It’s that time of year again. From a future filmmaker at the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema snagging an award for her achievements in spite of her disability, to the graduating senior with the overachiever’s problem of having to chose between 11 medical school acceptances, Brooklyn College students continue to provide an abundance of good news each spring when a number of significant awards and other achievements are announced. This year was no different. Here’s a look at some of this year’s dynamos. Breaking a Leg Sarah DeLappe, a graduate student in the MFA program in playwriting, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her much buzzed about play, The Wolves, about the complicated lives of a girls high school soccer team. “It’s overwhelming,” she says of the honor. “I can’t think about it too much honestly, I get vertigo.” It’s a pretty big deal for the first play that DeLappe ever staged that enjoyed very successful off-Broadway runs and that picked up nods from the Pulitzer committee as well as the American Playwriting Foundation, which gave her their inaugural Relentless Award. She was also a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Yale Prize. DeLappe first started writing the play on the subway a few years ago. Despite the success, she still very much takes inspiration from the community of writers she has in her courses. “I feel so lucky to be in the same room with all these other smart, brave, really curious and imaginative writers,” she says. Getting Around Maisha Kamal, a sophomore and business economics and English major, won a Jeanette K. Watson Fellowship, a three-year program that provides funded summer internships—among other perks like networking seminars and mentee opportunities—to promising undergraduate students. “I’m excited about being able to push myself outside of my comfort zone and explore a lot of the things New York City has to offer,” she says. The scholarship will allow her to try out a different internship each summer—including the possibility of a summer abroad—at vastly different organizations in various fields. Kamal is a student in the William E. Macaulay Honors College, and also serves on their student government body. She’d like a career that combines her passion for human rights and her economics background. The Rhode to a Scholarly Life Peter Lee, a senior in the Coordinated B.A.-M.D. Program, nearly became Brooklyn College’s fourth Rhodes Scholar. He was on a tight and prestigious shortlist of college seniors that underwent the Rhodes selection committee’s notoriously rigorous panel interview before being notified last fall that he was not selected. An anthropology major and a member of the Scholars Program, Lee was not, however, short on awards. He was a 2015 Rosen Fellow, received a research grant from the Golden Key International Honour Society in support of fieldwork he is conducting in Nicaragua, has been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and received their Propylaea Award, along with the Brooklyn College Alumni Association‘s Student Award. Lee is the son of immigrants and grew up in Queens but has been impacted deeply by his travels, first on a trip to rural India as a Tow Fellow to conduct health worker training and community development, and to Nicaragua with the Global Medical Brigades to help implement an anti-parasite medication campaign. “Medicine has become for me a way to aspire towards social justice,” he says. After graduation, Lee plans to conduct fieldwork in India over the summer before pursuing other scholarly opportunities, including graduate school. A Summer Full of Bright Possibilities Anumta Raheel, a sophomore and student in the Macaulay Honors College, was named a Fulbright Summer Institute Scholar and will spend June at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom where she will be studying the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “I’ll be learning about a really horrific time in history where, based on the color of your skin and where you came from, you were treated like goods,” says Raheel. “It was a really monstrous time in our history and I think it’s important we don’t forget it.” Raheel is in the B.A.-M.D. program and an anthropology major. She plans to be a physician and would like to work on public policy in the healthcare field.
