October 2022
Hello Cooke Scholars and Alumni!
We hope you are enjoying the start to the autumn season and the new academic year. Here’s an update on what’s going on in the community and the great things some of your fellow Cooke Scholars are doing. Alums, we’d love to feature you and your work in an upcoming edition, so please reach out and let us know what you’re up to - send us your updates at alumni@jkcf.org.
Community Buzz
Connect with your Regional Chapter
Cooke Scholar Alumni Chapter Leaders are organizing activities in cities across the globe including the Bay Area, New York City, and Washington DC - you can find the full list of Chapters and Chapter Leaders here. Email us at alumni@jkcf.org to connect with the Chapter Leaders in your region or if you would like to get in touch with other Alums in your region not listed on the webpage.
Join the BIPOC Scholar Alumni/Staff Working Group
If you identify as Black, Indigenous or a Person of Color (BIPOC), consider joining the Foundation’s BIPOC Scholar Alumni/Staff Working Group. Our goal is to inform the Foundation about the BIPOC Scholar and Alumni experiences with the Cooke Scholarship programs and at Scholars’ schools, colleges, and universities. The group advises the Foundation on an array of racial equity matters, including selection and advising of Scholars, Alumni engagement and support, and how to improve the Scholar experience for future cohorts. To learn more about getting involved, click here.
New Blog - Finding Opportunity in the Cooke Scholar Community
Cooke Scholar Noah Nguyen was having a difficult time finding an internship this past summer. So, she reached out to her Cooke community online and spoke with her Cooke Foundation Educational Adviser in search of opportunities. Fortuitously, an interesting Research Assistant internship was posted for Cooke Scholar Alum Ousmane Kabre’s non-profit organization - Leading Change – Africa. To learn more about Noah and Ousmane’s work together and how Cooke Scholars can work together to bring positive change to the world, click here.
Connect with an Alum
Our Cooke Scholar Alumni network is a vibrant community of more than 2,000 individuals engaged in diverse career and personal pursuits. One way you can Connect with an Alum is to complete this form and let us introduce you to an Alum sharing similar interests and career goals.
Compass Feature: Angel Sanchez
2014 Undergraduate Transfer, University of Central Florida; 2017 Graduate Scholar, University of Miami
Congratulations to Angel Sanchez, who was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar. Angel recently started the Second Chance Fellowship with the U.S. Department of Justice and will focus his research on restoring and enhancing access to education for people with prior criminal justice involvement. Prior to his fellowship, Angel was the Senior Policy Analyst at the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC). Angel was the Keynote Speaker at Scholars Weekend 2022; watch his speech below.
Alumni Buzz
2008 Undergraduate Transfer, New York University; 2013 Graduate Scholar, Harvard University
Paola is the new Director and Head of Product Design at Bumble. Based in London, Paola leads product strategy, advocates for design excellence, and supports a global design team to craft end-to-end experiences for the core product, Bumble Date. Prior to Bumble, Paola led design at Meta for 7 years, where she launched new experiences to 3+ billion people, built and scaled design teams from the ground up, and drove and pivoted complex product strategies. To learn more about Paola’s work, click here.
2009 Young Scholar; 2014 College Scholar, University of Notre Dame
Nathan started a new position as Senior Associate, Deal Advisory for the Accounting Advisory Services group at KPMG US in the Milwaukee area. He has worked for the firm for four years since graduating from Notre Dame and has accounting experience in both the Audit and Deal Advisory sectors. In his time with the firm, Nathan has worked with multiple international clients in the manufacturing and consumer goods industries.
2002 Undergraduate Transfer, Syracuse University; 2008 Graduate Scholar, New York University
After living in New York City for more than a decade, Matylda has been fully nomadic since early 2021, embracing a lifestyle of slow travel to spend enough time in each location to gain an understanding of what it’s like to live like a local. She was recently featured in The Unpurposeful Podcast with Carolina Kowalczyk to discuss her new lifestyle, leadership and career coaching, and more.
2007 Young Scholar; 2012 College Scholar, Rice University
Edgar Silva just celebrated his one-year anniversary with M&H – an oil and gas consulting service company based in Houston, TX. Edgar is an Enterprise Asset Management Specialist with over 5 years of experience in the oil and gas industry. His expertise includes implementation of reliability tools, including smart PM rounds, Power BI dashboards, and PowerApps to increase equipment reliability. This past year he's been working with a world-leader in natural gas liquefaction to support their Train 6 Asset Management implementation.
2008 Graduate Scholar, University of Idaho
Jerry recently released a two-minute clip from the short film that he wrote, A One Man Show, which was produced by Human Pictures in March. The film follows a person just released from prison to a halfway house and his struggle with alcohol. The film is set in both the real world of the halfway house and in the mind of the person’s alter ego – a standup comic in the spotlight of a club.
2009 Undergraduate Transfer, Washington University in St. Louis
Moni contributed to Teach For All’s first-ever eBook “What Leadership Do We Need Now?” To read his chapter on Deep Interconnectedness: The Leadership We Need to Heal and Transform, click here. Moni is the Founder and CEO of Teach for Cambodia – where they have recruited and developed more than 96 teachers in their two-year full-time leadership development fellowship and have served in nearly 20 public schools throughout Cambodia.
2013 Undergraduate Transfer, UC Berkeley; 2018 Graduate Scholar, Oxford University
As you may recall, back in our May Buzz we mentioned that Mandolyn was working on a new album. Well, we’re excited to announce that she has recently done just that with the release of Dreaming In Cursive: The Girl Who Loved Sparklers! Mandolyn, known by her artist name Mystic, is a GRAMMY-nominated hip hop artist who is also an activist, scholar, community educator, home chef and manages Beautiful Soundworks, her independent label. You can watch the music video for We Are the People (All Around the World) below. Congratulations, Mandolyn!
Throwback Photo of the Month
Scholars Weekend 2016