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With Prestigious Fellowships, Two New Hunter Graduates Devote Themselves to Public Service

For Brian Lamberta ’15 and Stephanie Park ’15, spring graduates of Hunter’s Macaulay Honors College, individual achievement is inseparable from a commitment to serve people in need and society at large.

Lamberta, a commencement salutatorian, graduated Phil Beta Kappa with a major in urban studies, a minor in art history, and a certificate in public policy with a concentration in housing policy. Park graduated with departmental honors in English, multiple academic prizes, and a double minor in history and media studies. As both excelled at Hunter, they also worked in their communities and built strong records of public service. Those records were recognized and rewarded when Lamberta and Park successfully applied for widely coveted public-service fellowships.

At summer’s end, Lamberta will enter local government as a 2015-2016 New York City Urban Fellow. Park will join the Immigrant Justice Corps as a Community Fellow.

Serving His City


The stated goal of the NYC Urban Fellowship is to “introduce America’s finest college students and graduates to local government and public service.” Top students nationwide compete every year for acceptance to the program, and Professor Joseph Viteritti, chair of Hunter’s Urban Affairs and Planning Department, praises Lamberta for being selected. “It’s a real honor,” Viteritti says.

Besides working in a mayoral office or city agency, Lamberta will complete an intensive seminar series exploring urban issues. He and his peers will also travel to Albany and Washington, D.C. to meet with public officials.

Lamberta is especially interested in policies affecting income security and public transit. He was an associate fellow at the National Academy of Social Insurance, spent a summer working in Washington for the Alliance for Retired Americans, and served as president of the alliance’s Hunter chapter. He was also president of the Hunter chapter of the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network, an organization that empowers students to speak out on vital issues, and northeast communications coordinator for the network’s national office.

With Professor Michael Owen Benediktsson of Hunter’s Department of Sociology, Lamberta conducted a study of the displacement of small businesses along Brooklyn’s commercial corridors. Their findings were covered by the New York Daily News and will be published in an academic journal later this year.

Aiding America’s Latest Arrivals

As a Community Fellow at the Immigrant Justice Corps, Park will help low-income immigrant New Yorkers obtain legal aid and apply for asylum, green cards and other types of legal status. She will spend the first year of her two-year fellowship at the MinKwon Center for Community Action, which serves the large Asian American and immigrant populations of Flushing, Queens.

In her work at the MinKwon Center, Park will draw on her proficiency in Korean, her personal experience of immigrating to the U.S. as a child, and all she learned in a past internship at the immigration-focused Law Office of Stephanie Yutkin. Especially helpful, Park says, are “the skills I developed studying in the Departments of English, History and Media Studies at Hunter.”  She adds, “The ability to research, compile evidence, edit, pay close attention to detail, and communicate ideas clearly and efficiently helps a lot when you’re working in immigration law.”

Park intends to enroll in law school after completing her fellowship, and to practice immigration law herself. As she credits Hunter for setting her on this path, she cites not only her classroom education but also the general campus environment.

“It was inspiring to attend a college where so many students are immigrants or the children of immigrants,” she says.

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