S P R I N G 2 0 2 2 | 6 9 N O T E S ’17Robert Hillman, robert.j.hillman1@ gmail.com Before I feature one of our awesome classmates, I wanted to get ahead of an upcoming event for our class: our five-year reunion! We all left Goodman Campus in May 2017, and the time has just flown by. After you read this, check the reunion website (mylehigh.lehigh.edu/ reunion) and see the most upto-date plan. At time of writing there is a save the date for June 9-12, 2022, for our class and the two classes before us that missed their reunions due to the pandemic to get together that weekend. Get it on your calendars, and think about coming back or catching up with us. So, a very funny thing occurred in November 2021. I got a text from our fellow alumna, Seneca Rasey, while she was boarding a plane. She said that she had just spoken with an old high school friend of mine who worked for the TSA at the airport. I was more than a little confused at how two perfect strangers passing through airport security would have enough time to talk and find common ground, let alone that the common ground would be me. Well, Seneca took an amazing trip and never got back to me (more on her voyage below), and I got to reconnect with my friend. According to him, it was her Lehigh University “regalia” that was the conversation starter. When she returned, I caught up with Seneca. At Lehigh she was a global studies major and religion studies minor, as well as part of the Marching 97 and the Kappa Kappa Psi fraternity. After graduating, she has done so much! While living in Brooklyn, she had an internship with the United Nations, and has since worked for the Huairou Commission, which is a global grassroots women’s nonprofit organization, and later was a programmanager at Shackman Associates, a destination management company for corporate incentives and events, tourism and hospitality. She is currently in Northampton, Mass., and is now a project manager at Medicalwriters.com, where she transforms complex medical information into innovative, easy-to-use formats to engage with health care professionals. After a difficult two years, Seneca had the urge to travel. She mentioned that an earlier idea for a safari trip through countries in southern Africa fell outside of “COVID-friendly options,” so she looked at her wish list of places and decided on an island only 25 miles south of the Arctic Circle. She spent an incredible nine days and eight nights of a self-driving tour of the south and west areas of Iceland, visiting lava caves, glacier lagoons, black sand beaches and a massive 200-foot waterfall. She spent her 2021 birthday in a geothermal outdoor spa, the Blue Lagoon, an absolutely beautiful place where, despite being in Iceland, water temperatures can reach 90-100 degrees F. And finally, she got to see some Icelandic ponies up close, which may not seem special, but the ponies on this island have been so isolated from other horse populations that they have developed their own gait of movement called the tölt, which is a rare sight to see in action! Look it up, it is a wild thing to watch. You can find Seneca on social media and check out the incredible photos from her trip. If anything could convince you to go to a place named “ice” + ”land,” it would be her adventure! I hope everyone in our class has been doing well and that you can find time to go on a wild adventure as well. And when you do, please tell us all about it! If you want your life updates shared with your classmates, get in touch with me! I can be reached at robert. j.hillman1@ gmail.com, and I am always monitoring our old Facebook group (facebook.com/groups/ LUClassof17/), and you can also find me through a variety of other means, i.e., Instagram, Snapchat, semaphore, etc. Stay safe and get in touch soon! ’18Megan Olivola, meolivola@gmail. com Ashley McKendry and David Morrison both graduated from Lehigh University with degrees in civil engineering. The pair met on orientation day, were lab partners for their classes and dated throughout their time at Lehigh. They were engaged on April 6, 2021, and are planning their wedding for June of 2022 in Pittsburgh, Pa. Richard Barry will graduate with a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University in May 2022. His coursework at JHU built off of his EE foundation at Lehigh, and he took classes in circuit design, power electronics and satellite communications. He shared that these courses were directly applicable to his technical work at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL). Barry works in the Spacecraft Power Engineering group in the Space Exploration Sector at JHU/APL, and currently works on Europa Clipper, a NASA spacecraft that is set to launch in October of 2024, and DragonFly, another NASA spacecraft that will launch in June of 2027. On DragonFly, he is leading the design, development and test of the hibernation controller. ’19Alexis Parsells, aparsells@elp-inc. com and Claudia Cohen, claudiacohen10@gmail. com Julianna Paldino graduated with a double major in business information systems and marketing, and a minor in earth and environmental science. In 2021, Jules took working remotely to a whole new level by working abroad for PwC in Italy and London for five weeks. Jules has been working with international companies in cybersecurity for PwC, assisting in PwC job recruitment (look out for her at Lehigh!), heading diversity initiatives such as the PwC Explore Program, and leading a worklife balance running/walking initiative, “Run The Edge.” She recently adopted a very kind, 13-year-old, neglected black cat named Rambo. While at Lehigh, Jules served as recruitment chair in Alpha Omicron Pi and on the Habitat for Humanity board. She splits her time between N.Y., N.J. and Fla. Daniel Factor graduated fromCollege of Arts and Sciences with a major in political science and a minor in business. He has recently relocated from N.Y. to Phoenix, Ariz., to kick off his first year at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at ASU. While at Lehigh, he served as the philanthropy and community service chairman of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity. In his spare time, he has been enjoying the beautiful golf courses. Gillian Gude graduated with majors in finance and economics. Gill kicked off her career inManhattan working in healthcare investment banking at Citigroup and has recently become a private equity associate at Avista Capital Partners. A couple of months ago, Gill became a co-owner of an adorable Schnauzer named Winston and is serving as a junior board member of the New
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