Santa Clara University

Serene Aandahl

I graduated in 2006 and was a double major in English and Ancient Studies. During my course of study I particularly enjoyed taking history classes from Professor Greenwalt, studying abroad in Florence—where I spent most of my semester traveling with an archeology class, and participating in various symposiums as member of Eta Sigma Phi, the National Classical Honor society. By my senior year I had discovered my passion for classical performance literature and represented the Classics department with pride as the title character in a production of Aristophanes's Lysistrata. Four years after my first acting experience, I now live and work as an actress in New York City and have booked national commercials for Amazon Kindle, Blistex, Dick's Sporting Goods, Cable Vision, Off Broadway Shoes and more. I'm also proud to have graced the covers of countless Harlequin romance novels with several best-sellers to my name! But best of all, I have returned to my roots and am currently enrolled in the Ancient Language Post-Baccalaureate program at Columbia University. Taking Greek and Latin during this two year program is an excellent stepping stone to graduate school where I hope to further investigate the culture, context, and performance of ancient theater.

Lisa Biton (Rozakis)

I moved to Israel with my husband and daughter last year. Its been a challenge getting used to the cultural differences, but I love living with the history I studied. I take my daughter at least once a month to Beit Guvrin, Caesaria, Masada or one of the many other sites nearby. I currently teach Latin in an American school here. Its amazing that I spent all of college trying to avoid Latin, yet its all I've taught for the last three years. It has really opened doors.

Joel Castro

After graduating from Loyola High School class of '01, I matriculated to Santa Clara University and graduated in '06 with a triple major in Theatre, Classics, and Music. In my final year, as a thesis project encompassing all of my majors, I compsed 35 minutes of an opera based on Homer's Iliad. After Santa Clara I moved back to Los Angeles and found full time (now part time) employment as a 3D CAD drafter primarily working in Vectorworks. I then landed a gig at the Morgan-Wixson Theatre in Santa Monica playing the role of Jud in Oklahoma!, and won best supporting actor. It quickly became my new home theatre, and they allowed me to host three benefit concerts for AIDS Marathon - I ran a marathon (another passion) and raised over $6,000 for AIDS Project Los Angeles. I'm currently a board member at the Morgan and chair of their Play Reading Committee.

Some of you might recall taht I had a strong passion for sword fights and fight choreography - not much has changed. As a choreographer I've returned twice to Loyola High School's Hannon Theatre to choreograph fight scenes for their productions of Pericles, and Queen Hamlet. I've also become a member of the Society of American Fight Directors and am a certified Actor Combatant with certifications in broadsword, rapier and dagger, and unarmed. On the other side of the sword, I've spent the last two years studying the German medieval martial art of Kunst des Fechten, and now even teach some of the novice classes.

As you might have surmised from the start of this letter, I am now attending CSUN, and am working on Masters of Music in Vocal Performance. This is now my second semester and I am loving it here. I am very excited to announce my upcoming performance dates as Guglielmo in Mozart's Cose Fan Tutte on Saturday, October 29 and Friday, November 4 at 7:30, and Sunday November 6 at 2:00 pm, at the Campus Theatre in Nordhoff Hall at California State University, Northridge.

Curtis Clark

I started at SCU in 1995 after taking 4 years of Latin and 3 years of Greek in high school (at another Jesuit institution).  After a short break, I resumed my Classical studies and majored in Greek&Latin, while minoring in Math and participating in the Honors program.  My strong base allowed me to do well in my Classics courses, while also affording me the time to enjoy math/physics classes and to spend extra time studying for premed classes.  After graduating with the class of '98, I debated teaching Greek and Latin or attending law school before finally deciding to attend medical school.  While interviewing, my background as a Classics major set me apart from the people with more common majors and gave me a consistent, interesting topic for discussion with interviewers.  After medical school, I completed a Urologic surgery residency at the University of Kentucky and a Pediatric Urology fellowship at Stanford University, both of which offered plenty of opportunity to expound on the virtues of Priapus.  I then returned home to Northeast Ohio, where I grew up, and now work as a pediatric urologist at Akron Children's Hospital.  My Classical education, from high school through college, gave me numerous advantages throughout my education and now into my career.  I continue to work on 'encouraging' my children to study the Classics and recommend it (as well as SCU) to anyone and everyone I can.
 

Ariel Dillon

I've actually thought a lot about how my classics education was perfect preparation for my modern farming career. All the writing I did in college certainly prepared me for my hobby of writing about our farming lifestyle ! (www.redwoodempirefarm.com) ...I can write for pages on end about nothing in particular and somehow people find it entertaining to read. Amazing. Now we have expanded our acreage, started a CSA program (food subscription), and somehow become fairly popular here in the North Bay. People are usually pretty shocked when I they find out that I am educated and a farmer, but growing food seems like a solid, meaningful occupation, especially in this world. We also have pet goats and that's awesome.

Lizette Faraji

I graduated from Santa Clara with a major in Latin Language and Literature. Today, I’m an editor at a company that spans the publishing and e-learning industries. Taking Latin taught me how to look closely at words and to make them work with and flow around each other. Taking Latin made me think about words in a poetic way that my English classes tried to broach but could rarely actualize (diction, rhythm, cadence, meter) and in a technical way that other foreign language classes struggle with but can rarely teach (passive voice, past tense, subordinate clauses). My love of words feeds my love of editing. In the future, I will continue editing. Whatever I do, my world revolves around words.

Dan Felice

In the Classics department I received an excellent education in the traditional liberal arts model.  The education I received prepared me very well for graduate studies in Classics, but inasmuch as it was also a well-rounded liberal arts education, I developed a number of skills which apply to almost any career.  The ability to think critically and express one's thoughts clearly in speaking and writing are skills which will serve me well wherever I end up, including a career in the culinary arts.  More, my Classical education has developed an interest in and the ability to research the history of a subject and multiple views of that subject.  This skill translates well into the culinary world, in which a dish's history is often as important as the dish itself, and also in which it is common for multiple versions of one dish to exist (and not all of them work so well!).

Tom Garvey

A native of the city of Santa Clara and the valedictorian of his graduating class at SCU in 2003, Tom Garvey went on to do his graduate work in Classics at the University of Virginia.  While there, in addition to winning several teaching awards, serving a term as President of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Council, and twice directing UVA’s intensive Latin Summer Language Institute, Tom managed to publish articles on topics as wide-ranging as religion in Plato’s Atlantis myth and Greek papyrology, as well as archaeological and art historical entries in the new Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome.  Perhaps still more impressive, Tom has successfully wedded his professional life and his love of travel by spending 6 months in Berlin studying German, a month in Venice learning Italian, and a full academic year in Greece studying archaeology in situ as a fellow at the American School for Classical Studies at Athens (during which time he toured through most of Eastern Europe, Turkey, and Egypt as well), and has in addition presented his research at scholarly conferences as far afield as Gothenburg, Sweden and Christchurch, New Zealand.  Now a newly-minted PhD with a dissertation on coming-of-age in Homer, Tom has taken up a two-year visiting post as a Professor of Greek at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, to which he commutes daily by cycling on the scenic Kokosing Gap Trail.  In his free time, Tom enjoys reading and watching science-fiction, growing, cooking, and eating vegetables, and singing.
 

Emily Lauerman

Right now I'm working at theater camp and I'm also in a play with the same group "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" which is going great. I'm signing up for classes to get my ECE and then I'll work on getting my teaching credential so I can teach K-3rd. My dream project in the years to come is to create a program dedicated to exposing kids to classical literature at an early age and fostering in them an appreciation and love for the classics. Not just mythology but also great Western authors such as Shakespeare and Dickens. I'm not sure at this point how it will turn out but I've got a lot of great ideas for it.

Christine Lechelt

Christine is pursuing a PhD in Classics at the University of Minnesota, after completing an MA in Classics at U.C. Santa Barbara.  She is currently working on her dissertation entitled “Allusions of Grandeur: Gigantomachy, Callimachean Poetics, and Literary Filiation,” in which she argues that Greek and Latin poets used the myth of the battle of the gods and giants to talk about their own poetry and place within the poetic tradition.  She is a recipient of a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Minnesota, the first student in the department working in classical literature to receive this prestigious award.  She has also enjoyed teaching classes in Beginning and Intermediate Latin (Vergil’s Aeneid).

Shannon Nessier

Majoring in Classics is like having great parents, going to a good preschool, or loving vegetables from an early age; you will always be just ahead of everyone else, though I didn’t know it at the time.  I majored in Classics at Santa Clara because I heard the Professor was fun.  I already had my language requirement done; se habla espanol.  But, after one day of Latin, I was hooked - I added the major that quarter, and never looked back.  It wasn’t until I started my teaching career, that I saw the import of that choice.  I taught high school English and Latin for seven years after graduating from SCU.  Everyday I used the skills I had developed studying the Classics: from studying the great philosophers and poets, I learned the ability to think, to create, and to ask questions that made reaching my students so much easier; being able to help them write better came entirely from the English language skills that come, oddly enough, from studying Latin; recalling my relationships with the small but committed faculty of Classics modeled for me the attention I knew I had to give to my students. 

When I eventually left teaching to study and practice law, I became even more aware of how my Classics major would continue to shape my life.  For those curious, law school is horrible; I was a great student at SCU, and I still wanted to quit law school once a week.  Despite the absurd amount of time I spent learning a new discipline, I didn’t spend hours learning to organize thoughts like my classmates, didn’t need to practice boiling down cases to key holdings, nor did I need practice arguing my point in an essay.  I had already learned that at SCU - learned it from reading Plato, and Herodotus, and even, Catullus; then I learned it trying to perfect a final exam for Prof. Heath, researching Women in Greece for Professor Moritz, and earning my thesis approval from Prof. Greenwalt.  It may sound vain to say, but I destroyed law school.  The thing is, I don’t really take much credit for that.  My entire experience was just easier than everyone else’s, and I know that’s because of the Classics professors I had who trained, refined, and pushed me, and the great ancient minds they made sure were a part of me.  Now, as I practice law at my dream firm in San Francisco (a job I know my Classics major helped me win) I am daily overwhelmed by all those same feelings: that while this is hard work and I have so much to learn, because I was a Classics major, everything is just that much easier for me.  Its like starting a marathon at mile 13; maybe it isn’t fair to the others, but there is just nothing like the advantage of a Classical education.

 

Evan Pivonka

After graduating from Santa Clara with double degrees in Classics and 
Political Science back in 2004, Evan went on to earn an MA from 
Stanford in Classics before starting his PhD in Political Theory at 
the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA, where he currently 
lives.  After a two-year hiatus from the classroom, he'll be back to 
teaching this summer with Modern Political Theory, and is really 
looking forward to it.  Evan's in the beginning stages of his 
dissertation, which is an exploration into the political thought of 
Karl Popper; when he's not dissertating, he's probably traveling.  And 
if he isn't, he wishes he were.

Evan still has many fond memories of the Classics program at Santa 
Clara, and continues to keep his fingers crossed for a teaching 
position someday in order to implement all of the great pedagogical 
tools that the excellent professors at SCU gave him.