshay Prabhushankar, thanks for not only writing but spending the countless hours with us in the office working on this issue and any other issues — newspaper and personal.

Thanks to our writers Hanna Khosravi, Meghna Maharishi, Melanie Pineda and Victor Porcelli for dedicating your time and words. To Natalie Chinn and Yasmin Gulec, without your hundreds of Google doc comments, some of these pieces wouldn’t have gotten the editing facelifts they needed. (Also, shoutout to Yasmin for writing — even though she does that in her sleep.)

The creative duo of Priya Tharwala and Sophia Di Iorio made our pages

come to life with their designs. You both have great patience when InDesign crashes a thousand times on nights like this.

Katie Peurrung and Justin Park, our Under the Arch multimedia team, led the photoshoots for this issue and somehow managed to turn the WSN office into a studio. Thanks for giving us an excuse to turn the lights off at work for a few hours.

To our multimedia team, led by Alana Beyer, thanks for chasing around the Up-and-Comers and our writers.

Keep running and capturing because without your photos, who would read all those words?

Last but not least, who could forget about our loquacious copy desk?

Without your colorful conversations about Lyndon B. Johnson amid your feverish copy editing, our paper would be one grammatical mess.

Have fun flipping through this issue — maybe you’ll see your name next year.

All Studio Photography By KATIE PEURRUNG

Under the Arch Multimedia Editor

& Under the Arch Managing Editor

Editor-in-Chief

Table of Contents 4 . . . . . . Maame Boatemaa 6 . . . . . . Justin Chae 8 . . . . . . Ben Neiley 10 . . . . . Shriya Khonde 12 . . . . . Derin Caglar 14 . . . . . Ma Qing 16 . . . . . Tom Feng 18 . . . . . Matthew Friend 20 . . . . . Lesi Hreb 22 . . . . . Natalia Bell

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Maame Boatemaa

Unrelenting Unbound

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The Solo Traveler M

By SAM KLEIN Managing Editor

aame Boatemaa was lost in a small town near Zhengzhou, China, after spending all day in the mountains.

With only enough money to either buy food or take a taxi back to her lodging, she didn’t know what to do.

Night was approaching in the town square where she sat, and the number of women was becoming sparse, though plenty of men remained. Hoping that her unabashed willingness to talk openly with strangers would help her get by — as it has in Peru, Iceland, Ghana and elsewhere — Boatemaa experienced the opposite. Strangers only wanted to touch her hair, which was long at the time, and take pictures with her.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so frustrated,” Boatemaa said. “I felt like a doll at a museum, or something. That day, I got really angry.”

Most of the time, Boatemaa tries to find the best in everyone, but this time, she couldn’t.

Boatemaa, a Gallatin senior graduating in May, has traveled everywhere. (That’s only a slight exaggeration.) She flies on NYU’s dime and couchsurfs at strangers’ homes, so her travels are practically free. On that trip to China, NYU sent her to a two-day leadership summit on climate change and urban planning. She stayed for two weeks.

“For me, it’s easier to learn about people by going to these places and staying with them,” Boatemaa said. “I don’t really have money, so I just stay with people whenever I travel. I kind of just enjoy that as a pastime.”

Thanks to NYU, Boatemaa has traveled to Senegal, South Africa, China and Japan. She spent a semester in Paris. On her own, she’s gone to Kenya, Peru, Iceland, Poland and returned to her birthplace, Ghana. (That’s far from the full list.)

Ideally, her adventures take place alone — at least until she meets strangers to stay with. She’ll meet them through the website Couchsurfing and homestays, but also by running into strangers in new places. In Poland, she homestayed with a woman and ended up staying inside the house the whole time because of the Warsaw winter; they’re still friends now, Boatemaa says. She partly attributes this boldness to her resistance to gender norms as a teenager.

“You kind of notice [gender norms] a

lot growing up in a Ghanaian household, because African notions of what a woman should be and what a woman should be doing, it starts to rub you the wrong way,” Boatemaa said. “When you’re younger, it just seems like you’re made to make the life of a man easier. But then you’re older, and you’re like, ‘I want to have my life too.’ So you start to question all of these things and become rebellious.”

Boatemaa was born in Accra, Ghana and lived there until moving to Birmingham, a suburb north of Detroit, at 15. She first went back to Accra after her sophomore year at NYU; she has been back twice since then and will return this summer.

Though her Gallatin concentration originally centered on the effects of war and famine on women, Boatemaa decided heading into her junior year to study how to merge natural and urban environments in African cities. She wants to explore the positive impacts that doing so can have on people living in those cities.

“A big part of my Gallatin experience has been traveling and meeting people and realizing that it’s not just about focusing on ‘this one person is a tyrant, and they’re here to destroy these people,’ but looking at the individual lives and what can be done to improve that individual life,” Boatemaa said. “One way is by creating situations that foster progress for each individual person. A person cannot think about educating their daughter if there’s no food at home.”

Boatemaa’s experiences in New York City and Iceland bolstered her understanding of the impact of green spaces on people’s well-being. In New York, there’s not enough dedication to nature because the city’s design is dated, she says, and it would be hard to return to what it used to look like. But in Iceland, Boatemaa’s favorite travel destination so far, she marveled at the symbiosis of grey concrete and green nature.

“We’re always prioritizing the built environment over the natural scape, and that to me kind of takes away from the uniqueness of the place,” Boatemaa said. “As human beings, we have all of this nature all around us, right?

And nature basically controls itself, creates itself really. But then here we are, saying, ‘oh, the built environment is more important than the trees or the ocean’ and things like that.”

Boatemaa’s studies focus on African cities, and she has researched in Accra, Ghana; Dakar, Senegal and Nairobi, Kenya. In Nairobi

SAM KLEIN | WSN

Boatemaa sits on her building’s stoop. She has lived in Accra, Detroit and New York, but has traveled to more than a dozen countries across five continents. Her favorite? “Iceland,” she said. “I just felt like I could breathe.”

SAM KLEIN | WSN

Gallatin senior Maame Boatemaa in Maria Hernandez Park near her apartment in Bushwick. Boatemaa loves New York City, partially because it reminds her of Accra, the city where she was born and grew up.

in particular, there is a history of conflict between urban development and the preservation of green spaces. Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for founding the Green Belt Movement, which empowers women and improves the environment through agricultural projects. The Green Belt Movement has planted over 51 million trees across Kenya since 1977, according to its website.

Boatemaa cites Maathai as a role model for her simultaneous commitment to female empowerment and public health.

“My biggest problem is, who’s going to take me seriously?” Boatemaa said. “Because, one, being a woman, two, being a woman who’s not as religious as I should be, little things like that kind of make me worried. But then, she’s a woman who endured all of that and still made her mark.”

Gallatin Associate Professor Rosalind Fredericks has been Boatemaa’s adviser in her time at NYU. She has research interests almost identical to Boatemaa, which involve studying cities across Africa, specifically Dakar. Fredericks spoke to how Boatemaa is making her own mark.

“She’s just this incredibly dynamic personality who, in addition to being a really strong student, is also just a force to reckon with,” Fredericks said. “I’ve known her since her first year and I’ve been impressed with her all along the way.”

Fredericks said that Boatemaa’s independence and dynamism shined through while in Dakar, where Boatemaa was simultaneously researching and taking Fredericks’ class, “Postcolonial Urbanisms,” the summer after her junior year.

“Just thinking about small little details, when she was the first to find interesting nightlife things to do,” Fredericks said. “And one of the first to push exploration of different parts of the different cities that we were exploring in this really unfazed, sort of fearless way.”

Though not terribly glamorous or public, Boatemaa’s accomplishments are impressive.

She secured two research grants from NYU — one the summer after her sophomore year to study youth employability in Ghana, and the second to study environmental conservation in Dakar after her junior year and Nairobi this past January term. Upon graduation, she will be one of 50 Princeton in Africa Fellows. The fellowship entails a year working with organizations across the continent. Boatemaa does not yet know who she will work with.

But the true testament to Boatemaa’s ambi-

tion and independence is the project she’s undertaking this summer. Along with a friend, Boatemaa plans to travel around Ghana to promote a more comprehensive resource for tourists in Ghana — which CNN deemed “the next big tourist destination.”

“It’s very hard to travel around Ghana unless you pay some tour company to take you around,” Boatemaa said. “But I’m a solo traveler. So I’m making a website for people like me, who just travel on their own and want to figure out the bus system all around the country.”

“People like me.”

Boatemaa wants to live in three more countries before she’s 35. She says mediocrity is her biggest fear — “There’s no reason why any one person should be mediocre at anything.”

She speaks four languages (Asante Twi, Akuapem Twi, French and English), a bit of a fifth (Spanish), and wants to learn two more (Arabic and Portuguese).

But despite her unbridled joy — “I wake up excited for breakfast” — Boatemaa has only recently started becoming comfortable with herself, and part of that is starting to wear dreadlocks.

“It’s just recently that I started being aware of being completely natural and loving the way that I am specifically,” Boatemaa said. “I grew up with white dolls. You kind of grow up wanting to look a certain way, and then all of a sudden you realize the way you look is already beautiful.”

Boatemaa’s concentration is “Sankofa: (Re) Defining the Colonial City.” Sankofa means “going back to get it” in Twi, which is an Akan language and Ghana’s most widely spoken regional tongue. Akan is Boatemaa’s ethnic group. She said Sankofa refers to learning from mistakes in pre-colonial Africa and examining how those mistakes can be corrected today.

“For me, looking at history is so important,” Boatemaa said. “It’s not something that you can just ignore and say ‘OK, it happened, it doesn’t matter anymore.’ Because it all does matter.”

Boatemaa isn’t afraid to go and look at green spaces in African cities on her own.

Maybe that’s why, as she walked through Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick one Sunday afternoon, she bumped shoulders with a man walking the opposite direction.

“If I started down a path, and you’re in my way, I’m not moving,” Boatemaa said. “It’s not possible.”

Email Sam Klein at sklein@nyunews.com.

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The Fast-Talking, Fast-Walking Local Canvasser

SAM KLEIN | WSN

LS sophomore Justin Chae’s phone rings incessantly, and he curses liberally to the person on the other end. Chae owns a political consulting firm and he participates in ROTC as well.

By SAKSHI VENKATRAMAN Editor-in-Chief

S

houting expletives into his phone, Justin Chae speed-walked through the Union Square Subway station on a Tuesday afternoon. He weaved through the crowd of people. A black duffel bag swung by his side. His eyes fixed on his screen, he dodged old ladies and children. The 19-yearold LS sophomore had the energy of a cartoon businessman — animated with theatrical briskness. Everything was chaos, but he was loving it.

“Should I tell him to f-ck off?” he yelled into his phone’s voice-to-text. Paces behind him, I could hear the intonation in his voice.

His phone picked it up as well amid the station’s commotion.

Keeping up with Chae proved difficult. I followed his voice since his medium stature kept getting lost in the crowd.

“Some crazy sh-t just happened,” he said, looking back at me. “I’ll tell you about it when we’re settled.”

After zipping across the entire station, we caught our 4 train just as it was rolling in.

Chae turned back to check on me.

“I’m so swamped today,” he said.

We spent the subway ride mostly in silence.

He gripped his phone, rarely moving his gaze from it as he sent fervent texts to his coworkers. I, too, stared at my phone or at the floor, pretending to be busy.

“Do you want to sit down?” I asked.

“No, I don’t like sitting,” he said.

Without much warning, he grabbed his bags and got off the train at the 59th Street station. I scampered out behind him.

We stood on the platform for a few minutes waiting for his business partner, Fordham University sophomore Evan Schaffer, to join us on our journey. We made some small talk about how much we each had to drink that weekend. I found we have similarly hectic weekly routines and that he plays the saxophone. And at his house on Long Island, he owns two South American lizards. They’re illegal in New York City.

Then the texts started rolling in again. Periodically, he would look down at his phone and mutter “f-ck” under his breath.

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Chae says “f-ck” the way most people say “um.” Like a filler for people who are too self-confident for fillers. Everything is an emergency. Every text he gets is sh-t hitting the fan.

Soon after, Schaffer joined us in the station. He towered over Chae by almost a head, but his voice was about half as loud. They spoke to each other quickly about the day of canvassing that lay ahead of them and the state of their company.

“Do we need to have you sign an NDA?” Schaffer asked me, chuckling. I didn’t know how to respond except with nervous laughter.

Chae set his duffel bag down on the floor of the subway station and opened it to reveal stacks of brochures and papers they would later use to get signatures. He pulled some out and handed them off to Schaffer.

“If you’re wondering — yes, it’s always this chaotic,” Schaffer said when we boarded the next N train to Astoria. *** The few months that have gone by since Chae and Schaffer started their political consulting firm, Meridian Strategies, have been nothing short of hectic. The firm, which the two opened in January after leaving another political strategy company, works on canvassing and strategy for local campaigns. As self-assured as he seems, Chae said he wasn’t sure about the company. It was Schaffer’s idea.

“It sounds so cringey,” Chae said. “Two 19-year-olds opening up their own business in an industry dominated by seasoned politicians. I was hesitant. I didn’t really tell people at first. I feel like there’s a stigma against young people who open their own businesses, like ‘who do you think you are?’”

Chae eventually got over his doubts, and after a couple of months of logistics and paperwork, they welcomed their first client.

Since then, the firm has taken off. Using connections made from previous jobs, the two have clients lined up months in advance.

Chae says the Meridian team makes thousands of dollars in profit from each campaign.

“It’s so easy to get business and it’s so consistent,” he said. “This job could never be taken over by robots.”

A client Chae worked for over the sum-

Chae met his interns in a Burger King in Astoria, Queens, before sending them out to solicit signatures. Though Chae typically gets less than five hours of sleep, he doesn’t drink coffee or energy drinks. “Pure adrenaline,” he says.

mer referred him to his first client, Melissa Mark-Viverito. The former speaker of the New York City Council hired Meridian to work on the early stages of her campaign for public advocate. At the moment, the team is working on getting signatures for New York City Councilman Rory Lancman, who is trying to get on the ballot for Queens District Attorney.

That’s what brought Chae to Astoria. He approaches each campaign and each community differently.

Upon arrival in Queens, he got right to work. Meridian Strategies doesn’t have a central office, so we first hunkered down in a Starbucks where some of his interns were waiting for him. (Yes, interns.) Around 10 eventually arrived at the site. They ranged from scrawny high school students to late 20-somethings, all ready to take to the streets and solicit signatures from Queens residents.

Most of them had never cold-approached people before, so Chae demonstrated, acting out scenarios with a carefully thought out, memorized script. Although running on only a few hours of sleep, he snapped into character and delivered an animated pitch. Any skepticism I had of his success disappeared after I watched his performance. He’s a salesman. He knows what people want to hear.

Chae soon realized that Starbucks didn’t have enough seating, so the group relocated to a Burger King down the street. He directed the interns to polling locations and street blocks around Astoria and sat down for the first time in a while, papers and backpacks surrounding him on the tables of the fastfood chain.

“He’s just relentless,” Schaffer said in an earlier interview. “He’s like a bulldog, he just drives into it. And he’s really good at what he does. If he says he’s going to do it, he’s going to do it.” *** Two things to note about Chae — he doesn’t drink caffeine and he doesn’t actually know anything about politics. During campaign season, he says he works 80 hours a week. No soda, no Red Bull, no coffee.

“It’s pure adrenaline,” he said.

Whether Chae has always been this intense is unclear. Stony Brook University sophomore Gaurav Sharma, currently a project manager at Meridian Strategies, has been friends with him since middle school. Chae was a quiet kid, according to Sharma. He was smart, not super sporty, and he wore basketball shorts every day.

“We were the odd kids out,” Sharma said.

“He didn’t really like the people in middle school. He was kind of just like the strange kid that goes to chess club.”

The two became close when they started working together after high school, and Shar-

ma says the years have done Chae a lot of good.

“He really reinvented himself in high school,” Sharma said. “He got himself a look, started working real hard. Now he’s a grown man. He’s running a company.”

Chae knows how to get results, or at least that seems to be the consensus among those that work closely with him. His work zeroes in on local communities — he learns the demographic and adjusts to fit the niche. The script is airtight, he says, and his rhetoric is convincing.

“As long as you have the right talking points for that community, you don’t really need to know anything else,” he said.

He admits he barely knows anything about national politics.

Though Meridian has worked for only Democratic candidates so far, Chae identifies as more of a left-leaning centrist, with a few issues that he cares a lot about: veterans, LGBTQ rights and national security. But until his junior year of high school, he says he didn’t even know the difference between Democrats and Republicans.

He’s still not sure of himself in conversations about national politics. And he’s pretty much fine with that.

“I don’t need to know what our stance is on trickle-down economics and how to regulate the stock market,” Chae said. “I just need to know that the person on this block probably cares about the pothole in their road or the mold in their apartment.” *** A long, stressful day in Astoria ended with Chae in the passenger seat of Sharma’s white Lexus sedan.

“We sat in the car for two and a half hours talking,” Sharma said. “We basically restructured the company.”

Chae doesn’t have a lot of free time, but he does participate in Fordham’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, which partners with NYU to provide training and scholarships.

The program gets him up and uptown for early morning workouts. Before Meridian, he had aspirations to serve in the military and run for office.

“Now that I’ve started this consulting stuff, I might just go reserve,” he said. “But I originally wanted to do active duty.”

He says if the U.S. were to go to war again, though, he would request to go active duty.

He’s still not sure what his life will look like after college, but he’s pretty sure Meridian will be long-term. Until then, it’s all about the grind.

“You need to work your way up the totem pole,” Chae said. “You need to start as an unpaid intern, you need to get f-cked, and you need to work your way up.”

Email Sakshi Venkatraman at svenkatraman@nyunews.com

SAM KLEIN | WSN

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Justin Chae

Political Consultant Entrepreneur

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Eloquent Enterprising

Ben Neiley

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The Connoisseur of Contemporary Quality A

By HANNA KHOSRAVI Opinion Editor

s he organizes his production set in his Lipton dorm room, Ben Neiley jaunts around his inexplicably color-coordinated closet, sliding from corner to corner, dabbing powder on his chin, organizing his extensive Korean beauty collection on the shelves and periodically adjusting the tripod, all while munching on a cream cheese bagel from the dining hall downstairs.

He tells me his YouTube filming process requires a lot of time because of his intense focus on analyzing ingredients. But in watching him rattle off information about products into his camera, all it takes for the Gallatin senior to deliver a near pitch-perfect delineation on the products he is describing is a quick coif of his hair and an angling of his camera lens. There’s no teleprompter or script. He just turns the camera on, leverages the natural light from his colossal window and talks about each cream, powder, and cleanser with the ease of a natural orator, throwing out figures on the advantages of bee saliva as if it is common knowledge.

Neiley and Jorene He, our WSN photographer, proceed to gab about the ingredients in an array of products I know nothing about. I, on the other hand, inquire about my hair care conundrums.

“Oh my goodness, that happens to me all time!”

Neiley hollers. He emerges from his hair care lair with a bottle containing an elixir of sorts that he promises is “perfect” for sopping up moisture. “And doesn’t it smell incredible?” he smiles, bringing the container to my nose. “I want my whole life to smell like this.”

The precision in the cadence of his voice, the ease with which he guides himself and other people through the street and his command of both his diction and his direction makes Neiley seem like a connoisseur in anything he describes, whether it’s his favorite Mexican restaurant downtown, the reasons why London recently dethroned New York as his favorite city in the world, or — of course — the potentially harmful ingredients in your acne cream.

And when he enters a room, whether it’s his own vlog set or the coffee shop we eventually settle into on Lafayette, he moves as if he commands the space. He’s not cocky — just confident.

Confidence is big for Neiley. It has to be, when your business revolves around your social media presence, your YouTube personality and your ability to get your point across in a boardroom filled with high-power executives. His concentration, called a “Fundamental Rethink of the Way We Market,” is rooted in analysis of the ethical nature of marketing and the understanding of creative-decision-making, scrutinizing the legacy of marginalization within the beauty industry. He tacked on an Art History minor after taking a class in the department while at NYU London his sophomore year.

“My colloquium will be a nice mix of ancient and Renaissance artworks, and, like, the Kendall Jenner

Pepsi commercial!” Neiley tells me with a chuckle.

If you don’t already know Neiley from his Instagram account or his YouTube channel, you might have heard of him before — the wunderkind Lipton RA and Korean skincare guru. “Korean skincare?” you might ask. The calling is niche, but Neiley is eager to feed it.

He has always been the creative type — a character formula that defined his upbringing in what he calls the charmed Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado, 30 minutes outside of Aspen.

“It was definitely cool to have grass under my feet

“I was doing a campaign with Nordstrom on a national Wanelo collaboration; I was going to events with Louis Vuitton,” he said. “Seventeen-year-old me was doing collaborations with J. Crew. I was so overwhelmed, but [I] learned such a huge amount so quickly about how to market myself and create a presence of myself that brands and people were interested in.”

After going viral, the rest was history for Neiley.

Ever since then, his life and resume has been chockfull of rapid movement. His senior year of high school, he worked as a retail operations intern at

JORENE HE | WSN

Gallatin senior Ben Neiley prepares skincare products for a YouTube video. Following his first trip to Seoul, he returned to the U.S. with a suitcase filled solely with 31 pounds of Korean beauty products.

and stars over my head and be living this super outdoorsy, fun, adventurous lifestyle,” Neiley said. “I had an upbringing that cherished exploration and creativity.”

His go-getter persona does seem predominantly defined by the influence of his family. He describes his father as a literary, “joy-sparking” English major, and his mother as the ultimate source of his personal grit.

Neiley says her mantra, “Life is not a dress rehearsal,” has provided the basis for much of his personal exploration.

Neiley’s early years seem to encompass both an admiration for his comfortable, small-town mystique, as well as an urge to break out of it, and it was during his sophomore year of high school that he began to develop a basic interest in fashion as a career prospect. As I look at him across the table — impeccably dressed in muted, neutral tones of mauve and navy — he tells me the clothes were purchased mostly from boutiques in London and Seoul.

The allure of the fashion world spurred an all-out desire to “become Anna Wintour.” At the age of 15, after a couple of months as a user on the application Wanelo, a social-media-fashion-platform-meets-digital-mall, Neiley became the most followed curator on the platform.

JORENE HE | WSN

Ben adjusts his camera before recording a video, in which he delivers a fast-paced sermon on the advantages of Korean sherbert cleansers and the benefits of bee saliva without any script or prompt.

Burberry in Aspen and fell in love with what he describes as its “welcoming brand ethos.” But a high school career’s worth of hours spent at high-fashion events and visual development meetings had rendered him disillusioned with the industry as a whole, which resulted in an identity crisis of sorts when he arrived at NYU. “I started to develop a distaste for the people and the product of the fashion industry, and it clashed with my values, because I felt like it was really exploiting people,” Neiley said. “I remember standing in the Burberry stockroom and pulling a T-shirt out of a plastic bag that could have been an H&M T-shirt any day of the week, and it was $200.”

Despite choosing to attend NYU because of Gallatin’s open curriculum, Neiley began exploring an array of new professional identities — and no, he didn’t just take a new class or search online for career options. He went from interning on a Republican presidential campaign before abandoning politics to try out the entertainment industry, which he found equally uninspiring. (He keeps mum about which political candidate, aside from clarifying that it wasn’t Donald Trump and that the GOP no longer represents his views.)

The only point in our conversation when Neiley expressed anything other than invariable eloquence and stark self-assurance is when he described a particular aspect of his high-school experience. Despite being “a super gay guy who [was] really into fashion” in a conservative Colorado town, he remembers the time period jubilantly. Neiley’s mini-crisis actually stemmed from his experiences with “horrible skin” in his teenage years that led him to buy a full 10-step Korean skincare routine on a whim in Flushing, Queens during his sophomore year of college. Within a few days using the products, he could discern a complete improvement in his skin’s tone and texture.

This time, it was different. Neiley had fallen in love.

“In high school, I had self-loathing on another level about my skin,” Neiley said. “[But now] I was finally using products that worked. And I was thinking ‘Wait, if I marketed these products, I would actually be having a positive impact on people’s lives.”

Neiley, as per usual, acted on his impulse. That spring, he flew to Seoul to do field research on the Korean beauty industry after receiving the Gallatin Undergraduate Research Fund. Shortly after his trip, he became a Digital Content Marketing Intern at Soko Glam, and blew up on its YouTube channel and on its article-based media outlet, The Klog. He then landed an internship at L’Oreal and has already lined up a job as a Marketing Associate at the makeup conglomerate upon graduation.

Neiley attributes his success, in large part, on his ability to dive down into the nitty-gritty of a product’s ingredients list. He says his “favorite part of skincare is the science,” and he describes many nights poring over academic research in Bobst in order to interpret clinical studies.

Sitting face-to-face with an exquisitely manicured, well-dressed Neiley, I tried my very best to get into the head of the archetypal, internship-subsumed student of NYU folklore that I’ve always heard about but thought was more of a mythical creature than an actual reality. And while Neiley is humble in his response, he also owns his accomplishments. Which, while at first somewhat jarring, is part of his authenticity.

“I am hyper-critical of myself, and I constantly compare myself to what my friends are doing,” Neiley said. “But I remember one time I called my mom and I was complaining about something, and she said to me, ‘Neiley, do you think about the fact that you are kind of an exceptional individual? These aren’t things most people really do.’ But it feels like second nature to me. If I want to do something, I’ll just do it.”

Neiley seems certain of his successes, and preserves his intentions — to move up and make an impact — with an iron-clad resolve and a well-groomed wit.

“Neiley is definitely a great advocator for himself, but in a very humble way,” said Cristina Fernandez, his boss at L’Oreal while he worked as a summer marketing intern for its luxury Japanese hair-care brand Shu Uemura. “He was always open to sharing what he was studying and how he perceived marketing.”

If moral quandaries regarding exploitation pushed him out of the fashion realm, Neiley is not letting it happen in the beauty industry, where he feels he has found a true home. He recounts an experience in which a group of executives in a boardroom were analyzing Nielsen reports stating that white gay men spent an exorbitant amount on skincare and are therefore one of the most lucrative demographics.

“In reality, the vast majority of the LGBTQ community is not white men who can afford to spend hundreds of dollars on skincare,” Neiley said. “If you depend on Nielsen metrics to determine who to include in your marketing, you will only include the people who are not in need of inclusion. Diversity can’t be crammed into data.”

Neiley’s goals are quite entrepreneurial — he wants his own company and his own unabating attention to ingredient details and personally developed marketing strategy to define his career. His ambition is undeniable. (He studies Korean and has already achieved a degree of communicative fluency, describing the Korean alphabet as “brilliantly designed.”)

“He’s really not the kind of person to give it 95 percent; he gives it over 100 percent,” Renee Jacques, his manager while at Soko Glam, said. “And he also doesn’t let any type of failure get him down.”

His emphasis on quality in every aspect of his life, whether it be his meticulously categorized shelf of skincare products or his adoration for British style, seems to permeate his every movement.

As he gets up from the coffee table to toss his matcha latte and give me a quick hug, I catch a glimpse of the phrase etched in white thread calligraphy on the inner wrist of his navy blue sweater. It’s as if the sweater’s designer left the two-word message in the shirt sleeve just for Neiley: “High Quality.”

Email Hanna Khosravi at hkhosravi@nyunews.com.

09

Climbing Through Advocacy

By AKSHAY PRABHUSHANKAR Deputy Managing Editor

S

ummer interns at the White House are just like the rest of us. They leave the office — the New Executive Office Building on H Street in Washington, D.C. in this case — for lunch and talk about anything but work.

One day in July, however, the conversation turned to politics. Shriya Khonde and about seven of her friends were getting food across the street — “probably grilled cheese or a salad,” she said, a contrast to President Trump’s preferred Filet-o-Fish and Diet Coke from McDonald’s — when someone brought up the East Wing tour they would be going on the next day.

“They said they were going to wear their best outfit because apparently Ivanka Trump came and took a picture with the other interns,” Khonde recalled. “And then someone [else] started talking about how she was the perfect person, a Barbie doll, the embodiment of perfect.”

The Tandon junior worked as an intern in the nonpartisan information technology department of the executive branch. This is separate from the White House Internship Program, which is considered a political gig, and her projects were unrelated to Trump’s policies. It’s a clarification she likes to make quickly to her friends at NYU. “I’m asked about it a lot,” she said. “But the political agenda did not affect my work. I only saw the president once, on my first day there [...] since he uninvited the Philadelphia Eagles.”

Khonde is referring to the president canceling a visit by the Super Bowl-winning team after some players refused to attend. He instead threw a party meant to, as he said, “celebrate America” that Khonde attended with her boss.

As a business and technology management major, Khonde took interest in the role to observe how a government IT department is different than those at private companies, and had assumed that her fellow interns had similar motivations, until that one lunch break.

“I was very surprised [by their] strong support for the president,” she said about the other interns. “I was there for the professional experience in a government setting. They were there for a completely different reason — the administration itself.”

Khonde was the only woman of color in the department and, as native of Edison, New Jersey, a town with a large South Asian community, the demographic difference was jarring.

“I couldn’t get a word in, which I think is a reflection of where [the country] is now,” she said.

I asked whether it was possible to really

separate any White House job from the chief executive and his attacks on women, immigrants and science, all boxes that are checked

by Khonde or her loved ones.

“I’m not a very confrontational person, and I didn’t want to push my beliefs on others,” she replied. “But I stood up for what I believed in.”

The projects she worked on in Washington included managing the White House’s cloud storage needs and organizing travel for the Office of Administration when employees traveled to Helsinki for a summit that made international headlines. While IT projects like these are not dazzling on the surface, they are still impactful. Getting others to recognize the value of nitty-gritty work is a struggle she has faced on Tandon’s Undergraduate Student Council too.

“If [Tandon students] don’t see any tangible changes, they just feel like nothing’s being done,” she said. Making her constituents aware of progress is essential, she stressed, since administrative work just doesn’t get people excited. This is especially true at Tandon, where students often feel isolated and neglected compared to their Manhattan counterparts.

“There’s definitely a stigma.”

Khonde, through TUSC, has led successful initiatives to introduce a three-credit internship course at Tandon, increase NYU bus service between the campuses, provide feminine hygiene products in bathrooms and post QR codes around Tandon so that students can easily provide immediate feedback or complaints.

I sat in on a recent TUSC meeting at The Hub, a windowless room at 5 Metrotech Center. Khonde had already been here for 20 minutes typing away on her laptop and slurping up some soup from Au Bon Pain. As secretary, she’s responsible for taking attendance, sharing meeting minutes and following up on assigned tasks. It was an important meeting — next week was spirit week at NYU’s Brooklyn outpost, and TUSC was finalizing plans for all the events.

The council covered issues including whether or not to co-sponsor Class Activity Board’s Sophomore Soiree, how to administer a new travel fund for Hackathon participants, the distribution of spirit week T-shirts — Khonde gave me a peek at the design, a trigonometric pun — and the marquee event of the week, the Tandon Gala. Khonde aggressively encouraged everyone in the room to share the event on social media. They had booked food, a DJ and a photobooth at a venue nearby. “‘TUSC is really killing it this year,’” club advisor Sarah Shields said as she read a text message from a former council president. Everyone in the room beamed, but Shields had even more praise for Khonde.

MIN JI KIM | WSN

Tandon junior Shriya Khonde (right) studies with her close friend and roommate Shradha Mididaddi (left).

They share a room in Brooklyn Heights and met at Chipotle the first week of school, but weren’t immediately fans of one another.

10

“She’s been a huge asset,” she said. “Introduced a lot of new initiatives, many with other organizations she’s been a part of on campus.”

Current TUSC president Florence Tong also recognizes her outstanding contributions to the council.

“She is always a go-to when it comes to getting things done, [especially] last-minute,” Tong said.

Khonde does bring extensive prior leadership experience to the council. She formerly served as vice president of service for the Inter-Residence Hall Council, no easy feat for a Brooklyn-based student since all the meetings were on Washington Square. There, she helped organize the New York Dance Marathon and Days of Service, where students would garden in the outer boroughs.

“They named one of the trees after me,” she said with a proud smile. That was nice, Khonde admitted, but she emphasized that the most rewarding part of the role was seeing

[is] one of them.”

As for future plans, Khonde is a huge Disney fan and wants to work for the company one day, whether it’s in a corporate office or in the studio to voice a princess.

“It’s always been a dream,” she said, trying to hold back a grin.

But for now, Khonde will head to the New Jersey office of UBS, a Swiss investment bank, to work as a wealth management intern this summer.

“I see her [bringing a] fresh perspective to drive her success,” said Joyel Sequeira, Khonde’s supervisor at NYU IT. “Her personality and efforts fit the [project manager] role well and I can see her integrating her skills to develop her very own managerial style.”

Khonde loves her work but acknowledges some criticisms of the industry. She’s frustrated by the cutthroat competition at so many companies, for example.

“There are a lot of extremely qualified peo-

MIN JI KIM | WSN

Khonde poses for a photo with a friend at the Tandon Gala. The two met during Khonde’s internship in Washington, D.C. last summer and have kept in touch since.

friendships form between residents as they attended events.

The 25-minute bus or subway ride between NYU’s campuses doesn’t seem to phase Khonde. She was happy to meet me for coffee in the East Village, where she described her work as a project coordinator at NYU IT and its six offices spread across Union Square, Washington Square and Metrotech.

“In the morning, they’ll tell me, ‘OK, you have a meeting here, here and here,’ and I’ll have to plan out my day,” she said.

I asked whether she’s able to deliver tangible results at the IT department since it seems like such an invisible job. She agreed that her projects were mostly back-end, but brought up Multi-Factor Authentication as a change her team helped implement that also impacted the entire NYU community, even though it did not get an entirely positive reception.

“I was frustrated, too, at first,” she said. “It just seemed so annoying.”

But working on the behind-the-scenes issues helped her realize how important the implementation was in keeping student data secure.

While she does her best to represent her constituents in professional settings, she is not short on enthusiasm for her friends’ activities either.

“She shows interest in other people’s passions,” said Shradha Mididaddi, Khonde’s close friend and roommate, recounting a recent instance when Khonde baked banana bread for Mididaddi’s dance team. “There are a handful of cheerleaders in my life and Shriya

ple and everyone’s going for the exact same jobs,” she said.

Representation has also been a noticeable issue everywhere she’s worked. “There can be, like, 16 men in a room and two women,” Khonde recalled of some NYU IT meetings.

And the ratio isn’t much better at Tandon, where male students outnumber female students 2-to-1. Still, she has hope.

“Everyone is respectful,” she said. “And in my major specifically, it is pretty balanced.

I see potential and I can see change happening.”

After the TUSC meeting, Khonde took me on a quick tour of Tandon’s campus. She was like one of those ubiquitous purple-jacketed admissions ambassadors, but far more personal, since everywhere we went she had a story or a fun fact. Her answers to my questions were often interrupted by friends waving hello or her own input on places we saw.

We walked through the new commuter lounge — created thanks to a TUSC initiative, Khonde bragged — and the MakerSpace Lab before heading over to the cool MAGNET space with its retro video games. Despite not having first-year cohorts, Khonde said, Tandon’s gen-ed classes and two residence halls make it so that everyone becomes friends with each other.

“It’s a very tight-knit community,” she said, a politician unashamedly boasting of her often overshadowed constituency.

Email Akshay Prabhushankar at aprabhushankar@nyunews.com.

Shriya Khonde

Technophile

& Proponent

11

Derin Caglar

Keyboards

&Boxes of Moths

12

Stepping out of the Pigeonhole and Flying High

ALINA PATRICK | WSN

CAS junior Derin Caglar plays the piano with singer Beth Million (center), bassist Lucas Saur (left) and drummer Jacob Patrone (not pictured) during a rehearsal in the New School. Caglar enjoys playing live shows and being on stage.

I

By YASMIN GULEC Under the Arch Editor

n Turkish, sofra is a dinner table set for a meal. It cannot be complete without people around it who share a slice of themselves through their personal stories and moments of intoxicated singing. A cornucopia of dishes usually fills the table and could fill you up even if you just glance at it.

CAS junior Derin Caglar has successfully made a sofra of his own, replacing hungry dinner guests with talented musicians and delicious food with sweet melodies.

Caglar started his music collective Sofra with the intention of making original music.

He wanted people to come and create with him, but felt weird asking them to commit by calling it a band — as he was about to make the move from Philadelphia to New York for college.

“It was really more interesting to me to construct something that would be per project,” he said. “It’s hard to get people to commit to stuff, but I want them to be able to take ownership over it.”

Sofra was born in the heart of Gladwyne, Pennsylvania with a handful of people Caglar met through high school and jazz programs.

Since its inception, he has worked with many up and coming musicians like Sterling Duns, Olivia Reid and Peter Enriquez — whose Greenpoint apartment doubles as a fully functioning recording studio where they will record the collective’s next EP. Caglar wrote a piece for jazz band his senior year of high school that evolved over time, eventually turning into one of the songs on Sofra’s first EP, “Not so Not Familiar.”

His parents moved from Turkey to the U.S. for graduate school and later relocated to Ardmore, Pennsylvania, where Caglar grew up. He got into music at 4 years old, and no, his story does not include a life-changing song or a sad backstory. It does, however, include a legendary lady named Zelda.

After his parents gifted Caglar with a GameCube for what he calls “American Christmas,” he began playing “The Legend of Zelda” all the time, and the songs in the game sparked an interest in him.

“I just remember you’d be in the town and it would sound like a town, or you’d be in the forest and it would sound like a forest,” he said.

“I was like, ‘that’s pretty crazy, how did they do that?’”

Caglar did not start listening to non-video game music until the start of middle school.

One of the reasons for this, which he says he

is still a little “salty” about, is that his parents never made him listen to Turkish music. He says his long-awaited cultural identity crisis has not happened yet, but he wishes that he was exposed to his Turkish side more. Though he is trying to remedy this as an adult, it is difficult, as New York City is not exactly bustling with a rich Turkish music scene.

“My dad gave me — not even Queen or The Beatles, kind of Western culture things that had injected themselves into Turkey,” he said.

“He was like, ‘here is Supertramp and the Alan Parsons Project’ — but I totally am so into all that.”

His first introduction to hip-hop was with The Roots’ album “Undun.” In middle school, Caglar immersed himself in the world of jazz, joining jazz band.

When he asked his mom if he could learn an instrument, she told him to choose between piano and guitar. He chose the former, justifying his choice by telling me that there are too many white guitar players in the jazz realm.

“I was just like a little sh-t in middle school,” he said with a laugh. “I was like the fedora kid, so that, combined with the fact that [I was] learning how to play jazz piano, was maybe the most obnoxious combination of things I could do.”

His musical prowess doesn’t end with the keys. He made an impulse keytar purchase inspired by a Herbie Hancock concert, and his aunt gifted him a Ney, an end-blown flute prominent in Middle Eastern music.

“It’s so hard; I could only get like two notes out,” he said.

Caglar also plays the saxophone, which he jokingly asked me to keep “between us.”

Caglar finds musical reassurance in the people he works with, occasionally turning to them to see if he is headed in the right direction. This, he says, has been an integral developmental step — he used to feel extremely jealous of people who were better than him.

“It’s such a shift of perspective to be around people that are better than me but who want to play with me,” he shared, looking down at his painted, blue nails. “That probably has had the biggest shift, positive critical influence.”

Peter Enriquez, a Sofra collaborator and close friend of Caglar, said the tracks are not made to please anyone else. It is Caglar’s attempt at telling a story, something meant to be engaged with.

“He didn’t write that record to sound like jazz or sound like hip-hop or sound like R&B,” Enriquez said. “He wrote that music because that’s what was most honest to him, and the record itself as a result is at times chaotic, at times

silly, at times smooth and at times aggressive and much more.”

Enriquez said Caglar downplays his musical abilities, as he hates being the center of attention.

“He’s unbelievably humble and is truly a radiant talent,” Enriquez said. “His musical choices and endeavors are beautiful because they’re never self-serving. Every note he plays and every piece he writes is for the sake of making something beautiful, something that is meant to be communicative and interactive.

And aside of all of this, he is simply very, very good at playing the piano.”

Outside of Sofra, Caglar plays the keyboard for Haiku and Mia Gladstone, is in the process of co-producing the Synapse — a neuroscience podcast — and writes film scores for student short films.

When I tell him that I am going to ask him a dumb question, he anticipates it, guessing “What is my process?” I nod.

Caglar usually messes around at home until he comes across an idea he likes, or sometimes he writes songs with specific people in mind.

There is also a recurring melodic theme.

“I’m also obsessed with the ‘Sesame Street’ theme song,” he said. “I think this sh-t is so high. It’s so good. It slaps so hard. I have like four versions for arrangements of that because I can’t get enough of it.”

Occasionally, Caglar will try to take sounds he hears around him and reinterpret them in a musical context. “‘The Desert Rejoices,’ which is the third track of the album, I just started with the rhythm [of a] cicada,” he said, imitating the insect’s sounds. “I took that idea and just did that back to back and then eventually that became that song.”

Including the cicadas was not random, as Caglar is very interested in bugs. (“Yay bugs,” he says when I ask about how this interest started.) Caglar got into bugs because his high school botany teacher is an expert on the North American Emerald Moth. He put him in contact with the curatorial manager of the entomology department at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia who made Caglar identify boxes of moths 10 hours a week for three months. This was followed by a fiveday trip to Arizona to do field collecting.

“You set up sheets, take a thousand-watt mercury vapor light bulbs and put them in front and then some UV just for, you know, species that are into that, and then you wait,” he said. “Not only does the sheet gets swarmed, but you get swarmed. You have to tuck everything in. There [are] bugs all over, and then

you just collect.”

Contrary to what might be expected of him with his background in music, he is a neuroscience major. (He calls it a “sexy new science.”)

Jennifer Punt, Caglar’s high school advanced biology teacher and an immunologist, says that he has an intense interest in biology and neuroscience as a means of understanding how and why things work.

“He brings the imagination of an artist to a field that some think is driven simply by adherence to fact,” she said. “He, however, sees the art in science — an essential part of both discovery and communication.”

As his competitive disposition is moderate at best, Caglar did not think studying music was the best option for him.

“The thing with music is, if you have the people around you — which is a privilege — you have the connections, and if you practice you don’t have to go to school for it,” he shared, his amber earrings gifted to him by his mom dangling off his ears. “I owe that to other people here, so it’s just nice to owe it to friends and not to an institution. ” In the near future, Caglar hopes to find research opportunities in New York City so he is not far away from the music scene.

“Grad school, at least a master’s, maybe a Ph.D.,” he says. “I think my ideal currently is to land a job at the American Museum of Natural History and just work there indefinitely and live here, do music and die happy. Which isn’t the most unattainable thing, so we will see.”

When I imagine Caglar as a dish featured on a “sofra,” I tell him that he would be aşure, a traditional Turkish dessert made with sugar, wheat, beans, currant, oranges, pistachio and chickpeas that tastes great despite the array of ingredients. He laughs, saying he would prefer being a Turkish almond-based pudding, keşkül, but I stop him.

“Look, think about it,” I said. “Aşure has peas and weird vegetables, but also sweets and fruit. You do not have to pick one specific thing — you can put everything together and it can still work out. That is exactly what you are doing.”

In true aşure form, Caglar does not understand people’s tendency to compartmentalize beyond what is necessary.

“It’s confusing in a way that I feel like it doesn’t have to be,” he says. “It’s like I’m just trying to do the things I want to do. You know, combining disciplinary stuff hasn’t killed me yet.”

Yet.

Email Yasmin Gulec at ygulec@nyunews.com.

ALINA PATRICK | WSN

Caglar plays the piano at a rehearsal in the New School for rhythm and blues singer Beth Million.

Caglar started his own music collective, Sofra, in 2017. However, he still plays the piano for other musicians.

13

Creating Her Own Seat at the Table B

By MELANIE PINEDA Opinion Editor

usiness runs in Ma Qing’s blood.

With a businesswoman mother, it’s something Qing has been surrounded by since birth.

“When I was little, my mom was always in charge of everything,” Qing said over a latte. “We would go out to restaurants and she would order food for everyone at the table. I’ve kind of become like her in that way — taking charge, knowing what I want and ordering the check for everyone.”

As a Gallatin senior concentrating in Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Cross-Cultural Communication between China and the United States, and the President of the Gallatin Business Society, Qing is no stranger to entrepreneurship. The spring of her sophomore year, she took a semester off to start her own restaurant, Prime Poke.

The idea behind Prime Poke came to Qing after she took Steinhardt’s Food Management Theory course, where she was exposed to the business and marketing sides of the food industry. Inspired and determined to put her knowledge to the test, Qing began to draft a plan to open her own restaurant.

With most restaurants, labor costs are one of the biggest challenges. But Qing soon realized that’s what made poke so accessible — its simple ingredients and plating could allow for money to be spent elsewhere.

“All you need to create poke is someone who can cut fish and servers,” Qing explained. “That’s what makes it such a great food business to go into.”

Through bank loans and funds from close friends and family, Qing quickly formed a business plan with a family friend. She did most of the grunt work — including pricing, creating the menus and designing the website. While the restaurant prepared its grand opening in Pleasanton, California, she personally trained employees on how to format the poke bowls and present the food in an appetizing way.

“People would come up to me and think this was part of a franchise,” she laughed as

14

she remembered Prime Poke’s grand opening. “They couldn’t believe a college student had designed and created all of this.”

With a four-and-a-half-star rating on Yelp from over 130 reviews, Qing considers Prime Poke a success. Now, she serves as a business advisor to the West Coast joint because of the distance from school in New York. Qing says she’s ready to move on to other projects and doesn’t plan on opening any other locations.

But Qing’s aspirations to be a part of the business world started long before college.

In fact, she started her first business in high school — a boba tea delivery service for students who couldn’t yet drive.

“My high school basically planted the entrepreneurial seed in me,” Qing said. “Back then, I didn’t even know I was doing business.”

Ready for her next venture, Qing stands in front of a whiteboard covered in colorful sticky notes and her handwriting at NYU’s Entrepreneurship Lab on a Friday morning.

She’s dressed in ankle boots, leggings and a knee-length pencil dress, marker in hand.

She only puts the utensil down to type something on her laptop or to encourage her new startup team members to offer their input.

Qing constantly asks the questions “What do you think?”, “How can we do this?” and “Can you help me?” to her team. As a leader, she views her colleagues and their opinions as the most essential part of her startup. Her Friday morning meeting was no exception to this.

Milton Zhang, an NYU Shanghai junior studying in New York this semester and Qing’s business partner, said he’s never worked alongside someone quite like her.

“Everything she does is organized to a science,” Zhang said in an email to WSN. “Having someone like her around makes me think I need to organize my daily life as well.”

Qing and Zhang met at a train station while she was studying at NYU Shanghai during summer 2017. After realizing they both had similar life experiences and motivations, the idea for their startup, Crema, came to life.

“We wanted a name that conveys a positive

JORENE HE | WSN

JORENE HE | WSN

Gallatin senior Ma Qing listens to her business partner, Milton Zhang, and offers new ideas. As the leader of her business team, Qing is more than willing to listen to her partners’ ideas about the development of their food app, Crema.

and upbeat feeling to match what our app does,” Qing said. “[Crema] reminds people of ‘cream’ and conveys that sweet feeling.”

Crema is a food app that strives to achieve everything its predecessors have and more. A mix of Instagram, Yelp and blogging, Crema aims to provide a space for food lovers to share their stories through an interactive platform as well as access to possible advertising partnerships.

“Our mission is to allow everyone around us to become ‘influencers,’” Zhang said. “We want to allow people to share their life experiences through food.”

Qing’s journey to the creation of Crema was partly inspired by her last food venture.

In 2017, she and a team of four other students were semifinalists in the Stern School of Business’ annual $300K Entrepreneurship Challenge, in which they submitted the idea for Foodture, a food ordering platform that incentivizes consumers to interact with people from different cultures by offering discounts to cultural restaurants.

Food, according to Qing, is something everyone can enjoy and is a great way to form close relationships with people.

“I always bring my culture to whichever company I go to,” Qing said. “Cultural exchange is so important in the modern world, and one of the ways we can do that is through food.”

Gallatin alumna Momachi Pabrai, who previously served as the Gallatin Business Society president and is a close friend of Qing’s, said she’s never seen someone work as hard as Qing does.

“When she has her eyes set on something, she’s gonna make it happen no matter what,” Pabrai said. “She puts her whole heart into her work.”

Qing credits most of her accomplishments to her education in the United States. Born in Shanghai, she began studying in the U.S. at age 12 through student exchange programs. Her time abroad has encouraged her to become interested in different cultures and attempt to understand them.

Although Qing is constantly coming and going, traveling around the world for both work and school, home is with her host family in San Francisco, whom she met three years into her student exchange program and spent most of her teenage years with.

“Family is important to me,” Qing said with a smile, glad that three of her American sisters are currently in New York City for work. “We always try to make time for each other.”

She considers her support system of Ma Qing keeps a lively and creative dynamic in her business meetings. Her energy and passion for Crema is contagious in her start-up meeting.

friends one of the most important factors of her success. Nicholas Capsimalis, a sophomore at UC Santa Barbara and one of Qing’s oldest friends, is an important part of that system.

“She has an endless tenacity, and I really do mean endless,” Capsimalis said over the phone. “She’s incredibly ambitious — sometimes to a psychotic degree. She’s had an enormous impact on my life, and I’m a much better person for it.”

Qing’s friendships have taught her to always surround herself with people who motivate her. With every single one of her entrepreneurial ventures, she’s considered teamwork the most important aspect. A few weeks ago, Qing and her partners finalized plans for Crema’s launch past 2 a.m., something which she said occurs more often than expected.

“Every idea changes — from beginning to end. But your team doesn’t,” Qing said.

“Without people who are willing to sacrifice their time and who are as dedicated as you are, it’s hard for any product to launch.”

In the future, Qing aspires to motivate others like her by helping change education in China.

Her U.S. education, Qing said, is what makes her different from other young Chinese entrepreneurs. Her friends back in Shanghai are also creative and innovative, but according to Qing, their ideas get shot down more often than not by the current education system.

Qing hopes to change this by one day starting a school in China that will promote individuality.

“I want to help Chinese students follow their passions,” Qing said. “To show them they don’t have to be the careers their parents expect of them. They should be doing what they love to do.”

Although ambitious, Qing does not doubt her ideas or what she desires to achieve.

“The belief that I can make things happen helps motivate me,” Qing said. “I want to make things happen and I want to do them now.”

Qing reiterates that all of her accomplishments and future goals are part of a process.

Failure, she said, is a part of any business venture, and should be expected.

“Challenges are always going to come to you,” she said. “But if you try to look at these challenges and failures in a positive way, there’s only room for growth.”

Email Melanie Pineda at mpineda@nyunews.com.

Ma Qing

Restaurateur

& Innovator

15

Tom Feng

Champion

16

& Model

The Soft-Spoken Olympian W

By BELA KIRPALANI Deputy Managing Editor

hatever you do, don’t challenge Tom Feng at table tennis. Trust me.

Under the dimmed lights of Spin New York, a table tennis bar in Gramercy Park, Feng casually whipped a ball across the table, using a miniature paddle, not even glancing down as he served it to me. Effortless swag.

He remained remarkably calm the entire time. But when you’ve been to the Olympics, I guess a little game of ping pong against a nobody in a bar doesn’t really faze you.

Later, as lo-fi beats blared in the background and balls flew in every direction, the 22-year-old floated effortlessly through the crowd of drunk corporate employees at Spin, where he works with various patrons, organizing games and managing private events. At 6 feet 1 inch tall, it’s easy to pick him out in his gray sweater embroidered with the Olympic rings on the chest.

Clipboard in tow, he tallies scores, chats with clients and watches on, slightly amused, as the amateurs struggle to keep a rally going.

As the SPS junior stood calmly beside me, a man approached and joked, “I played this guy earlier,” gesturing to Feng. “He beat me, but I was holding back.” As the man chuckled and walked away, Feng flashed me a wry smile.

“That’s what they always say,” he said.

Feng — who has also worked as a model — seems to revel in the spotlight. At first, he politely obliges whenever someone wants to challenge him, before gradually turning up his game and pulling out some neat party tricks. He hit the ball between his legs, generated wicked topspin on some strokes and even eventually pulled out his iPhone from his pocket and used it as a paddle, sparking “oohs” and “ahhs” from onlookers and flustering his bewildered opponents. After the fun is over, though, Feng always shakes the hand of his opponent before fading back into the background — well, as much as someone at his height can fade away.

From an early age, Feng’s dream was to make it to the Olympics. In the run-up to the U.S. Olympic qualification, Feng trained six days a week, eight hours a day, broken down into three sessions per day. Even on his day off, he would still get in a light workout. The countless years spent practicing, day after day, hour after hour, hitting ball after ball until he was past the point of exhaustion were not for naught. In fact, to Feng, they were just par for the course.

“If I didn’t play in the Olympics, I would think that my 15 years of playing was a waste,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you became a national champion or something. That happens every year. The Olympics happen every four years, and in four years, things [can] change so much.”

But before the Olympics, before the Nation-

al Championships, before he left China for the United States, Feng got his beginnings in table tennis on an old table in his dad’s office. When he was just six years old — about the height of a ping-pong table — he would tag along to work with his dad, Jinhai Feng, who would serve him the ball, only to have it bounce off his little head.

The six-year-old was hooked.

“At first it was just a hobby, but then I got good,” Feng said. “And when you get good, you want to be better.”

A shy boy, Feng grew up an only child, and as a result, became very close to his parents, whom he considers his biggest supporters. When he was a young and upcoming player, they would take road trips together to different tournaments across the United States. Feng shuttled back and forth from China, a difficult experience for any child — constantly jetting off to a foreign land just when he was making friends and settling in at home.

The U.S. wasn’t always a kind place to Feng — when he was 8 years old, a group of parents from Dallas started a petition to prevent him from competing against their children because he was not a U.S. citizen, nor did he attend school in the country.

After becoming a U.S. citizen when he turned 18 in February 2015, he was eligible to compete in the U.S. Nationals competition in Las Vegas.

He showed out, winning the under-21 men’s singles, adult men’s singles, men’s doubles and mixed doubles titles.

“I stopped playing in tournaments because of that petition for six or seven years,” he said.

“That time was really hard for me. I thought about quitting, but I didn’t quit. And then when I won my first U.S. Nationals [in 2015], it was kind of like a revenge thing for me.”

After the tournament, he became the number-one ranked U.S. men’s player, and competed in the North American Olympic Qualification tournament in April 2016.

Feng picked up his paddle and stepped up to the table. The pressure was immense. His lifelong dream was on the line. Then, on the first day of competition, Feng lost.

His confidence was shot — it felt like someone poked a needle into a balloon, and his hope was leaking out. After all, he was only 19 years old. That night, Feng couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned, stressed about his future in the tournament, but also giddy at the prospect of fulfilling his dream of qualifying for the Olympics.

“It’s hard to describe the feeling,” he said. “I was half-sleeping and also dreaming about possibly qualifying.”

Feng knew there was no point thinking about the loss and woke up the next day fully charged, raring to go. With only one objective in his mind and his parents looking on, he swiftly defeated his next three opponents to help the U.S. win

JULIA MCNEILL | WSN

JULIA MCNEILL | WSN

Former table tennis Olympian and SPS junior Tom Feng serves to one of his many futile challengers at Spin New York, the table tennis bar where he works. Beyond participating in the 2016 Olympics, Feng was the top-ranked U.S. men’s player, played professionally in Austria and led NYU to its first national championship in 2018.

the North American Olympic Qualification, sealing his spot at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

He launched his paddle into the air, looked up to the sky with tears in his eyes and leaped over the barrier to embrace his parents.

It was over. His dream was complete.

The six-year-old who first fell in love with table tennis when he could barely see over the table now towers over his parents, but he never outgrew his dedication. Thirteen years of training, pain and an everlasting hope had led up to this moment.

“That was my proudest moment of Tom,” his dad said.

A few months later, Feng made his way to Brazil for the Olympics. On the journey over, he was surprisingly relaxed, even managing to fall asleep on the plane.

However, once he attended the opening ceremony, he was in awe of the immense athletic prowess that surrounded him.

Feng was suddenly face-to-face with icons he had grown up watching and hearing about.

“Michael Phelps, Kevin Durant, Simone Biles,” he said, just to name a few.

Through it all, Feng remained steadfast, never wavering because he knew how much his success would mean to his parents who had sacrificed everything for him.

“I could see how proud they were in the [Olympic] village,” he said. “They smiled like never before.”

Olympian, U.S. Nationals champion, former top-ranked ranked U.S. men’s player, runway model at New York’s and China’s Fashion Weeks — Feng’s list of accomplishments goes on. But as I sat across from him at an East Village coffee shop, he talked to me about how he spends his free time; playing “League of Legends,” working out at the gym, watching movies in his Long Island City apartment and spending time with his girlfriend.

‘He’s just like us,’ I thought.

But he is not just like us.

During his sophomore spring semester, Feng began to play table tennis professionally while simultaneously attending NYU. He signed with an Austrian Club, TTC Wiener Neustadt, to play in the Austrian Division I League. During this time, Feng balancedschool, professional ta-

Feng goes over a tournament draw with two patrons at Spin.

His training is not as intense as in the past, but leading up to his Olympic qualification Feng practiced nearly 50 hours a week.

ble tennis, NYU’s table tennis team and the U.S. team in international competitions.

“Basically, after recitation on Fridays, I would go to JFK [John F. Kennedy International Airport], fly 16 hours, land in Austria and then take a train to Vienna to go and play,” he said. “Then the next week, I [would] come back from Sweden at midnight, take an Uber from JFK to my apartment and then pull an all-nighter to study for my economics final.”

Talk about an exhausting way of life. Suddenly turning serious, Feng spoke with a sense of clarity and maturity.

“If you don’t understand yourself or what you want, you won’t succeed,” he said.

Feng led NYU’s table tennis team to its first College Table Tennis National Championship in August 2018, motivating his teammates, who subsequently improved thanks to his commanding presence. Feng’s passion for the game runs deep — when he plays a match, his inner child comes out to play as well.

“I remember after the last point in [the] championship, he threw his paddle [up] and jumped up and down together with us,” NYU Table Tennis Head Coach Yan Gao said. “He was so excited. I’ve never seen him like that.”

Despite experiencing triumphs on the world stage and attaining international recognition, Feng still finds comfort in being a part of NYU’s table tennis team.

“Representing NYU feels different,” he explained. “You belong to a team here, and when I compete outside [of NYU] I’m always either representing the U.S. or myself.”

Looking back on his career, filled with exhausting 10-hour days of training, flying all over the world and time spent away from his friends and family, Feng wouldn’t change a thing.

Before we went our separate ways, I asked Feng what lies ahead for him. He took a moment to respond, breathing in the frigid February air.

“After you’ve just fulfilled one of your dreams, it’s hard to figure out what’s next.”

For now, Feng hopes to take a breath and be a normal college kid for once. But this college kid just won NYU the Northeast Regionals — for the second straight year.

Email Bela Kirpalani at bkirpalani@nyunews.com.

17

Never Himself

By PAMELA JEW Under the Arch Managing Editor

M

atthew Friend spends a majority of his day not in his own voice. You might sing in the shower. Well, Friend talks as Rami Malek, Timothee Chalamet, Homer Simpson and a couple hundred more. He can sing, too, but in the voice of Michael Bublé. Cue the Michael Bublé taking a shower impression.

A stranger neither to city life nor the comedy scene, the Chicago native only transferred to NYU last spring from Tufts University in Massachusetts, where he studied Political Science and Theater. Friend decided to transfer after realizing he could further his comedy career in New York City. As a Gallatin junior, his concentration focuses on political satire, comedy, acting and entertainment business, but he does most of his impression training outside of the classroom.

Currently, he’s a production intern at “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and performs multiple times a month at local comedy clubs. (He books them all himself; he says one day he’ll have “people.”) But his end goal, as of now, is being a repertory player on “Saturday Night Live.”

His impressions emulate his admiration. If comedy is Friend’s religion, then “Saturday Night Live” is the service. (His Instagram handle, @matturdaynightlive, riffs on the show’s title.) Every Saturday night, if Friend isn’t going out with friends, he’s in his room watching “SNL” — his version of studying — and talking to himself in a mirror.

No matter what stage he’s in while perfecting an impression, he’ll post it to his Twitter, YouTube channel or Instagram. His Instagram page is filled with a series of freeze-frame images of Friend mid-impression.

When you click on one, for example, Roger Federer, Bernie Sanders or Sebastian Maniscalco will speak but with the face of Friend. His videos have even caught the attention of Armie Hammer on Twitter and Bobby Moynihan, who saw Friend outside the “SNL” stage door and recognized him.

“It was so cool,” Friend beamed. “[Moynihan] was like, ‘You’re that kid from Twitter, right?’”

To date, he has about 250 impressions he can do, which he tracks with a list on his phone, from Ronald Reagan to Coach Steve from “Big Mouth.” He even does impressions of impressions, specifically of celebrities playing President Donald Trump — Alec Baldwin, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon.

“I just watch these people a lot. I just spend an inordinate amount of time just talking like them,” Friend said. “It’s an obsessive thing. You can’t just make someone have that quality. I just started doing it when I was 4. Like that guy, I think he sounds funny. I want to talk like that guy.”

When Friend was 4 years old, his parents were having a party, but, as always, Friend’s behavior got out of hand. His father sent him into the basement where he found the portal to his impression addiction — Austin Powers. The DVD was sitting out on a bookshelf; attracted to the psychedelic cover, Friend put it on the TV and the rest is history.

“I would go around to my parents’ friends and I would go up to random family members and say, ‘Do I make you randy?’” he said, impersonating Powers. “I had no idea what it meant.”

As a kid, Friend had featured performances at all of his family gatherings. For his grandparents, he’d do Johnny Cash or Ed Sullivan, whom he considers one of his comedic inspirations. At his high school talent show, he impersonated the principal, who sat in the back of the auditorium and later patted him on the back for what Friend recalls as “a spot-on performance.” At NYU, he was recently the featured performer for “Views from NYU,” a semesterly live-studio audience talk show.

The second time we met, I challenged him to not do any impressions. He broke in less than five minutes. He shuffled through seven — Barack Obama, Brett Kavanaugh, David Beckham, Shawn Mendes, Bradley Cooper, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ricky Gervais — before realizing he had broken the rules. In his stand-up routines and even when we talked, he de-

18

faults to Stewie from “Family Guy.” Maybe he hasn’t learned a better transition, or maybe it’s just easier to have someone else do it for him — I’m still not sure.

Even when Friend does talk in his own voice, it sounds like he’s doing a bit. Prepubescent boys envy his low register. Hell, full-grown men might, too. It just makes his impressions all the more jarring as he seamlessly phases in and out. But what really alarms audiences is his Barack Obama impression — or rather his three Barack Obama impressions.

I watched and heard a packed audience at Gotham Comedy Club in Chelsea knock back in their chairs, gasping, as Friend shuffled through his Obama im-

I spent most of our interviews trying to crack what is seemingly the scratch-free life of Matthew Friend.

I grew up in the suburbs of Georgia, taking dance classes at a local studio. He grew up in Lincoln Park, taking acting classes at Second City as a kid. I have one parent, no siblings. He has what he calls “the most supportive family you could have.” Our upbringings were starkly different, and I couldn’t contextualize his luck thus far. I asked him how life might be different if Second City weren’t mere steps away. He quipped back, “How can I imagine a hypothetical life I was never subject to living?”

He calls his life progression so far pure luck. The

ALANA BEYER | WSN

Gallatin junior Matthew Friend performs his Alec Baldwin as President Donald Trump impression at Gotham Comedy Club in Chelsea. When he’s out of classes or off from his internship at “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” he often performs late night stand-up and impressions at clubs around New York City.

pressions — Obama giving a speech, Obama speaking to children and Obama hanging out with the boys.

His set was surrounded by other comedians, whose material focused on their dry dating lives, casual interactions with women and the joys of sex without a condom. The audience was about half women and met those jokes with silence and diverted eyes.

Later, I told him his jokes and impressions brought real humor among other borderline #MeToo acts.

He agreed, rolling his eyes in disgust, “Those guys are just lonely, out-of-college dudes without real jokes.”

Friend says he keeps his set pretty clean unless the impression calls for it. (He saves the dirty stuff for his friends and family.) Only recently has Friend started writing his own jokes, in addition to his impressions — he’s a performer over anything else.

But as any performer can tell you, making it in show business isn’t easy stuff. I had my suspicions; Friend had his confidence.

“Do you have any doubts about making it in comedy?”

“No. No, I’m 20. Why would I?” As someone older than Friend by a few months, I had all the reason in the world to have doubts at 20.

But I’m not a 6-foot-4-inch white guy — yes, I had to go there — from Chicago proper with a nuclear family, each member laden with successes of their own: his dad works in investment management, his mom owns an Instagram-famous cookie business, his brother endures long hours at J.P. Morgan and his sister edits for Food & Wine magazine.

Friend doing one of his three Barack Obama impressions to an audience at Gotham Comedy Club. He says that his Obama impression surprises people the most, and it’s one of the impressions in his expansive reportoire he has mastered.

worst time in his life? When he had a severe gluten allergy at 9 years old. But after flying out to an allergen specialist at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California every two weeks with both his parents to build up his gluten tolerance, his allergy diminished. Now, he can eat a whole pizza with no problem, and his mom can safely bring home her company’s cookies.

When I questioned him about his personal life, I was met with some resistance. “What does that have to do with the profile?” In a rare moment of our conversation, I explained what a profile is and why I was asking personal questions — without him quickly cutting in — as he furrowed his brows. I told him he seemed closed off — he didn’t want to tell me what

he did the Saturday night before when I asked. (He watched “SNL.”) His 15-minute set told me more about him than the few times we met one-on-one. But he assured me that he was as “open as any guy could be.”

So I cut to the question hanging in the back of my head. “Are you, like other comedians, using comedy to cope with something greater?”

“I’m not using comedy to cope with anything,” he asserted. “That’s not to say it doesn’t help others in that way.”

I asked about his much-removed boss Jimmy Fallon’s rumored alcoholism, which Fallon himself has denied. Friend lowered his voice, made the conversation covert amid a busy coffee shop and gave me the NDA spiel from NBC. He couldn’t talk too much about the job and nothing about its host. But Friend didn’t want to leave me with my assumptions.

He told me to not buy into the “fake news” he mocked in Alec Baldwin’s Trump impression. I wondered if this profile could perpetuate a less libation-ridden series of assumptions as well.

My bare-bones knowledge of comedy — my preferred genre is YouTube comedy — rivaled his understanding of what a fleshed out profile is. During our first meeting, I politely pretended to know every comedian he named. I even faked a laugh at his “House of Cards” Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) impression — something Friend even says isn’t as funny post-scandal.

He taught me about comedy and impressions — knowledge he takes great pride in. If I didn’t know the comedian, he’d slip into their voice and seat me front row. Every time I met him, I also met 20 or so other people that came out of his mouth.

If you don’t know Friend on a personal level, it’s hard to consume more than just a Netflix comedy special’s worth of him. He’s joke after joke after joke.

At this issue’s photo shoot, he made us all laugh for the mere 40 minutes he was there. We subsequently let out an exhausted breath as the door shut behind him.

He makes himself the center of attention and tries to draw your mind from any anxieties you might have at the moment. That’s his whole purpose in this. “[Comedy] is a way of helping others to relieve stress and put a smile on someone’s face which I do think makes a difference in such a tumultuous world and environment that we live in,” Friend said. “There are immense benefits to being able to make someone laugh and ease people’s anxieties.”

His eyes are set on “SNL,” which has caught heat recently for some of its material — such as Pete Davidson’s impression of Lieutenant Commander Dan Crenshaw and Alec Baldwin’s famous Trump impression. I questioned the longevity of the show itself. Friend says we need comedy and mediums like “SNL.” “People notoriously laugh at portrayals of themselves,” Friend said. “Dana Carvey was famously friends with George H.W. Bush. And [Bush] invited him to the White House to do his impression of him.

If you make the argument that this impression is more mean-spirited than Alec Baldwin, then again right now the president is more mean-spirited. So no, we need shows like this. I hope to take part in it one day.”

Email Pamela Jew at pjew@nyunews.com.

ALANA BEYER | WSN

Impressionist

& ‘SNL’ Hopeful Matthew Friend

19

Lesi Hreb

Feminist

20

& Politician

The Assertive yet Humble Idealist F

By MEGHNA MAHARISHI News Editor

or the final round of a 2017 national Policy Case competition, Olesya “Lesi” Hreb and her team were the youngest and only all-female team. Hreb’s team designed a policy to address the education gap between men and women in India. The team was up against male graduate students from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and did not expect to win.

When judges announced the winner of the final round, the CAS senior’s team was in complete disbelief. They came in first place, beating out the other older, male-dominated teams.

For Hreb, the experience highlighted how important it is for women to speak up.

“It’s important not to have just one woman for diversity; it should be OK to have an entire team of young women,” Hreb said.

“I noticed the gender gap, but it didn’t stop me or my team in any way.

The Policy Case competition further fueled Hreb’s interest in politics and her interest in advocating for herself as a woman in politics. She sees her advocacy as something personal.

“I think a lot of times women are told ‘don’t be too aggressive’ or ‘don’t be too confident with yourself,’” Hreb said.

“Women grow up thinking these things and that translates to low representation in government. It’s important to point these [characteristics] out in yourself first.”

Hreb currently works in Queens as District 30 Office Manager for New York Assemblyman Brian Barnwell. Somewhere down the road, Hreb envisions herself running for office. *** On a chilly Wednesday morning in a Greenwich Village cafe, Hreb spoke softly yet passionately about her work at Barnwell’s office, recounting an experience when she guided a woman through the eviction process.

“I knew housing, gentrification was an issue, so seeing it firsthand definitely makes you realize that you’re having an impact,” Hreb said.

At a women’s political action conference with only a dozen attendees, Hreb arrived late, but did not shy from discussing the lack of female representation in politics. While most people remained silent at the conference, Hreb spoke up about her intentions to potentially run for office in the future.

She served as a mentor to first-year attendees and in a few short hours, befriended nearly everyone at the conference — with whom she now regularly keeps in touch. *** Dressed in a black blazer and gray turtleneck, Hreb looked ready to tackle her day of classes and sandwich making for the homeless at the Saint Sebastian Parish in Queens.

This is one of Barnwell’s monthly initiatives to encourage community engagement among his staff.

Since the predicted forecast was three inches of snow, Hreb brought along a large beige bag filled with boots and a heavy jacket in the event that she would need to shovel the streets in the district. Whenever it snows, she, along with other staffers at Barnwell’s office, shovel snow to prevent low-income and elderly residents from facing fines for snowy sidewalks.

Ilaria Carbone, one of Hreb’s co-workers at Barnwell’s office, commented on how Hreb always shows up to shovel snow at night despite her long commute. “[It] shows not only how dedicated she is to the job, but also how much she cares about the citizens she works for,” Carbone said.

Hreb partly attributes her assertive drive to her mother. When Hreb was a child, Hreb’s parents separated, and during this time, she says she became more vocal. At Ukrainian school, whenever a teacher would order the class to do a certain task she did not want to do, she would be quick to voice her thoughts.

“I remember going to protests, I grew up in a very patriotic family,” Hreb said. “It’s very much a big part of my identity.”

As a child, Hreb grew up immersed in Ukrainian culture. She spoke Ukrainian at home, traveled between New Jersey and Ukraine to spend time with her grandmother, participated in Ukrainian summer camps and was even runner-up in the 2018

JULIA MCNEILL | WSN

Hreb takes notes during a visit from Council member Helen Rosenthal at IGNITE’s session. She is eager to learn and derives knowledge from all of her personal experiences, such as working for Assemblyman Brian Barnwell.

When she spoke to me, she stopped herself every few minutes and apologized for bragging about how she managed to move up the ranks in Barnwell’s office.

She’s soft-spoken, yet still manages to assert herself and make sure that her voice is heard — something that’s hard to do in a field where women are highly scrutinized.

Miss Ukrainian NJ pageant.

When telling me about the pageant, she chuckled, her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. The pageant was a charity event to aid wounded soldiers in Ukraine. She avoided speaking too much about it, simply replying “My mom made me do it.”

Hreb partly attributes her desire to ad-

vocate for herself and for others to her Ukrainian background. Growing up in a patriotic Ukrainian family, Hreb was always outspoken on issues plaguing Ukraine and participated in rallies in support of the country.

In 2014, Hreb attended a rally outside of the Ukrainian embassy in New York City.

The rally was in support of the country’s

case competitions, which gave her a glimpse into designing policies that could have a real impact.

After her 2017 Policy Case competition victory, Hreb was a summer intern at DOROT — a nonprofit organization that aids senior citizens. DOROT exposed her to a slew of issues senior citizens deal with regularly, such as not having enough mon-

JULIA MCNEILL | WSN

CAS senior Lesi Hreb talks to another attendee at IGNITE, a national movement dedicated to empowering women and engaging female college students in politics. Hreb’s friendly demeanor stands out to everyone who works and interacts with her.

revolution to overthrow President Viktor Yanukovych, who some felt favored Russia’s influence in Ukraine’s affairs. Hreb and hundreds of other protestors marched from the embassy on 49th Street to Times Square.

Hreb never questioned attending the rally; to her it felt more like an obligation.

As she spoke, Hreb showed me her necklace that she wears almost every day.

The necklace has the golden pendant of a “tryzub,” which is Ukrainian for trident.

The tryzub, typically superimposed on a blue shield, represents the country’s coat of arms. *** Despite being raised in a politically active family, Hreb did not always have a personal interest in politics. Initially, she was keen on photojournalism. In high school, Hreb placed fifth in a national photography competition and had some of her photos published in a magazine.

Hreb studied in Paris her first year at NYU as part of the Liberal Studies Core program.

Two months into her first semester at NYU Paris, the Paris attacks happened, killing 130 and injuring 413. “[My interest in photography] faded out, especially in Paris,” Hreb said. “When you’re exposed to the world and issues, and you’re going through more concrete life experiences, you start thinking of your place in the world and how you can have the greatest impact.”

Before the frenzy surrounding the attacks, she befriended CAS senior Mahathi Vemireddy. The two met while they were stuck in an elevator and after the Paris attacks, they visited vigils in the city. Vemireddy remarked how caring Hreb was during that tumultuous time.

“She was very kind and thoughtful during that time — as she always is,” Vemireddy said. “We definitely checked in with each other often then.”

The attacks led Hreb to search for something more meaningful. Once she arrived in New York City, she participated in policy

ey for groceries or medications. Seeing how these problems manifest made Hreb think that governments needed to do more to serve vulnerable individuals.

“Our government can’t provide basic resources, so nonprofits have to step in and do the job, but they are often underfunded, understaffed,” Hreb said. “It made me open my eyes and I thought, ‘Wow there needs to be a big policy change.’”

In order to have an impact on policy, Hreb initially joined Barnwell’s staff as a Public Affairs Fellow, but then quickly moved up the ranks to become a District Office Manager. Currently, Hreb is one of two undergraduate students that work in Barnwell’s office.

As a Public Affairs Fellow, Hreb specifically worked on policies pertaining to senior citizens, inspired by her work at DOROT. Organizing events, speaking on behalf of the office and working on constituent cases — problems which people raise that the district tries to fix — are not normally jobs that interns get to do.

Even as an intern, Hreb had the opportunity to work on legislation. One of the initiatives she worked on included giving senior citizens larger tax breaks because of issues such as gentrification and rising property taxes. After Hreb made countless calls to other Assembly members, the bill got over 20 co-sponsors.

“It was definitely an opportunity that most offices don’t give [you], especially in politics,” Hreb said.

As for the future, Hreb speaks with an air of uncertainty on what exactly she will do after she graduates this spring. All she knows is that whatever it is, it will involve helping people in any way possible.

“For me, it’s very important to interact with people as a person and careerwise,” Hreb said. “I like to talk to people, I like to figure out why they’re having issues whether it’s on an external level such as having a pothole and offering to fix it.”

Email Meghna Maharishi at mmaharishi@nyunews.com

21

Sparking Change in Film V

By VICTOR PORCELLI News Editor

alentina Guzman takes a step onto the cold tile floor of her college’s fluorescent-lit hallway. Exiting the lecture hall where her final exam is taking place, the graduate student doesn’t take a moment to pause. The squeaking of her Reebok sneakers echoes through the halls as she walks toward her husband, who sits in a wire-frame chair holding their newborn baby while her toddler José sits on the floor and colors. Val takes baby Nina in her arms, breastfeeds her and walks back down the long hallway and into the lecture hall — her exam isn’t finished.

“Cut!” Natalia Bell says from behind the camera, bringing an end to the scene. The senior in NYU’s Stern-Tisch five-year B.S./ B.F.A. Dual Degree program walks through a sea of production assistants to give notes to the lead, Nathalie Carvalho, who plays Val in Bell’s short film.

Slightly less than 20 people crowd the hallway of Lehman College in the Bronx. The set seems to be controlled chaos — production assistants move ladders and set up the scene, the costume designer fixes Carvalho’s scarf and hands her a prop coffee cup and the crew fiddles with the positioning of the camera. In the middle of it all, Bell glides from person to person with a smile on her face.

Speaking too quietly for me to catch her conversations, actors nod as she gives direction and smile as she speaks. Turning to a production assistant, she points with both hands, describing the way she envisioned this particular scene.

This is how a typical production day goes for Bell’s film, “Pasos de Valor,” which translates to “Steps of Valor.” The short film follows a pregnant Mexican-American woman whose professor won’t change her final exam date despite it coinciding with the due date of her child. The events of the film are based on Bell’s mom’s experience in the ’90s — three days after Bell was born, her mom took her four-hour organizational management exam for her MBA at the University of Texas at Brownsville, taking breaks to nurse her.

Telling her mother’s story is just Bell’s latest project that tackles female-driven narratives that break stereotypes perpetuated by the U.S. film industry. “[Women have] had very traditional depictions,” Bell said. “Women tend to fit in niches, or they get character titles that are just ‘Mom.’ And you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, mom.’ But like, we all have a mom, and I bet you your mom’s really different from my mom.”

Bell achieves in her own life what she hopes to in her work: shattering stereotypes.

Although quiet, she does not come off as weak. Instead, her soft-spokenness adds a certain edge to her voice which, combined with surety of tone, commands respect.

A Mexican-American woman, Bell is entering a field dominated by white men — but she’s not intimidated by this. In fact, Bell told me it gives her an edge.

“It makes my work stronger because I think it’ll feel more of me,” Bell said. “I’m not the kind of person who barks, I’m not someone who stomps around and I’m not someone who wants to take away space from

22

other people. Those things just don’t align with my values or who I am as a person.”

Because of these values, Bell has fostered strong relationships with her actors and crew.

Bell treats them with nothing but respect, which makes them go the extra mile for her.

Without knowing the time or date, one of her actors offered to take part in any pick-up shots if she needs to re-shoot any of the scenes for her film.

“They know I’m not going to take it if I don’t need it,” Bell said. “I know they’re giving me a lot and I recognize and appreciate that.”

The source of Bell’s strength of character is her mother, Melinda Bell, a breast cancer

“I want to tell stories that spark the imagination, that take us somewhere that we haven’t [been] or are showing us a different depiction of people that we don’t normally get to see,” Bell said.

For her, a spark should shed light on an image you haven’t seen before. Using imagination as a tool, Bell wants her films to inform people of the complex communities that can often be chalked up to stereotypes, such as women or Latinx people.

“I think when we can understand or see women’s experiences more authentically, then we can understand more of the women in our lives,” Bell said.

But more than that, Bell wants people to

ALANA BEYER | WSN

Tisch and Stern fifth-year Natalia Bell directs a production assistant on her set. Bell prioritized having a diverse cast and crew when first starting to work on the short, “Pasos de Valor.”

survivor who at one point was the only female wealth manager at a big brokerage house in small-town Texas.

Bell decided to write her mother’s story after struggling with the funding logistics for her original thesis film idea — an exploration into citrus greening in southern Texas. Bell usually goes to her mother for advice while writing her scripts, but for this one, she surprised her mom with a final copy instead.

“If you could have the two emotions of being humbled and proud at the same time, I think those were my immediate sentiments,” her mom said.

I met Bell’s mom on set, as she had come to New York from Bell’s hometown of Richmond, Virginia, in order to provide her daughter with any help she needed. From snack manager to story consultant to pizza orderer, her mom was constantly busy. Melinda Bell spoke with a similar calm confidence as her daughter, albeit slightly more assertively.

She smiled with pride as she described Bell.

“I think she’s always been a storyteller,” Melinda said. “So, whatever medium you choose to express that — whether as a child you start to write stories, as a teenager you pick up a camera — it’s all about having a story to tell.” *** When Bell talks about the effect she hopes her stories have, she says she is looking to create sparks.

Bell fixes the costume of actress Nathalie Carvalho, who plays the protagonist Val in her latest short film “Pasos de Valor.” Bell said she has a strong relationship with her lead actors due to their mutual respect.

feel that her work acknowledges their identities. For her, the CW show “Jane the Virgin” did just that.

“I think that sparked the imagination for me,” Bell said. “I felt so seen, and I think that’s so powerful, to feel seen — and to feel like people like yourself are not being made fun of or not the joke or not shorthand, which I think often happens with Latinx characters.”

When Bell had her own photography business in high school, she focused on portraiture of young women. However, after she worked as an intern at the marketing company West Cary Group, helped with the research and launch of MeetNYU and interned at the offices of filmmaker Martin Scorsese and Chicken & Egg Pictures, she found herself somewhere that made her question how she had been doing things — the Weinstein Company.

Bell started there as a finance intern in 2017, but she was soon hired by co-founder Bob Weinstein himself to work as a digital

strategy consultant with the head of publicity. While working on the advertisement campaign for the movie “Polaroid,” she reported directly to Bob. She had no interaction with Harvey Weinstein, but she was working for his company when the New York Times article with allegations of sexual harassment against the producer broke.

“That was devastating,” Bell said. “It was so personally angering and upsetting to read all these stories and feel connected to this company.”

But Bell had signed a contract and was working on a big project for a top production company. She decided to stay.

Deciding to stay did not mean she chose to ignore the situation. Instead, Bell says it was a turning point in her life and career.

“It sparked something in me where I don’t just want to tell women stories — I need a whole new process,” Bell said. “I want to be in a space where there are mostly women working. I want to make sure that the process that I’m working with, its core values are about respect and community and safety.”

It’s this change of priorities that led Bell to work part-time at both Hello Sunshine and Annapurna Pictures in summer 2018.

Hello Sunshine, founded by actress and leader in the Time’s Up movement Reese Witherspoon, is dedicated to telling female-driven stories. Annapurna Pictures is one of the first and only motion picture companies founded and owned by a woman, Megan Ellison. *** I see the result of Bell’s spark in her diverse, majority-women cast and crew.

Her producer and friend, fourth-year and fellow Stern-Tisch B.S./B.F.A. candidate Sophia Shi, tells me this isn’t by chance.

“When I came on board, one of the first things that Bell said to me was that she wanted to make the process of making this film have the same intention and integrity as what we’re showing on screen,” Shi said.

Despite the potential disadvantages attached to being a woman of color entering the film industry, Bell feels sure of her success. She has worked hard to get into NYU, to create multiple short films, to earn the opportunity to work on professional sets — oh, and to hand the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay to NYU alumnus Spike Lee this year.

She is prepared to leverage her identity as a Mexican-American woman to make her mark on the film industry.

“At the moment, I feel excited,” Bell said.

“I feel confident that what I have to offer is a special voice and [when it comes to] the stories I want to tell, I know the audience who needs to hear them — and who wants to hear them.”

Email Victor Porcelli at vporcelli@nyunews.com.

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