3-29-16

table of contents holly stavarski mike lecak myra carbonell anish kumar cynthia bradley-king stanley marks carlino giampolo jessica burkman lora & claire matway lori campbell hibiki sakai charlotte goldbach

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alex austin 24 derek griesbach 25 justin thakar 26 apoorva kandakatla 28 Andrew ng online sarah lane online kilian liptrot online iris matijevic online greg weston online lola adebiyi online Grant Jacoby online video Francisco laguna correa online video

March 29, 2016

letter from the editor One of the best things about this job is that every day we get to meet all sorts of people, driven by all sorts of passions, fighting their own battles and relishing in their own triumphs. So we have to begrudgingly admit — even in the midst of selfie sticks and reality television — maybe humanity isn’t doomed after all.

Through our second-ever edition of silhouettes, we’re offering glimpses into the lives of 26 students, faculty, staff and community members. Give it a read, and maybe you’ll decide that we’re right.

Danielle Fox Editor-in-Chief

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March 29, 2016

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PORN, PALLBEARERS PUNCHLINES

Photos by Nikki Moriello

&

From wiping down 'viewing booths' in a porn shop, to interning at a morgue, to practicing stand-up comedy, Holly Stavarski has had some odd jobs. No joke.

EMILY BRINDLEY | STAFF WRITER

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t started out as a joke.

Holly Stavarski and a friend drove by the AdultMart on McKnight Road and saw they were hiring. They laughed about how funny it would be to work there — and then Stavarski applied, got hired and began slinging sex toys.

From January to September 2015, Stavarski often worked more than 40 hours a week at AdultMart, mostly between midnight and 8 a.m.

Sometimes, the work was slow. Sometimes, the work was sticky — one of Stavarski’s duties was to wipe down the private video viewing booths at the back of the store.

“That’s when it stopped getting funny,” Stavarski said. “[But] it was still kind of funny because you would find a lot of interesting things.

You’d find toys and vegetables and cheese — I found a lot of ‘snacks.’”

When the job at AdultMart took strange turns, Stavarski just laughed and shared the stories with her friends — reigning as “the queen of Snapchat” while working at AdultMart.

Stavarski’s sense of humor has led her to and through several jobs, such as her job at AdultMart, but also a summer internship in the morgue of the Allegheny County Medical Examiner. Despite the difference in appearances, comedy was the common thread between the two jobs, as it has been for most of Stavarski’s life.

In middle school, Stavarski would come home from school and watch the Comedy Central stand-up specials. Older, but not old enough, one of her friends would take her to comedy shows in high school, usually at bars or clubs where she was too young to perform.

Last summer, Stavarski did her first stand-up routine in her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

“Growing up, there were just a lot of things you kind of face on your own, and comedy has been a really good defense mechanism and a way for me to cope with some of the issues — like bullying and parents’ divorce and moving,” Stavarski said.

In college, she became the co-editor in chief for The Pittiful News in the fall of 2015, where she writes about the smells around Pitt’s campus and erotic Criss Angel fanfiction. She started writing for Pitt

she’d had enough.

It wasn’t the demeaning tasks or the low pay that pushed her out. What bothered her the most was the patriarchal, male-centric atmosphere within the porn industry in general.

One of the most common themes in the types of porn customers would view and buy, Stavarski said, was implications of rape.

“It’s such a bad culture. There’s also a lot of stuff that would insinuate manipulation and rape — you can only see that so much,” Stavarski said. “I think it definitely plays into a lot of maladaptive ideas of what women should be and how sex should be.”

In addition to normalizing rape culture, Stavarski said the porn industry has a large influence over the views of female appearances, leading to unrealistic beauty standards for both men and women.

“There’s so much the porn industry can do to not only better the views of sex but also better the views of wome n ,”

Stavarski said. “It really fails in a lot of different ways to portray realistic images of women and sex and what is OK.” Out of AdultMart, Stavarski hopes instead to pursue her interest in mortuary science. She plans on either working at the morgue or going to mortuary school — perhaps both.

Though she’s used her humor to add life to her job at the morgue, Stavarski said comedy is also about making sure other people can join in on the joke.

“I really just hope that it makes people laugh,” Stavarski said. “It’s fun for me, and I want it to be fun for everyone else too.”

For Stavarski, comedy is an integral part of her personality and her daily life, and she plans to continue doing stand-up after she leaves Pitt as a way to comment on the issues around her.

“Comedy gives everyone an outlet to make jokes about what’s happening in the world and why it’s maybe a little [messed] up — but also just finding the humor in daily life,” Stavarski said. “It’s a fun outlet for creativity. You can make so many different observations on the world in a joke.”

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There's so much the porn industry can do to not only better the views of sex but also better the views of women.

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Tonight, Pitt’s late-night talk show, when the show began in the fall of 2015, and joined the Comedy Club, Pitt’s first stand-up comedy club, when the club first formed during the spring 2016 semester.

Although her job at AdultMart taught her to laugh off graveyard shifts, Stavarski’s summer internship taught her how to laugh in the face of death.

Following an interest in mortuary science, Stavarski interned with both the forensic investigation team and the medical examiner at the Allegheny County morgue last summer, where dark humor is as mandatory as the autopsy kit.

“Having a sense of humor can really help disconnect you from the situation,” Stavarski said. “It’s really important to have it, because you can’t get emotional. Everyone in that industry has this certain sense of humor, this certain mindset, you all feed off of each other with it.”

The one thing Stavarski disliked about the internship was the smell the morgue sometimes emanated, but she has a quip about that too.

“A regular dead human body just smells like farts a little bit,” Stavarski said. “But once [the cadavers] get soupy, it’s one of the worst smells you’ll smell.”

Dead bodies and curiously placed edibles aside, some things will never be funny.

The turnover rate at AdultMart was so high that after only six months, Stavarski became the most veteran employee. After nine months, in September 2015,

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walking on: Photo by Nikki Moriello

LECAK LOOKS BACK AT PITT CAREER

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DAN SOSTEK

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There was someone that wanted to meet Mike Lecak.

The Arizona native had just competed in a game in the Pittsburgh Basketball Club ProAm, a now-defunct summer league. He had been playing so well, he claims he “could have closed his eyes, shot left-handed or kicked [the ball] in.”

So after the successful contest from the Wheeling Jesuit University guard, Lecak’s coach, Sammy “Sammy D” D’Agostino brought over an admirer from the crowd.

“I don’t know if you know who this is,” his coach said.

“This is Brandin Knight.”

Sammy D could have saved his breath.

Lecak might have been an Arizona resident, but he was born in Pittsburgh and raised by two former western Pennsylvania collegiate basketball players. He grew up worshipping the former star Pitt guard. He knew exactly who Knight was — his icon.

“My hands were shaking,” Lecak said. “I wanted to ask so many questions, but I was silent.”

Lecak listened, and heard what Knight had to say — which wasn’t much. The former point guard, now an assistant coach at Pitt, was terse.

“We like the way you play. Keep in touch,” Knight said.

Lecak couldn’t believe it.

He had played sparingly in his first season at his small Division II school. Playing at Pitt? That was a far cry, it seemed, and in the truest sense of it, out of his league.

But Lecak would do just that, spending four years at the college he rooted for as young boy, now learning, watching and, for brief moments, playing the game that he loved.

The courting process was sudden and quick. Lecak, a 6-foot3 guard, received a call from thenassistant Brian Regan, who told him to get released from his commitment to Wheeling Jesuit and head east.

Regan didn’t leave Lecak a lot of time. He already had his car packed, ready to leave for his 2012 fall semester at Wheeling.

“I had to call and make all of those adjustments really quickly,” Lecak said. “But I would never change it for the world.”

Because what that move meant for Lecak was the opportunity to walk onto a top college basketball program, the opportunity to play for an elite coach and the opportunity to have his voice heard — within certain limits.

Lecak didn’t play much in his three seasons at Pitt, totaling just 58 minutes on the court, while often serving as a human victory cigar of sorts, almost exclusively entering the game in the final minutes of huge blowouts.

That didn’t mean Lecak was committed to riding the pine every contest.

“I wanted to play,” Lecak said. “I always wanted to play.”

On his first day at Pitt, he told his coaches and teammates that much. Looking back, he said the assertion might not have been so wise for a player the team isn’t even spending a scholarship on.

“I don’t even think Coach [Jamie Dixon] was committed to me being on the team,” Lecak said. “And I’m sitting here

| SPORTS EDITOR

saying I wanted to play.”

It took a while for Lecak to get that opportunity. Due to transfer rules, he had to sit out his first season in Oakland, the 2012-2013 season. But that wasn’t an issue as Lecak, who wants to enter the coaching field, enjoys just watching basketball.

Throughout his time on the bench, Lecak has stayed focused, honing in on the game action, while scouting out and analyzing plays. Sometimes that focus has caused him to fall into a trance, frequently at the expense of his coaches.

“When my name gets called, it has to be said multiple times,” Lecak said. “Because no matter what the score is, I’m just still completely in the game.”

Playing at the Petersen Events Center meant playing in front of a notorious fan base, the Oakland Zoo. Lecak cherishes the Zoo, even if it has sometimes posited unrealistic expectations on him.

“It’s just funny every time I get out there, they’re just yelling at me to shoot it and I have like three people on me and I’m five feet away from the 3-point line,” Lecak said. “And I’m like, ‘There’s no way I can make this shot.’”

Lecak has considered taking those crazy attempts when the Zoo eggs him on — he claims he’s taken two ridiculous shots he’d like to have back. But overall, Lecak didn’t get too many shots to make or to miss at Pitt.

Every opportunity is precious, and he still remembers how nervous he was before his first successful conversion — a free throw against Niagara University.

“I remember when I got to the line, I started to take my dribbles. Because it’s such a routine, it’s muscle memory,” Lecak said. “So I went to take my three dribbles, because it’s what I’ve always done, and on the third dribble I almost dropped it.”

The jitters continued, as Lecak said his hand shook when he went up for the shot. The ball rattled around the rim, as the walk-on could only hope gravity would propel the ball through the oval.

Physics played its course, as the ball fell through the nylon netting.

Lecak looked over to the sideline, to his former hero Knight, and was met with a sense of calm.

“He just looked at me like, ‘Now you’ve got the first one out of the way, now just shoot it,’’” Lecak said.

Lecak went up with the second attempt. Nothing but net.

Lecak had to travel across the country to get those first two points, to earn his four years on a top-tier basketball program and to return to his hometown where his parents used to play the same sport.

“I’ve grown with them, and they’ve grown with me,” Lecak said. “It’s been fun.”

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Taking her time

These days, Myra Carbonell doesn’t have time in her schedule for other people’s opinions Elizabeth Lepro | Assistant Sports Editor

see a show, every restaurant that gives you free food on your birthday.

In case you want to know which restaurants do that exactly, subscribe to Carbonell’s email lists of folk music house shows and film screenings, and she’ll also link you to about 50 birthday coupons.

Carbonell adores folk music, but not with her whole heart — theater needs room there, too.

She ushers at the City Theatre in South Side, where everyone knows her name, and the New Hazlett Theater in East Allegheny to attend shows for free. She sits front row every time.

Through the Osher Institute and the auditing program at Pitt, Carbonell takes mostly film and art classes, interests first fostered by her mother. Even while Carbonell was attending the Bronx Science School, her mother insisted that her children be well-rounded.

Though Carbonell admits she wasn’t strict when it came to rules, she gifted her children with the same access to a diverse range of activities.

“From a young age, I remember visiting the roaming art cart, Calliope sing-alongs and countless festivals with her,” her daughter, Diana Carbonell, said, adding that when she moved back to Pittsburgh from New York, she looked to her mother for advice on what to do.

“She didn’t disappoint,” Diana said.

But Carbonell doesn’t speak up in her classes, also a habit from her mother, who thought children were meant to be seen and not heard. Although she takes improv classes through Osher, she has never taken the stage.

“What I would love to do is to be able to sing and See Carbonell on page 29

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called “College over 60,” even though she was only 55.

“Really I think my, kind of, life began,” Carbonell said. “I mean I was doing more things for myself once we were divorced.”

Now, at 67, Carbonell does everything for herself.

She bustles around Pitt’s campus between lectures and film screenings, sometimes lugging a black suitcase full of books or CDs. What most Pitt students take for granted is penciled into Carbonell’s daily itinerary.

That itinerary, in the form of a little green planner in her purse, has only one free hour available on a Monday afternoon in March. Otherwise, her schedule is booked solid, and it’s hard to catch up with her.

Wake up at 8:30 a.m. Film class at 9:20 a.m. — she’s a little late, but that’s fine because “On the Waterfront” with Marlon Brando hasn’t started yet. Lunch and a discussion on “rising above hate” just after 1 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center.

Then off to an Osher Institute art class before she swings by the Carnegie Library to drop off 10 Irish CDs she’d borrowed for St. Patrick’s Day, check her email and complete her daily Duolingo brain exercise before a lecture on female professional chefs.

Then it’s that lone free hour between 5 and 6 p.m. before another class.

Some entries in the little green calendar just have times and locations, but she’ll go without knowing exactly what the event is.

To get a better picture of what Carbonell does with her time: Imagine attending 60 percent of the events you saw posted on fliers around campus or advertised on the MyPitt website. Imagine taking advantage of every opportunity for free food or information, every chance to

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ome small facts slip from Myra Carbonell’s memory: her grandson’s age, the name of the second person in her favorite folk duo, her exhusband’s birthday.

But memories come easily. There’s the lingering image of coming home from school in the Bronx to find her father asleep in the Barcalounger, the putrid sweet taste of Manischewitz doled out in Hebrew school or the first time she saw performers dance down the aisles in “The Sound of Music.”

Most of her nostalgia comes with a soundtrack.

When she lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she used to sneak down to the bay to listen as performers Cliff Haslam and Tony Barrand sang sea shanties. She met her first boyfriend and, in turn, her ex-husband, folk dancing in an MIT gym.

She was an applications analyst at MIT, he was studying math and physics. They married in 1975 and moved to New Haven, Connecticut, before settling in Pittsburgh, where Carbonell got a bachelor’s degree in computer science.

“I remember, I would stay at home preparing meals for him, and felt I kind of had to live my life for him and my children,” Carbonell said.

Her husband had an affair, and ultimately, the two split up.

“I remember, I cried and cried an awful lot, but you know in the long run it’s better,” Carbonell said.

Before the divorce, he kept telling her to “get a life.”

So she did.

She took up ushering at local theaters to see shows for free and enrolled in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute for senior citizens at Pitt — which at the time was

Photo by Theo Schwarz

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tell me your stories Armed with a camera and a facebook page, anish kumar, the creator of humans of pitt, wants to hear it all alexa bakalarski / staff writer

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Photos by WIll Miller

ere’s what Anish Kumar does for fun: He walks up to strangers hanging around campus and asks them to divulge their fears, their dreams, their setbacks and anything else they are willing to tell someone they just met.

Then, he publishes it online for all the world to see.

This time, Kumar’s subject is a man in his 20s sitting outside the William Pitt Union.

He agrees to Kumar’s interview even though he’s fairly shy and won’t be a good candidate, or so he says. But Kumar doesn’t listen to him — at least, not yet.

Instead, Kumar wants answers to questions the man has probably never faced.

“Was there ever a time you feared for your life?” Kumar asks.

At the end of his first year at Pitt in 2014, Kumar started the Humans of Pitt Facebook page — a photo series based off Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York project, where the photojournalist takes portraits of strangers and interviews them, then posts the photos and transcripts on Facebook. The project began in 2010, and Stanton published his work in a book in October 2015.

Kumar, a pre-med junior linguistics major, realized Pittsburgh didn’t have a substantial Humans project, and asked his floormate, junior studio arts major Sarah Thornton, to help him launch Humans of Pitt.

“I feel amazed that people are

Wilson Chan.

Several other Pennsylvania universities have Humans projects, such as Humans of Duquesne, Humans of Carnegie Mellon University, Humans of Penn State and Humans of UPenn.

Despite the bold questions, Kumar was once much more timid.

“I was really scared about going up to strangers,” Kumar said. “I would usually go to places like Schenley Plaza, because cause it’s easier to find people ple sit-

mans of Pitt and in his other service positions — a member of food charity Pitt Nourish International, a board member for an annual Indian dance competition and a volunteer translator for Spanish-speaking patients at the Birmingham Free clinic.

Later on in his career, Kumar, who grew up in a multilingual

"

ting around, and people are less likely to get et upset about being interrupted.” upted.”

He still gets nervous when approaching potential subjects. The first few moments of every interview are a little awkward, Kumar said, before the shyness and strangeness melt away with natural conversation.

“It’s this really just human experience, which is just so worth it. It makes all the tense parts of it worth it in the end,” Kumar said.

Shortly after Kumar and Thornton started the project, the pair interviewed a middle-aged Ph.D. candidate, who was studying sociology and fracking’s effect on Pittsburgh communities.

“He had this just beautiful quote that I think encapsulates not only his view of the world but also Humans at Pitt. He said, ‘There’s no such thing as a simple person,’” Kumar said. “The second he said that — it just struck me.”

Kumar said he’s taken that man’s quote and turned it into a personal mantra, both at Hu-

home, wants to help non-English speakers overcome everyday language barriers, like doctor’s office forms.

“I think language is such an important, pervasive part of your daily life, and a lot of the things that go in language are very implicit and happen below your awareness,” Kumar said.

Kumar, sometimes brought to tears after interviews, said his project is just practice in creating spaces where people can feel comfortable enough to bare their necks.

“I think what I’ve learned is that — and this struck me in a very personal way too — that vulnerability is just such an integral, innate part of being human,” Kumar said. “I think this is a project that aims at slowly extracting that and getting people to realize that.”

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But for him, the interviews are not just about spreading stories — they’re about connecting with the community and challenging others to think critically and reflectively about themselves. Kumar pokes at their most haunting memories, greatest accomplishments and future last words to their mothers, among other topics.

“When did you feel the most vulnerable?”

Kumar asks his same subject, camera and notepad in hand.

The man bites his lip. A moment passes before he tells Kumar he can’t think of anything.

After telling him it’s all right, Kumar tries again with a different question, “What would you say to yourself at this time last year?”

This one hits — the man would tell himself to not be afraid to take the opportunities that pop up.

After photos, they part, with the man telling Kumar he is thinking over his whole life now.

Kumar said he tries posting at least once or twice a week, with each post averaging about 200 likes, and continues the project with The Pitt News reporter Emily Brindley and junior

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Was there ever a time you feared for your life?

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always able to go through these intense emotions with a stranger, with me,” Kumar said.

“I’m trying to imagine myself doing it, and I don’t know if I’d be able to.”

Though Thornton is no longer part of Humans of Pitt, they helped Kumar found the project and gain more than 8,000 Facebook likes.

“I just remember being very skeptical, even pitching the idea to Sarah and talking about it,” Kumar, who had never done anything like that project before, said. “I think I was really skeptical that people would want to share.”

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Leading by adoption

n episode of a TV tabloid talk show changed Cynthia Bradley-King’s life forever.

King, a professor in the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work, runs Pitt’s Child Welfare Education for Baccalaureates program, which places social work students in fieldwork throughout the state.

Nearly 20 years ago, when King was working as a nurse, she was sitting at home watching an episode of “The Phil Donahue Show” before a night shift. She was 45, divorced and, with a son away at college, looking for something to do with her newfound empty-nester status.

The guest on that day’s “Donahue” was Matilda Cuomo, then the first lady of New York. Cuomo was speaking about the foster care system in the United States and the overabundance of children in need of loving homes. King, who is AfricanAmerican, said, “It intrigued me that there were so many children up on the stage who looked like me.”

Right then, she resolved to take in a foster child.

She called the 800 number on her screen and was transferred to Family Services of Western Pennsylvania. King offered to take in a child with special needs, given her nursing background.

Within weeks, she was a foster parent to an 18-month-old girl who breathed through a tracheostomy tube. “We fell in love with her,” King said. King’s mother, who had recently been widowed, watched the baby while her daughter continued to work the night shift at the hospital, providing King with what she described as “a new lease on life.”

Six months later, Allegheny County Children Services called King back and asked if she would be willing to also foster a 6-month-old girl. King, who admits she was “addicted to babies” at this point, happily agreed. In the meantime she got remarried and, a year later, began fostering a third child and then a fourth, a baby boy who was only days old when King first met him.

“Little by little, we were able to adopt each of them,” King said. As she went through the adoption process with each of her children, King realized she wanted to learn more about the how the institution operated — how and why parents lost custody of their children. She went back to school at Chatham University to study human services administration, eventually matriculat-

By taking three, King renews lease on life Jack Shelly | Staff Writer

Photo by Theo Schwarz ing at Pitt to earn a masters in social work.

She began working in the field and completing a doctorate in administration and leadership of human services at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania — driving 62 miles three times a week to earn her Ph.D. King said much of her experience as a nurse carried over to social work.

“They’re both helping professions,” she said. “They are the helping professions, closely linked with education as well.”

Through social work, King studied racial inequities in the child welfare system, reflecting her initial observation of the disproportionate number of African-American children in the foster care system.

Since writing her dissertation, “The Adoption and Safe Families Act: Judicial and Child Welfare Administrators’ Perceptions of the Impact on African-American Families,” King said there has been significant reform of the child welfare system.

“The process for mandating abuse is now much more stringent, as are the consequences for not reporting,” she said.

In the last five years, more than 100 new child welfare laws have been implemented in Pennsylvania, largely as a result of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State University.

“Those children fell through the cracks. The extent of child abuse in this country is much larger than we expected,” King said. “Things that go on in the family have been thought of as private, the government getting involved in child protection is very new.”

The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, the first piece of legislation to address child abuse, wasn’t signed until 1974. Since then, King said there have been tremendous advances in our understanding of the signs of abuse, as well as child development and child-rearing techniques.

“We continue to be growing as people in our understanding of children as people and how we should treat them,” King said.

She points out that she wasn’t legally protected under the law for much of her childhood in the ’50s and ’60s, as children had no defined legal rights prior to CAPTA. Understanding child welfare is a relatively new academic field, and systemic changes come only through a growth in knowledge of children.

Since becoming involved in social work, King has witnessed that growth. She cites schools and homes declining corporal punishment as an example.

In many ways, King’s parenting style evolved alongside these developments.

“I was 19 when I had my oldest son,” she said. “You think you know a lot as a teenager, but you don’t. You haven’t lived long enough.”

King took a different approach to raising her four adopted children, she said, after having the benefit of decades more of life experience, as well as a college education and one very special episode of “Donahue.”

“Anything can happen that can impact what you’re going to do for your life’s work,” King said, “and it doesn’t just have to be what you set out to do.”

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CURING CONNER

Photo by Jeff Ahearn

Chris Puzia | Contributing Editor

There are no guarantees in this business.

“

he’s started organized groups, such as the Cancer Caring Center and the Western Pennsylvania Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

He is also the chairman of UPMC CancerCenter and clinical professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Balancing all that work is just a “matter of efficiency,” Marks said, but his outside life provides an escape — especially now that Pitt’s football and basketball teams have improved since his own college days.

“I’ve always gone to all the football games and lived through it,” Marks said. “It’s funny, when I went to Pitt, their record was like 1-9, 1-9, 3-7, 1-9, or something like that. When we played teams like Oklahoma and lost 60-0, they wouldn’t stop the clock because the scores were so bad.”

So current head coach Pat Narduzzi, who’s had more success than those early days, may find his top fan in Marks.

Narduzzi led the Panthers to an 8-5 record in his first season, but more importantly, Marks said, Narduzzi deeply cares about his players — something the doctor has witnessed firsthand.

In February, an attendant tracked down Marks to ask if he could return to the treatment area where Conner was in the middle of one of his multi-hour chemotherapy sessions.

“So I went back there, and there was Narduzzi, and he’d just come up there on his own to sit with him while he was getting his treatment,” Marks said. “Coaches just don’t do that.

I’ve treated a lot of athletes, and professional athletes — it just doesn’t happen. He just came up there by himself, no cameras, no one knew about it.”

For Marks, connecting with patients in a field where death can strike any day is always difficult.

During the most emotionally draining period of his See Marks on page 29

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status.

“I don’t want to say I feel like a celebrity, but I feel like everyone knows that I’m treating James,” Marks said. “Now, he’d better do well.”

Still, Marks’ tenure and work with big Pittsburgh figures has cemented that reputation.

In addition to treating athletes like former Steelers players Merril Hoge and Ryan Clark, as well as a Pittsburgh mayor,

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r. Stanley Marks doesn’t normally feel the pressure — a career in treating cancer patients, often high-profile ones, has ensured that much.

But when the star running back of one of his favorite sports teams announced his Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis in December, Marks began to feel the heat. As the primary doctor overseeing James Conner’s chemotherapy treatments, he knows the city is now watching him closely.

“Someone sent this story to me, it said, ‘Narduzzi guarantees James Conner will be playing in the fall.’ Narduzzi guarantees it. I said to James and his mother, ‘He must know something I don’t,’” Marks said.

Marks, 68, received his bachelor’s and medical degrees from Pitt in 1969 and 1973, respectively, and has spent nearly his entire career developing the region’s medical network and treating its patients. But currently, he said the public sees him first as the doctor who’s returning Pitt’s star running back to the field.

“I’m glad [Narduzzi] is 100 percent confident.

Hopefully [Conner] will do well and he will be back in the fall ... but there are no guarantees in this business,” Marks said.

He rarely misses a Pitt football or basketball game, where it’s gotten harder to dodge concerned fans. At the Wake Forest University basketball game Feb. 16, he said at least 20 people approached him asking about Conner’s health and treatment

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the heart and the city Carlino Giampolo is hard to pin down, but he's never strayed far from his values—

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respect and dignity — no matter how far from Panther Hollow he's gone

By his own definition, Carlino Giampolo is a powerful man.

Yet, he’s never held public office, and he’s not very wealthy. But he’s a man of many projects — from cleaning up South Oakland to advocating for city ordinances in Hawaii — and that’s what’s important to him.

“Power is simply the ability to take action,” he said.

Giampolo, now 69, has flexed his power frequently, most recently against Pitt and the city of Pittsburgh. But he’s also a publisher who wrote five books — including ones on golf, Japanese verbs and a collection of his philosophical mantras.

And he’s the traveler who’s traversed the globe and danced in all 50 states.

At his core, he’s a passionate Italian-American who’s fought public officials and sucked the marrow from the bone of life. He’s an occasional headache to city officials and Pitt administrators and a community leader to his neighbors.

If you go to the bottom of Joncaire Street in Oakland, you will find a sign made and hung up

by Giampolo at the entrance to his neighborhood, Panther Hollow. “Honolulu, 4,660 miles. Pizzoferrato, Italy, 4,630 miles,” the sign reads with arrows pointing toward each.

A little further down Boundary Street, across the way from their home, Giampolo and his father built a small memorial, a metal plaque with gold letters, for all of the families who had lived and died in Panther Hollow in the park. Their neighborhood was one of Pittsburgh’s first Italian neighborhoods, as their ancestors, immigrants from the Abruzzi region of central Italy, moved there in the late 1800s.

Giampolo’s Italian heritage and his adopted Hawaiian sensibilities define him, he said. In Waikiki, Hawaii, where he lives for a few months each year, Giampolo protested and petitioned city and state officials from 1988 to 2001 to have a local hotel remove a set of light structures that he said were an affront to Hawaiian natives.

In 2001, the city of Waikiki passed an ordinance that said all construction in the locale had to be done with “a Hawaiian sense of place.” In response, the hotel replaced the light poles. Giampolo uses that ordinance as evidence for his mantra, “Belief precedes experience.”

Dale Shoemaker | News Editor

“You can have all the ideals and principles in the world, but unless they’re put for the right thing, they don’t have any strength,” he said.

To truly see him, contrast his activism with his lighter side: the part of him that loves travel and relishes the Bruno Mars autograph he received while Mars was still singing as an Elvis impersonator in Hawaii. Juxtapose the angry letters he’s sent to Pitt chancellors Mark Nordenberg and Patrick Gallagher with his goofy smile as he shows off the fake Wheaties box that advertises his dominance as the “o p p o site-hand pingpong champion.”

Never married, Giampolo worked as an insurance claims adjuster and construction worker after he received his bachelor’s degree from Duquesne University in 1971, intermittently spending time in Hawaii.

By the mid-1970s, he had saved up about $5,500 so he could quit his job.

“So I asked myself, do I want to go back and spend a year in Hawaii, do I want to buy a car or do I want to travel?” Giampolo said. “So I go to the bookstore, I get a map of the world and I lay it out and I say, ‘All right, here’s Hawaii, here’s Japan and Thailand and India.’”

With one bag, no itinerary and two books — “Student Guide to Asia” and “Student Guide to Europe” — he left for Japan in April. Nine months and 37 different countries later, he came home.

Later, in 2004, after his activism in Hawaii, he and a close friend traveled stateside, trying to hit

all 50. There were two rules: stay at least one night and dance in each state.

He did it, too, then returned home to Panther Hollow, to his duplex on Boundary Street. No matter how far he traveled, he always ended up back in his birthplace, the place of his heritage, the place where “everybody knew everybody.”

“If you didn’t know someone’s name, you knew their nickname. You have a sense of security, you have that sense that, ‘Hey, I belong.’ I trust the neighborhood, I trust the people in the neighborhood.”

Now, his “Save Panther Hollow” project aims to stop the city from building a multi-lane road across the street from his house. He’s been emailing, meeting with and sending letters to both Pitt and city officials for about six months.

It’s his latest project, following his campaigns against litter and overcrowding in South Oakland.

His aim, he said, isn’t money, power or anything he could win in a courtroom. He just wants to protect his neighborhood.

“Everything you begin, in order to have it be meaningful, should begin out of love. I love that community,” he said. “That’s my birthplace, that’s my heritage there.”

Giampolo, who knows he is growing old, has an intensity in his sad gaze when he talks about the proposed road. But when the sadness leaves his eyes, it’s clear he intends to fight until one of his neighbors has to add his name to the Panther Hollow plaque.

“I can’t solve all of the world’s problems,” he said. “But I can do this.”

I canʼt solve all of the worldʼs problems. But I can do this.

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e h t g n i l fil gaps

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burkman dedicates herself to amending the ADA

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Annabelle Hanflig | Staff Writer

essica Burkman does not care for “inspiration porn.”

“People are like, ‘The only disability in life is a bad attitude,’ and I’m like, ‘My legs don’t work properly, so I would have to disagree with you,’” Burkman, a graduate student at Pitt, said.

Inspiration porn isn’t exactly what you’re thinking — it refers to able-bodied people seeking inspiration from people who have disabilities.

“It’s basically when the able-bodied, non-disabled community uses a picture of a little kid with two prosthetic legs and says, ‘If this kid can be happy, then what’s your excuse?’”

Burkman said.

Burkman, who is currently working on a device to help people get in and out of wheelchairs with ease, has spent her adult life and academic career working to help people with disabilities. She inspires through her career and her advocacy, not her cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder that weakens one’s movement control as a result of damage to the developing brain.

Cerebral palsy affects Burkman’s balance and upper and lower limb function, so she uses an electric wheelchair. “[People] see the wheelchair and automatically think I’m stupid,” she said. “It’s always fun to be like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m doing this, and this and this,’ and they’re so shocked.”

To elaborate on “this” — the Florida State University graduate and North Carolina native is currently working on her master’s in rehabilitation sciences at Pitt while training to become a certified coordinator of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and interning at the UPMC Disability Resource Center.

Burkman is also helping to construct a device called the StrongArm at Pitt’s Human Engineering Research Lab in Bakery Square, where she works 25 to 30 hours per week as a member of a team that is tasked with constructing, programming and testing the specialized device.

The apparatus would attach to the back of any electric-powered wheelchair via a mounting mechanism, greatly decreasing the difficulty wheelchair users and their caregivers face in moving the user from their chair to a bed or shower. The device is still in the prototype stage, and Burkman said it will be complete in two to three years.

“I knew from a young age I wanted to design wheelchairs and other assistive devices because I used them all the time, so who better [to do it],” she said.

Living on her own has highlighted the everyday challenges people with disabilities still encounter. She’s seen businesses that are impossible for her to enter and busses that have no way of getting her on board. As she’s gotten older and more independent, Burkman has realized what little infrastructure exists to accommodate her.

Part of her internship at the DRC involves tracking hospitals that have violated the ADA, which “ensures equal opportunity for persons with disabilities in employment, State and local government services, public accommodations, commercial facilities and transportation.”

Burkman can recall detailed descriptions of hearing-impaired patients being denied interpreters and a wealth of businesses refusing to install wheelchair-accessible ramps, usually for the sake of saving money.

Burkman credits the law with creating new opportunities for her and other people with disabilities but sees room for improvement every day in homes and public spaces.

“I’m affected by [The Americans With Disabilities Act]. I

see [its lapses], so I can’t get away from it and pretend that it doesn’t exist or pretend it’s doing the job it’s supposed to be doing,” she said.

Detecting gaps in the law’s enforcement is more than a job to Burkman — it’s a necessity. It’s something she hopes to educate others about as a certified ADA coordinator.

“It’s harder for people with disabilities because even though we’re one of the large minority groups and anyone can become disabled, people tend to forget us in politics or any other discussion about minority groups, whether it’s race or sexuality,” she said.

Politics aside, Burkman wants to make the more fun areas of life more accessible to people with disabilities.

If Burkman could use her mechanical engineering degree for anything in the world, it would be to develop a water park that’s completely wheelchair-accessible.

It may be a “shoot for the stars, cloud nine” scenario, she said, but she’s determined.

Growing up in a Floridian town nestled between Disney World and Universal Studios instilled Burkman with a love for amusement parks. She would go to water parks with her family, but could only enjoy the wave pool or the lazy river — the only two rides that didn’t have stairs. “[The disabled community is] a small community to begin with, so we have to band together,” Burkman said. “There’s this problem. Nobody else is going to fix it for me...The world’s not going to change for me, so I might as well try and change the world.”

DOUBLE

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Matways tackle social and environmental justice Nick Mullen | Staff Writer

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burgh.

The Matway twins, both senior urban studies majors and daughters of Pitt English professor Elizabeth Matway, are drawn to solving social justice and environmental issues. And, as each other’s closest ally, Lora and Claire rarely have to take on these issues alone.

“I have a lot of love for Pittsburgh, and I have a lot of roots here and a lot of understanding of the work that needs to be done here, the problems that exist here and the communities that struggle, and I want to work with those communities,” Claire said.

The Matways’ concern with their communities began in their home.

“Our parents are very world-conscious people,” Lora said. “We grew up going to the Unitarian Universalist church, and there’s a lot of social justice work happening at that community. Also our friends, in middle school and high school, especially, were very social justice- and environmental justice-focused.”

With them, Lora said, “We got woke.”

Between the two of them, the sisters spin an impressive list of campus extracurriculars, frequently pausing and reminding each other of events and groups, which include Fossil Free Pitt Coalition, Campus Women’s Organization, Free the Planet — which Claire was co-president of for two years — United Students Against Sweatshops and Pitt Bicycle Collective, where Lora is currently the co-president.

The Matways have always found support from their friends and family — and from one another — for everything they’ve taken on, including com-

ing out together in the seventh grade. “[Coming out] is a thing that most people go through by themselves, and we didn’t have to go through it by ourselves,” Lora said. “So we were this queer twin team, coming out into the world together, so we always had an ally, and always had somebody we could share everything with.”

As they’ve gotten older, Lora and Claire have branched out into their own separate spaces and niches. Lora has a black belt in kung fu and became the president of the Women’s Rugby Football Club, for instance, and Claire played the piano for 12 years and runs half marathons.

But the longer they’ve been at Pitt, the more they find themselves gravitating back to the same social circles and groups.

“If we do end up working together, it’s a good thing,” Claire said.

But “we inhabit similar spaces, very differently,” Lora said, before amending herself. “Somewhat differently.”

To Claire, expanding on those differences is a tough question — not because they don’t exist, but because it’s difficult to make such a generalization.

“It’s really tough to articulate an answer that’s both genuine to our differences and encompassing of our super-deep shared identities and connections,” she said. “We’re definitely not the same person, [and] stating the differences between us as if they define us or our relationship ends up as an oversimplification.”

When looking toward the future, the Matways, like many of us, are unsure of what comes next. But they think that one day they’ll return to Pittsburgh.

“If you’re trying to do good work, where would you be the more impactful than the place you know the best?”

Lora said. “I think we both have vague plans to boomerang, but we’ll see how it plays out.”

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rom growing up in Squirrel Hill to attending Pitt together, Lora and Claire Matway have always had a love for Pitts-

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FROM MUSIC TO MAGIC

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After a high-status career in the radio industry, Lori Campbell takes fantasy beyond fiction as the “Harry Potter Professor” Courtney Linder | Senior Staff Writer

Photo by John Hamilton

N

o one expects their professor to be a former Grammys guest.

But nothing is too fantastical for Lori Campbell, who is as vibrant as her St. Patrick’s Day wardrobe. Green down to the last detail — complete with a jade, draped necklace that she crafted herself and eyelids the color of Tinkerbell’s dress — Campbell evokes an effervescent aura of mystique, indicative of her life.

Campbell, widely known across Pitt’s campus as “The Harry Potter Professor,” lives and breathes this ethereal reverie, both in her work and in her everyday life.

A self-proclaimed “fantasy scholar,” Campbell has published two books on her favorite literary topic, including “A Quest of Her Own: Essays on the Female Hero in Modern Fantasy” and “Portals of Power: Magical Agency and Transformation in Literary Fantasy.” Her claim to fame in Oakland, though, and the reason behind her nickname, is her popular literature course, Harry Potter: Blood, Power, Culture.

As a published author, a professor with an original class and an intellectual with three degrees, including a doctorate in English, it seems like she’s planned her life in writing from the very start.

Only she hasn’t.

“This is my second career, not my first,” she said. “I used to sing in a band when I was in high school, and I wanted to be a rock star.”

At 16, Campbell was not only a full-time high school student, but also an intern at Pittsburgh’s once-prominent B94, a Top 40 radio station that rocked the ’90s until 2003 when the station was retitled 93-7 BZZ, and again B93.7 in 2004.

She climbed up the ranks until eventually, at age 19, she became the station’s youngest music director and the only woman. For Campbell, life became a whirlwind of cushy radio label events, award shows and musician meet-ups where she mingled with Aerosmith and Stevie Nicks four times in her career.

“I hung out with rock stars and helped pick out the music we played on the radio,” she said.

“It was the coolest job ever. But it got to be not the coolest job after a while.”

She progressed to promotions director and then to marketing director her last four years at the station. The pay was pathetic, the stresses of the job abounding and abhorrent — she had grown as far as the air waves would let her.

“It was horrible ... Meeting rock stars was not as fun as it used to be,” she said. “I kind of wanted money instead of CDs for free ... Because I started

there so young, they took advantage of me.”

While the phantasm of life as a rock star flickered out, her desire for a life of fantasy took an unexpected twist when she left the radio station and finished up her undergraduate degree at Pitt, followed by her master’s degree at Duquesne.

She primarily studied 19th century British literature with a focus on the Victorians but felt something was missing. So in 2002, she created a cluster course at Duquesne titled “Fantasy and Reality,” the first of its kind at the university.

“I loved [the genre] since I was a little kid ... I always sort of veered off and wanted to do things that had to deal with fantasy,” Campbell said. “I asked a friend of mine if it was a real thing. Is it scholarly enough?”

It was more than scholarly enough. After unearthing her true niche in academia, Campbell still aspired for more.

When she took up post at Pitt’s English department, she continued teaching fantasy literature but extended her breadth of courses to include Fantasy and Romance, Myth and Folktale, Children and Culture and The Gothic Imagination.

Then came her bona fide teaching zenith — between teaching full time, taking care of her 3-year-old son, Colin, making jewelry and fawning over her cats, Campbell proposed a new “Harry Potter” course for Pitt’s literature department, modelled on similar classes taught at Yale and Harvard.

The course uses the “Harry Potter” books as a “master text” to analyze the relationship between the books and common culture, according to Campbell.

Classes filled faster than you could say “Accio,” as students shared her enthusiasm for all things Potter — especially since Pitt is a school with its own Quidditch team. Campbell became faculty adviser for Pitt Project Potter, and in 2005, she started the Fantasy Studies Fellowship after realizing her students’ insatiable thirst for discussion extended far beyond class requirements.

As the faculty adviser for the discussion group, Campbell employs her creative edge — even handmaking Golden Snitch bracelets to sell at a conference last year. Jewelry, as it turns out, is her back-up plan after retirement.

You can still catch Campbell spinning some Eric Clapton — “I still have a little rock ’n’ roll girl inside me somewhere” — but the greatest fantasy she’s lived through yet, she said, is life as a professor.

“The worst day teaching is better than the best day in radio,” she said.

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‘Just Normal’

Photos by Wenhao Wu

Challenge Hibiki Sakai to a soccer match or game of chess, and he’ll show you what he’s made of Josh Ye | Staff Writer

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ibiki Sakai is the kind of friend who will recount embarrassing story after embarrassing story about himself if it means making you laugh. With his short, black hair and glasses, he’ll start chuckling before he even gets out the first sentence.

He’s also the kind of friend who pours wine for you at a party, gives you Italian bread with olive oil when you’re hungry and plays off-brand Jenga with you when you’re bored.

Most people can recognize Sakai on campus, so if all of that appeals to you, just say hi. But he’s not all fun and board games — despite being a United States Chess Federation national master and the vice president of Pitt’s chess club.

Though he can’t button his shirt on his own or do a header on the soccer field without stressing his fused neck vertebrae, the junior psychology major can — and will — school you with a trick shot. And if you stick around long enough, he’ll be the kind of

friend to push you harder in the Pete.

“Josh, try to cut your running time in half and run twice as fast.

It will be more effective that way because [your heart] has to reach a certain heart rate for your cardio exercise to truly be effective,” Sakai told me.

With 14 years of experience on the field under his belt, Sakai is a pretty fair trainer. His advice is worth following — even if it means having to run faster.

Soccer is Sakai’s passion, which he started playing when he was 7, sticking to “you know, the little league stuff.”

In high school, he stayed with the junior varsity team all four years instead of moving to varsity because “you know, those guys are huge. You don’t want to die.”

At 5 feet tall and 112 pounds, Sakai isn’t keen on getting crushed by men twice his size. He has an illustrious injury record on his own. You know, breaking the tibia on his right foot twice, which

21 Photos by Wenhao Wu

He said something... along the lines, ‘Yo dude, you are a crazy beast.’

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too seriously — it’s all about having fun.

Sakai said despite his casual attitude toward soccer, he’s trying to become more physical in his game — he hits the Petersen Events Center gym to tone up and build muscle.

He said he’s sick of getting boxed out on the field and wants to work out at least four to five times a week but “in reality, it never happens” with his busy schedule.

But in February, he made it to the Pete for an after-class arm workout that unintentionally pumped up someone else more than it did him.

“I was doing the lat pulldown exercise at the Pete. Some random guy came up to me — 6 feet tall and massive,” Sakai said. “He said something ... along the lines of, ‘Yo dude, you are a crazy beast. You are a great motivation.’”

This is the story Sakai wouldn’t tell you for laughs. He would tell you that, on that day, he had received a compliment he didn’t deserve.

All he had to do to motivate that “tall and massive” guy was have a congenital defect.

It is nice that people see him as a motivation, Sakai said. But it will be nicer if you see him as, “you know, like everybody else.”

“Just normal,” Sakai said.

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pushed him to train his left foot.

Now, when he’s in a bind on the field, he can switch from right to left to send the ball across the field or sweep a corner kick.

“Do you know Ángel Di María? The Argentinian guy? He played for Madrid few years ago — really incredible left foot,” Sakai said.

But Sakai didn’t have his first soccer idol until age 12, when his father brought him a Ricardo Kaká jersey from Milan, Italy. When Kaká signed with Real Madrid in 2009, Sakai said he pledged his loyalty to Madrid, which irritates his older sister — a Lionel Messi fan.

If you ask, Sakai just might admit that Messi is the best of all time — “But I can’t like him. He plays for Barcelona. I am a Madrid fan.”

Sakai plays pick-up soccer games with the Hooligan Soccer Club, Pitt’s amateur soccer club, at the Cost Sports Center twice a week. Minding height differences, Sakai plays to his strength — he keeps his center of gravity low to protect the ball and dribble his way between opponents.

But he still gets squashed between the turf and a sweaty, college-age soccer player every now and then. He’ll tell you about that one guy, “oh, man,” who was “5’8” and 180 at least,” explaining, “I tried to put my shoulder into him, and I just fell over. I didn’t have any mass.”

But he is not entirely inculpable for all his embarrassing stories.

Sakai said when he’s playing casual pick-up games, he’ll perform the audacious “nutmeg” move — a soccer trick that aims to trip up opponents by sending the ball between the opponent’s legs. With an unnecessarily flashy move like the nutmeg, Sakai said, you either humiliate your opponents or humiliate yourself.

“I just try to do as many nutmegs as possible,” Sakai said with a chuckle. Needless to say, he doesn’t take his field time

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I

In every inspirational memoir, there is always some impetus that drives the author to change their life for the better.

In “Eat, Pray, Love,” it’s Elizabeth Gilbert’s divorce.

In “Wild,” her mother’s death leads Cheryl Strayed to hike the entirety of the Pacific Crest Trail.

For Derek Griesbach, 34, a Ph.D. candidate and teaching fellow in Pitt’s communication department, this impetus is a book — “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera.

But it wasn’t the book itself that changed his life.

“It was the first novel I ever read cover to cover. It was important because it led to an interest in books and learning. It sparked a kind of curiosity. It’s not the text, it’s the art of reading, and it triggered an interest in learning.”

As the second of five children, Griesbach grew up in a large, tight-knit Catholic family in a small Wisconsin town called Greenville.

“The street I grew up on had six sets of aunts and uncles, two bachelor uncles, my family and 27 cousins on one road, and they all built each others’ houses,” Griesbach said.

Griesbach said he had a traditional childhood, spent playing outside with his gaggle of siblings and cousins.

He was an excellent student, and had a GPA of about 3.8 at the end of his sophomore year in high school. But that success came at the expense of his social life.

“I was less than 100 pounds, slicked over hair, braces, glasses,” Griesbach said. “Sadly, sometimes some people that age feel like one way they can earn friends is by taking a turn to the dark side. The easiest avenue for me at the time was to hang out with the ‘bad kids,’ basically.”

After spending too much time with the “bad kids,” he graduated with a GPA of 2.8 in 1998.

Without guidance and encouragement from his high school wrestling coach, even that wouldn’t have been possible. His wrestling coach even came to his house and encouraged him to try out

APATHETIC TO ACADEMIC How Griesbach found resiliency in reading Amanda Reed | Staff Writer his senior year of high school.

About his high school wrestling coach, he says, “He showed up at my parents’ house at dinner time and said it was his last year of coaching and he never won a [championship] and he thought we had a really good chance, but he needed me.

We ended up winning the championship. He sort of believed in me, and didn’t want me to be a fifth-year senior. He knew I wasn’t stupid, and he wanted to help me.”

Without college on the radar, Griesbach entered the workforce after graduating, working in a nail mill making two tons of nails per night in “the dirtiest, loudest, [most] unsafe working conditions,” and, after that, working for a heating and cooling company installing residential heating and cooling systems.

Despite the work, he was still struggling with substance abuse and, in his words, “generally being a bad person [with] no goal in mind.”

As his life continued to slide, one of his close friends from high school made him promise to read Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being .”

The book is about two women, two men, a dog

and how we only have one life to live.

After finishing the book, and doing some more leisure reading, Griesbach became more introverted, overcame his substance abuse, threw away his television — “It’s easier to watch [television] than to read a book” — and eventually enrolled in community college at 22.

He graduated with his associate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley in 2004, making Dean’s List along the way. For his bachelor’s, Griesbach switched from the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication on the last day to declare.

He switched after “having a freakout” when his then-girlfriend asked him if he ever pictured himself spending eight hours a day in front of 30 10-year-olds.

“One of the reasons [I switched] was that you didn’t have to apply to that school, and it sounded general enough that I could be interested [in the subject],” he said.

He was right. After receiving a bachelor’s in communication there in 2006, he then moved to London and received his master’s degree in mass

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sire to teach, but this time at the university level.

Knowing what he knows now, Griesbach says he would still tell his younger self to take a gap year between high school and college, which he considers an “individualized decision.”

“I think I would have told myself that it’s not worth sacrificing all of your healthier friendships, especially your family, to be cool. But I wouldn’t have told myself at that age to go to college because I wasn’t ready for it. It’s not for everybody right away — some people it’s not right ever.”

His post-Pitt plans are to work as a teacher and a woodworker, specifically using repurposed and

scrap wood to make furniture, picture frames, lamps, and vases.

Much like his stance on higher education, Griesbach wouldn’t push the book that changed his life on anyone. What “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” inspired him to do is more important than the book itself.

“The key for me was not the book itself but the act of learning to find wisdom in books,” he said. “I don’t remember much about the plot, but it’s not important compared to the investment it spawned in personal growth and a friend who stuck by me through all of my troubles.”

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communication at London Metropolitan University in 2007.

Five years after receiving his master’s degree, Griesbach decided to pursue a Ph.D. after moving to Oregon from Los Angeles. He was living with a friend who had received his Ph.D. and got a tenure track position at Portland State University. Griesbach witnessed his friend transition from graduate student to professor “without losing his soul.” “[It was] nice to see someone could do that, still have a social life and still be a dedicated professor,” he said. Griesbach added he still had a de-

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Real-life leslie knope at 20, charlotte goldbach has already lost her first election. But she’s keeping the senate square in her sights ZoË Hannah | Assistant News Editor

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B

efore Charlotte Goldbach knew which college she’d attend or what city she’d live in someday, she knew she wanted to be a senator.

She hasn’t reached that level of political success quite yet — but, at age 20, she’s already established herself as a Democratic politician, at least in Chatham Township, New Jersey.

At 19, in summer 2015, Goldbach ran a write-in campaign for Chatham’s town council. She walked her dog around her neighborhood all day, she said, asking everyone she met to write her in on the ballot.

“They told me that I wouldn’t be able to run,” Goldbach said. “But I didn’t really like them telling me that.”

After 72 hours of campaigning, Goldbach lost the election by one vote — she said one friend accidentally wrote her name on the wrong ballot, spelled her name wrong or some combination of the two mistakes.

Though she said she wouldn’t have won the general election even if her write-in campaign did work, Goldbach doesn’t see the loss as a loss, but rather another rung on her ladder to a political career.

From interning for Joe Sestak’s campaign at 18 to running for city council at 19 to starting Pitt Students for Hillary at 20, Goldbach is a real-life Leslie Knope — a political junkie with no shortage of creative passion. “[She’s] everything I hope to be and more,” Goldbach said of the beloved “Parks and Recreation” star.

Her dream, she said, is to become a member of Congress by the age of 40 or 50 — but only after she manages some local campaigns in her home state and runs a presidential campaign or two.

“I want to get people who will make positive change [elected] until I can get elected,” Goldbach said. Right now, she’s pushing hard for Clinton as Pennsylvania’s primaries approach and the presidential race closes in.

When she isn’t tweeting from the Pitt Students for Hillary account, Goldbach works on cultivating her leadership skills in as many Pitt clubs and organizations as possible.

She writes comedy for Pitt Tonight, serves as vice president of College Democrats, hosts a weekly radio show on WPTS, manages social media for Pitt Students for Hillary and helps out as a brother of Pi Sigma Alpha. Continuing her stream of leadership, Goldbach is taking over as the WPTS news director next year.

“Whenever I have the opportunity to do something, I take it,” Goldbach said.

For her, involvement in clubs she’s passionate about isn’t a nuisance — it’s a haven.

When she struggled with depression and anxiety in high school, Goldbach said her strongest coping skills were filling her days with music, meetings and meditation.

A songwriter, singer and pianist, Goldbach spends at least an hour each week

practicing original music in the Music Building. She also trains every week for a half marathon, and practices mindfulness meditation twice a week at the Stress Free Zone. “[Meditating] reminds me to stop for a minute,” Goldbach said.

Goldbach said she’s still navigating depression and anxiety, but her busy schedule keeps her in check.

She keeps most of her music — coffeehouse tones underneath her Regina Spektorish voice — private until it’s perfect, as her lyrics often meditate on deeply personal feelings about relationships and depression.

But even when she’s practicing piano at the Music Building, Goldbach’s focus remains on politics. In the middle of playing a song about an ex-boyfriend, she stopped to check a notification on her phone — “Martin O’Malley is endorsing John Fetterman?!”

Goldbach hopes her name will fit alongside Elizabeth Warren’s and Hillary Clinton’s someday, and said she’ll likely focus on women’s issues once in office.

“I can’t get over that there’s still inherent sexism [today],” Goldbach said. “[But] I really like knowing why people think the other way.”

Goldbach said this inequality doesn’t deter her from the political sector, though.

Instead, she’ll use her position to fight it.

Before she competes in any nationwide campaigns, Goldbach said she’ll serve her small town in New Jersey, where she wants to run for Senate in a few decades.

“When I run, I’m going to be ready,” Goldbach said.

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A & Austin Q

fights for debt-free future Britnee Meiser | Staff Writer

Photo by John Hamilton I started the [Pitt Students for Bernie Sanders 2016] Facebook page in June 2015 as part of a national affiliation. I wanted to get people politically engaged. That really started with the march for Bernie in November. It blew up really quickly. A lot of student groups came together and made it successful — even though the police were pretty mad. Plus, it brought light to the issue [of student debt].

TPN: Why is fighting against student debt so important to you?

AA: Tuition is super high. [Pitt is] the most expensive state-affiliated school in the country. I was just thinking, “How is this possible?” It’s not just about me — everybody is going to get screwed over. My daughter is going to go to school one day, and it’s terrifying to think that she could be taking out nearly $100,000 in loans just to pay for her undergrad. Especially when wages remain stagnant, federal funding is getting cut. It’s just a crime.

TPN: How does Caitlyn inspire you to stay politically active?

AA: We talk about the news regularly, and so do her classmates. When children are in fear of a possible president, we have a problem. When I look around at the way the world is, I worry about the future. I worry about the quality of life that the youth of this country will have as time continues. Today, the youth are paying attention. As adults, we have an obligation to look out for the future of our children and their children — to leave this world a better place than we found it.

pittnewsprofiles.com

had my daughter part time, so I was non-stop busy. Eventually I took the time to re-evaluate my life goals. Through speaking with counselors and the VA staff, we were able to come up with a plan. I quit my job at FedEx and came to Pitt full time.

TPN: What is it like balancing being a full-time student and a single father?

AA: It’s a challenge. I don’t have the ability to spend my evenings on campus studying, or participating in many extracurricular activities. My study time really takes place once [Caitlyn] goes to bed around 9 p.m., which means almost every night is a late night for me. I don’t have many friends on campus that are traditional students. I sometimes feel like an outlier in class and around campus as an undergrad.

My adult social life is pretty nonexistent for the time being, but that’s okay because earning my college degree is all I really care about right now. I want to be the best role model I can for my daughter.

TPN: Where did your interest in politics come from?

AA: My counselor suggested getting into political science. I had big concerns with the environment, and we always had political conversations. I talked to her about studying it. Once I took those classes, I learned so many things I never knew about the world. It really opened my mind. From day one, my counselor said I’d make such a great public policy guy. She’d say, “This is something I think you’d really like.”

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hen Alex Austin finishes class for the day, he doesn’t unwind with a three-hour Netflix binge or a shot pitcher from Hemingway’s. Instead, he drives back to his home in Squirrel Hill and cooks dinner for his 11-year-old daughter, Caitlyn.

Austin never thought he’d be a single father studying for a career in international development.

Since he was a teenager, he dreamed of working for the Air Force, and at age 20, he became a C-130 crew chief at Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina.

But in 2006, after just 10 months of service, Austin was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, a form of immune system cancer. After being medically discharged from the Air Force, that dream abruptly ended.

Flash forward nine years — Austin, now 30 years old, is a healthy senior studying natural and political science at Pitt and acting as president of the Pitt Students for Bernie Sanders 2016 organization.

In the fall, he’ll attend graduate school at GSPIA, Pitt’s graduate school for Public and International Affairs.

Through the Veterans Affairs’ Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment, a program that assists honorable discharges, he’s completely debt-free, but that hasn’t stopped him from taking a personal interest in lowering the cost of college.

He’s fought for our country, fought against cancer and now he fights for a less debt-ridden future for his daughter.

The Pitt News: Coming out of chemotherapy, did you have a plan for the future?

Alex Austin: I had no plan. When I came out, I moved back here to Pittsburgh. I didn’t have a certificate, I didn’t have a degree — I didn’t have anything. I actually had to go to therapy because I didn’t know how to take care of myself.

[My career in the Air Force] was so short-lived, but to accomplish your childhood dream that you worked so hard to achieve, and then have it crushed — that did so much damage.

A friend of mine worked at FedEx, so he got me a job there when I moved back home. I also went to school full time at [Community College of Allegheny County], plus I

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Dumpsters, depression and dreams

Justin thakar is a non-traditional Pitt Student, and he likes it that way Lauren Rosenblatt | Assistant News Editor

pittnewsprofiles.com

A

fter watching Justin Thakar salvage his dinner from an Oakland dumpster, a man honked his horn and held a $10 bill out his car window.

But Thakar waved the man on. He didn’t need the money.

Since 2011, when a friend began leaving him leftovers after his shifts at the Bagel Factory by its dumpster, Thakar, 23, has tried to push the boundaries of middle-class life. The former Pitt student dumpster dives for dinner, couch surfs for shelter and used to work through his calculus and digital logic homework with sidewalk chalk.

Now, he’s off to California to continue searching for his unconventional version of success.

“It just has to do with being frustrated growing up in a very middle-class suburban town and wanting something different,” Thakar said.

Throughout the past five years, Thakar has grown comfortable with his new lifestyle. Now, he doesn’t wait for the street lights to turn on and stores to close before searching for his next meal.

He mainly restricts his diving sessions to commercial dumpsters, where the food is usually still packaged and relatively fresh, and gets about 90 percent of his food from dumpsters.

After his dumpster diving days began, Thakar started using milk crates and sidewalk chalk to push the limits of traditional learning.

He spent most of his sophomore year of college perched on a milk crate on the corner of South Bouquet Street and Forbes Avenue, first reading scholarly articles about sustainable engineering aloud. He realized quickly the dense articles weren’t grabbing people’s attention, and, mimicking a friend, switched to Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax.”

Around the same time, Thakar decorated sidewalks with pale, grainy strokes of engineering problems in blackboard or sidewalk chalk, sparking conversation with students passing by.

“It might have been just me being an attention whore,” Thakar said. “[Or] some desire to get people thinking about how school can be made more fun and less of a drag.”

Thakar started studying business at Pitt in 2010, but after three

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Photos by Nikki Moriello

and anxious people manage stress and prevent it from hindering success.

Through this, he hopes to reveal a secret he feels he missed out on.

Growing up, Thakar said he watched his father fret about success, even after he achieved his career goals. Although his father did not have any academic expectations for him, Thakar put stress on himself to attend an Ivy league school.

After he was denied from Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University, he chose Pitt as a backup. “[CMU] was where all of the other Indian kids went, what all the dads talked about as the place to go. Like it or not, people compare, especially in those groups,” Thakar said. “I wish I would’ve gotten in — in retrospect, it would’ve killed me.”

Thakar said he thinks his parents would have led better professional and personal lives if they had “examined their heads,” as he is attempting to do in California.

Now Thakar is searching for what he calls the “sweet spot,” the balance between crazy intelligence, uncanny ability to focus and succeed and an unfettered desire to have fun while doing it.

Thakar cites, for example, a Yale graduate he had heard of who was once a crack addict, although he added that drugs did not have to be a part of his

equation.

These people, Thakar said, “know how to handle everything” and are who he hopes to meet in California.

“People who still feel comfortable enough with everything life has to offer that they find value in such extreme and wild life experiences and yet are still able and willing to contribute something,” Thakar said.

Thakar said he does not know how long he will stay in California or if he will return to Pitt, but he is determined to go back to college. Ultimately, Thakar wants to leave his mark on the environment by designing sustainable technology and working with solar power and electric grid efficiency.

Until then, Thakar plans to make a living through street art, possibly working at a bike shop or getting an internship in California, while spending most of his time carving a path to his own success through the cognitive roadblock of stress.

“I think it just has to do with sorting out a bunch of beliefs about things like wanting to be special, fearing not doing enough for society, some obscure stuff that seems to be very present in my family. But they don’t think they can handle it or sort it out,” Thakar said. “But I can.”

pittnewsprofiles.com

years of hitting the books, he left to focus on volunteer work and eventually travel to California.

He traveled through Los Angeles and San Francisco, then returned to Pitt in spring 2014.

Now, after almost two years back at school, Thakar once again feels a break would help him succeed — prioritizing happiness instead of surpassing career landmarks.

In early March, Thakar packed his weather-resistant bike caddy, took his environmental books out of his Cathy locker and left Pitt for a second time, midway through his junior year.

Taking the Amtrak train part of the way, Thakar met a friend in Seattle and continued the rest of the trip south, then north to Vancouver. Thakar plans to end in the California Bay Area — known for housing intellectual and ambitious people — where he will camp, staying in vans and houses.

There, he plans to keep chalking sidewalks, standing on street corners and writing and publicizing his thoughts, hoping to attract neuroscience and psychology Ph.D. students or doctors and experts in these fields. But Thakar said he will talk to anyone about what stresses them out, or as Thakar puts it, what they obsess over, and how this affects their performance in school.

With these conversations and his own introspection, Thakar is looking to uncover how driven

TPN SILHOUETTES

LIKE IT OR NOT PEOPLE COMPARE . . I WISH I WOULD’VE GOTTEN IN — IN RETROSPECT IT WOULD’VE KILLED ME

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teacher and tutor

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Apoorva Kandakatla knows immigrants to the United States have it hard, so she’s doing what she can to help Saskia Berrios-Thomas | Staff Writer

poorva Kandakatla spent her childhood navigating between two worlds — the dusty streets of her parent’s Hyderabad, India, and the cracked sidewalks of her new home in Ohio’s suburbs.

After emigrating from India to the United States at 3 years old, she became a liaison to life in the States for her parents, who were still learning American customs.

She went to American schools, learned fast and brought her lessons back home, giving her parents a comprehensive education on new traditions and customs — fielding questions like, “Why is Christmas such a big deal here?”

By the time her parents had her twin sisters Ananya and Anuhya in 2004, Kandakatla, now a senior studying neuroscience, said they no longer needed her help ordering drinks at Starbucks or clarifying words spoken through a thick accent for other listeners. And her parents were more willing to delve wholeheartedly into western, American traditions, such as getting a Christmas tree. “[My sisters] didn’t have to adjust to everything,” Kandakatla said. “I have an open mind about a lot of different things and people, and they didn’t have the opportunity to see those differences.”

Through her parents, Kandakatla realized her passion for helping immigrants grow comfortable in their new homes. After coming to one meeting at the suggestion of a friend, Kandakatla made the connection between the club and her life at home. Now co-president of Facilitating Opportunities for Refugee Growth and Development at Pitt, Kandakatla works with refugees to raise awareness of local and global refugee crises and to help them ease into American life.

“I understand where they’re coming from and why it’s hard,” she said. “I think we take for granted the really simple things, you know, like, ‘How do I talk to people in the grocery store? How do I pay taxes?’”

At FORGE, Kandakatla works with families through the in-home tutoring program and with refugee high school students through the college prep program in which tutors help juniors and seniors at Brashear High School prepare for the SAT and apply for college.

“It’s hard for people who are from a refugee background to succeed in high school where even the standardized tests are based on your comprehension of English,” Kandakatla said. “When I tutor kids for the SAT,

Photos by John Hamilton

they find t h e vocab section very hard, and I don’t blame them for that because even I find it hard and English was my first language.”

Kandakatla joined FORGE as a sophomore, where she met a student refugee from Thailand.

The student enrolled in a college prep program, registered for the SAT and arrived at the bus stop early on the day of the test — only to spend three hours waiting for a Port Authority bus.

The bus never came.

He missed the costly exam.

Stories like that student’s motivate Kandakatla at FORGE. “Seeing what they experience really drives me to try our best to help them, not even help them but take their input into account to work with them to help their transition,” Kandakatla said.

Before starting the tutoring program, Kandakatla

would visit the family in their new home once a week, working one-on-one with them to ensure they can commute to work and buy food.

“We don’t just go and teach them English,” Kandakatla said. “We do that if it’s needed, but we evaluate what the family needs help with.”

Kandakatla said once she started working in families’ homes, she realized the needs of women refugees differ from those of their families.

Complimentary bus passes and help with job skills aren’t always helpful to female refugees, she said, because many women prefer to stay home and care for their children.

Because of these cultural differences, Kandakatla said these women’s voices are often lost in the shuffle of securing job interviews and transportation.

As she pursues a certificate in gender, sexuality See Kandakatla on page 29

Marks, pg. 11 career, he was the primary physician treating former Pittsburgh mayor Bob O’Connor, who died from brain lymphoma after just six months in office in 2006.

“Aside from losing a friend and a mayor, it was just all the dynamics involved,” Marks said. “They’d be calling my cell phone at 1 a.m., the reporters. I cried myself to sleep most nights ... It was so difficult to take care of him because he just wasn’t getting better.

It took me months to get over that one, emotionally.”

In his line of work, Marks sees neardeath patients almost daily, but he said strong-willed fighters like Conner are what keep him going.

Conner’s final chemotherapy treatment is scheduled for May 9, and he is constantly sending Marks videos of himself working out or running on the treadmill.

“I think he had [the treadmill] turned up as high as it would go. It was, I mean, oh my God,” Marks said. “For next season, for Pat, I’d like to say [the team should finish] 9-3, at a minimum. Anything less, I’ll tell him we’ll be disappointed.”

If Conner can return to the field Sept. 3, against Villanova University — Marks said in a December press conference the cure rate is 85 to 95 percent — fans will cheer the work of the most famous doctor in the stands.

“Now I’ll get to put the pressure on him,” Marks said.

Kandakatla, pg. 28 and women’s studies, Kandakatla said she’s studying the ways refugee placement programmers can develop designs that address women’s desires and cultural norms.

Through a semesterlong communitybased research fellowship through Pitt’s Honors College, Kandakatla is identifying the barriers that female Bhutanese refugees face with independence, education and health care.

Through focus groups, Kandakatla interviews Bhutanese mothers to learn how their arrival could’ve been more comfortable for

them as women and mothers.

“A lot of resettlement agencies don’t take [women’s issues] into account,” Kandakatla said. “They are focused on just getting them jobs and sometimes these women don’t want that or don’t have the time.”

Despite all her research and volunteer work, Kandakatla still credits her interest in and empathy for the refugee population to her upbringing with immigrant parents.

“When I came, I got to experience their struggles more as immigrants,” Kandakatla said. “It opened my eyes to how people from this background face a disadvantage in a lot of ways.”

Carbonell, pg. 7 perform, but unfortunately I don’t have a good enough voice,” Carbonell said. “I just feel like I’m too old now.”

So she watches. On a Friday night, she takes her usual front-row seat at the Pittsburgh Playhouse for Point Park University’s rendition of “The Drowsy Chaperone.”

It’s a play within a play, classic fourth-wallbreaking humor — the main character, “man in chair,” is an old man, listening to his favorite show, “The Drowsy Chaperone,” on a record player.

Carbonell declares he has a wonderful voice as he sings along with the rest of the cast. He does have a great voice, but he remains on the outskirts of stage left, watching intently, thinking he’s unseen until the very end.

Diana said her mother has a “tendency to dwell in the past,” but that she hasn’t stopped moving forward.

“She has etched out a life independent of her former life with my dad,” Diana said.

Carbonell returns to memories when ruminating on how choices from her childhood — choosing not to play a woodwind instrument, dropping out of Hebrew school, marrying her ex-husband — affect her now.

“I might have subconsciously married my exhusband since he was controlling and domineering like my mother,” Carbonell said. “[He] made all the major decisions, such as where we would live and which house to buy and when to have children.”

“I guess I’m making up for lost time.”

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March 29, 2016

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I Rentals & Sublet N D E X -NORTH OAKLAND -SOUTH OAKLAND -SHADYSIDE -SQUIRREL HILL -SOUTHSIDE -NORTHSIDE -BLOOMFIELD -ROOMMATES -OTHER

3 bedroom apartment. $1450 (utilities included). 704 Enfield St. 5 bedroom house. $2200 + utilties. 35 Enfield St. Call 412-969-2790.

Craig Street. Safe, secure building. 1bedroom, furnished.

Newly remodeled, wall-to-wall carpeting, no pets. $775 and up. Heat included. Mature or Graduate students.

412-855-9925 or 724-940-0045. Email for pictures: kelly.m317@yahoo.co

Very large estate located 1/2 block from Ruskin Hall. Offering a 2nd & 3rd floor with a semi-private entrance with 6 BR, 3 BA, large kitchen, common lounge great for studying or entertaining guests. Lots of closets, original restored hardwood floors, partially furnished. Free limited parking. Free laundry room included. Free internet. $700 per person. Can divide each floor into 3 BR each.

No lease required but rental term available for duration of school year. E-mail felafelman@gmail.com.

pittnews.com

Employment

-CHILDCARE -FOOD SERVICES -UNIVERSITY -INTERNSHIPS -RESEARCH STUDIES -VOLUNTEERING -OTHER

-AUTO -BIKES -BOOKS -MERCHANDISE -FURNITURE -REAL ESTATE -TICKETS

****************** Large 6 bedroom house for rent. Fall occupancy.

Atwood Street.

Close to campus.

Please call Gary at 412-807-8058 **Large efficiences, 1 & 2 bedroom apartments available for August 2016. Clean, walking distance to campus. Great location. $575-$630$900-$1100. Utilities included. No pets/ smoking or parties. 412-882-7568. +++5 bedroom, 2 full baths, huge house, nicely updated, shuttle across street, washer/dryer, $2595+, August 1, photos www.tinyurl.com/pittnewsad4 coolapartments@gmail.com 724-935-2663

1,2,3,5,6, & 8 bedroom houses. August & May 2016.

Bouquet, Atwood, Ward & Dawson.

Please call 412-287-5712.

2 bedroom. 343 McKee Place. $1200 (heat included).

2 bedroom, 2 bathroom house. 3201 Niagra St. $1200. A/C, dishwasher, washer and dryer.

1 bedroom. 365 Ophelia St. $550+ electric.

Call 412-969-2790.

Classifieds

For Sale

Services

-EDUCATIONAL -TRAVEL -HEALTH -PARKING -INSURANCE

2-3 bedroom apartments for rent located on Atwood St, Dawson St, and McKee Place. For more information or to schedule a viewing, please call 412-849-8694.

2529 Allequippa Street Apartment Available For Rent

By Trees Hall beginning August 1st--$1200 2 Bedrooms w/ Central air + BHK--Please call 412-721-8888 if interested.

310 Semple Street, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath. $1500 for 2 person occupancy, $1600 for 3 person occupancy including gas, water, and electric. Very close to campus. Off street parking available. 412-559-6073. marknath12@gmail.com

3104 Niagara Street 6 Bedroom House Available for Rent for $2500--BHK--no utilities but includes central air--Please call 412-721-8888 if interested.

3303 Niagara Street 3 Bedroom House Available for Rent for $1400--BHK--no utilities included-Please call 412-7218888 if interested.

3444 WARD ST. Studio, 1-2-3 BR apartments available Aug. 1, 2016. Free parking, free heating. Call 412-361-2695. No evening calls please.

Announcements -ADOPTION -EVENTS -LOST AND FOUND -STUDENT GROUPS -WANTED -OTHER

311-1/2 Semple St. 2BR Unfurnished Apartment. For fall 2016 occupancy.

Kitchen, bath, living room, basement, front porch, back patio. 2 blocks from Forbes Ave. Dishwasher, disposal.

New gas range. New bathroom. Ceramic floor. New vanity and fixtures. Must see. $1200/month+utilities.

Call 412-681-3636.

PM 412-389-3636.

361 McKee Pl. 4BR + 2BA. $1650 +all utilities. Available May 1.

53 Bates St. 3 BR 2BA. $1300+ all utilities. W/D A/C. Remodeled. Avaiable now.

51 Bates St. 2 BR apartment. $900+ all utilities. Remodeled.

W/D and A/C. Available May. 51 Bates St. 3 BR apartment. $1200+ all utilities. W/D and A/C. Available August.

3142 Bates St. 4 BR single house. W/D. $1400+ all utilities.

Available August 1.

Call 412-721-1308 4 BR townhouses, Semple St., available May 1st 2016.

Equipped kitchen, full basement.

412-343-4289. Call after 5:00 pm.

R INSERTIONS 1X 2X 3X 4X 5X 6X ADDITIONAL A 1-15 WORDS $6.30 $11.90 $17.30 $22.00 $27.00 $30.20 $5.00 T 16-30 WORDS $7.50 $14.20 $20.00 $25.00 $29.10 $32.30 $5.40 E S DEADLINE: TWO BUSINESS DAYS PRIOR BY 3 PM | EMAIL: ADVERTISING@PITTNEWS.COM | PHONE: 412.648.7978 (EACH ADDITIONAL WORD: $0.10)

Available 8/1, 1 BR/1 Bath, 5 min. walk to Cathedral, A/C, hardwood floors, newly renovated, starting at $995+, 412.441.1211 Available 8/1, 3 BR/1 Bath, less than 1 mile to campus, updated, Dishwasher and AC, starting at $1325+, 412.441.1211 Available 8/1, 4 br/2bath, Less than 1 mile to campus, Split Level, Updated, Central A/C, $2420+, 412.441.1211

Bates St. 3BR, livingroom, dining-room, eat-in-kitchen. $1095 + utilities. Senior/ Graduate students.

Available May 1st.

Call Ralph 412-608-2543.

Brand new 2BR apartment in central Oakland for $1800 per month. Apartment has A/C, stainless steel appliances, washer/dryer in unit, spacious living room & bedrooms, heated bathroom floor, hardwood floors and more! Call 412.682.7622 or email sarah@robbrealestate.com for more info on this gorgeous apartment for FALL 2016.

M.J. Kelly Realty Studio, 1, 2, 3, & 4 Bedroom Apartments, Duplexes, Houses. $750-$2400. mjkellyrealty@gmail.com. 412-271-5550, mjkellyrealty.com

March 29, 2016

Nice 4 bedroom, 1 bathroom, plus study.

Located close to Pitt campus and Schenley Park. Brand new kitchen and hardwood floors. Free washer and dryer included. $1850+ utilities. Available August 1, 2016. Call Peggy at 724-877-7761.

South Oakland Duplex. 4 bedroom 2 baths. Central air, dishwasher, washer and dryer. Available August 1.

(412)915-0856.

Updated 1BR apartment within walking distance to Pitt for $775 per month.

Apartment has A/C, plenty of storage, spacious living room, eat-in kitchen, lots of character and is located on Atwood Street! Call 412.682.7622 or email sarah@robbrealestate.com for more info on this amazing apartment for FALL 2016.

4909 Center Ave. Updated 1 BR with new kitchen, dishwasher & hardwood floors.

Laundry, storage and parking available.

Close to Pitt & shopping district. Available now and for August. 412-720-4756.

Second floor duplex.

Solway Street. Available 6/1/16. $1495/month +utilities. 3 BR 1 Bath.

Kitchen. Large dining room/living room/basement.

Washer/dryer.

Garage. Near bus/shopping district.

Ray 412-523-2971, rwiener602@gmail.com.

3 & 5 bedroom. May 2016. Sarah St. Large bedroom, new kitchen, air conditioning, washer & dryer, dishwasher, large deck. 412-287-5712.

Before signing a lease, be aware that no more than 3 unrelated people can share a single unit.

Check property’s compliance with codes. Call City’s Permits, Licensing & Inspections.

412-255-2175.

Real estate advertising in The Pitt News is subject to the Fair Housing Act. The Pitt News will not knowingly accept advertising for real estate which violates the law. To complain of discrimination, call HUD at 1-800-669-9777 or email fheo_webmanager@hud.gov. For the hearing impaired, please call TTY 1-800-927-9275.

Studios, 1, 2, & 3 Bedroom apartments available August 2016 & sooner. Oakland, Shadyside, Friendship, Squirrel Hill, Highland Park, Point Breeze. Photos & current availability online, check out www.forbesmanagement.net, or call 412.441.1211

ATTENTION OCCASIONAL SMOKERS! UPMC seeks healthy adults ages 18-65 who occasionally smoke cigarettes.

This research is examining how smokers respond to cigarettes that are low in nicotine.

There are up to seven sessions lasting about three hours each. Research participants completing the study will be compensated up to $60 per session, or $20 per hour. For more information, call 412-246-5393 or visit www.SmokingStudies.pitt.edu

Undergrads needed to test tutoring system: 18 or older, native English speaker, adequate academic background as determined by a brief questionnaire. 2-5 hrs; $10/hr., possible $20 bonus. Contact rimac@pitt.edu

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Caregivers and babysitters needed.

FT/PT. Earn $25/hour. No experience required. Will train. Call now.

888-366-3244 ext. 102.

pittnews.com

Rolling Fields Golf Club in Murraysville.

Multiple positions available immeduately. Including bartenders, beverage cart, and pro shop assistant. Contact proshop@rollingfieldsgolf.com or 724-335-7522.

SUMMER HELP NEEDED, Ice company close to campus. Weekends necessary. Production/driving/maintenance positions available. Good pay, part-time/full time. Contact Mastro Ice Company 412-681-4423. mastroice@aol.com

Seasonal Work: Shadyside Management Company needs full-time dependable landscapers, painters, and assistant roofers for the summer.

Must be at least 18 years old. No experience necessary. $10/hour.

Mozart Management, 412-682-7003. Email: thane@mozartrents.com.

Join us in remembering the late George Daly by playing in the Spring Spike Volleyball Tournament on April 3rd!

Come work where it’s Oktoberfest every day. Now hiring for all positions at Hofbrauhaus Pittsburgh.

Apply in person Monday through Friday.

Email SpringSpike2016@gmail.com to play and find out more. Donate at https://www.gofundme.com/SpringSpike2016

The Pitt news crossword 3/29/16

SMOKERS NEEDED! Researchers at UPMC are looking to enroll healthy adult cigarette smokers ages 18-65. This research is examining the influence of brief uses of FDA-approved nicotine patch or nicotine nasal spray on mood and behavior. The study involves a brief physical exam and five sessions lasting two hours each. Eligible participants who complete all sessions will receive up to $250, or $20 per hour. This is NOT a treatment study. For more information, call 412-246-5396 or visit www.SmokingStudies. pitt.edu

March 29, 2016

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March 29, 2016

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