The SpectatHER: Alumni

Nzingha Prescod

By Zoe Oppenheimer

Stuyvesant is known for being one of the best schools in New York, always churning out innovative thinkers. The list of notable alumni is filled with well-known scientists, lawyers, doctors, and all-around brainiacs. However, Stuyvesant is not always known for producing amazing athletes, such as Olympic fencer Nzingha Prescod (’10).

Prescod had always pushed herself to succeed academically. “Fencing and school were two things I really wanted to excel at,” she said. “Stuyvesant was a natural path for me because I was academic but also athletically focused. The balance of the two [was] really helpful to excel in both, though fencing was my priority very clearly.”

For Prescod, “Stuy was hard. Stuy was rough,” she said. “I think the number one reason it was rough was because I had this huge time commitment outside of school: fencing. I didn’t have a lot of time to dedicate to studying and really understanding the material and doing all the reading, so it was always a challenge to keep up with the assignments and the tests and participating; it was a lot to manage.”

While she had gone to Stuyvesant for the academic rigor, the atmosphere isolated her. “I didn’t have a community I felt connected to,” she recalled. “I had friends—they were kinda scattered—but I didn’t feel like I had a typical high school experience where you have a lot of fun and you chill with your friends. I felt kind of isolated, and I think part of that was because it was the most rigorous school.”

There were benefits, though, with Stuyvesant’s competitive and focused attitude. “The Stuy community is so inspirational and motivating,” Prescod said. “It was great to be around people who were interested in excelling and they had interests and passions.”

Currently, Prescod is training for the 2020 Tokyo qualifications, and hopefully the 2020 Tokyo Olympics itself. She has been fencing since she was just nine years old, when her mother heard about the Peter Westbrook Foundation, a nonprofit organization started by Peter Westbrook, a six-time Olympian who is half Japanese and half black. “He grew up in the projects of Newark and he wanted to share his sport with more minorities around the city, because he saw how much fencing did for him,” Prescod said.

For Prescod, fencing is a way to keep pushing herself to be the best athlete and person she can be. “I always want to be better, and it’s my arena where I’m trying to be better all the time. The sport never really changes but you’re changing as a person and you figure out ways to stay motivated and continue staying effective,” she said.

However, like anything, fencing is not without its difficulties. For Prescod, these difficulties often manifest themselves in the psychology of the sport. “What’s hard is trusting yourself and your ability,” she explained. “You never know what’s going to happen on the strip; you have to be confident and sure of your skill and trust that you have to ability to beat people. That’s always a challenge to just believe in yourself every single time and every match, and to bring out the fight in you.”

Prescod encourages student athletes to push themselves. “It’s hard, but it’s possible to pursue academics and athletics at a high level if that’s what you really want, [and] to not be afraid to commit to a sport and sacrifice academics potentially,” she said. “There’s always going to be a path. If you’ve ended up at Stuyvesant, you can figure your path out.”

Shirley Moy

By Jiahe Wang

Shirley Moy (’80) decided to attend Stuyvesant simply because her middle school teacher recommended it. According to her, not many people at the time knew about Stuyvesant and certainly no one took any test prep. People seemed, in fact, to have a much more nonchalant attitude toward the specialized high schools in general. “You take the test,” Ms. Moy said. “If you get in, you get in.”

A first-generation immigrant, Ms. Moy grew up in Little Italy. She excelled despite her difficult home life—her mother had gotten ill and was hospitalized during her time at Stuyvesant, so Ms. Moy was forced to take up more responsibilities. She remained optimistic and pushed through these struggles. They allowed her to reach emotional maturity at an age much younger than her peers, which proved to be useful in the future.

After attending Stuyvesant, Ms. Moy went on to study at Harvard University. During her time there, she developed a passion for architecture. Now she works as the program manager for Penn Station Improvements in the MTA Capital group. She manages transportation engineering projects. Ms. Moy described her job with a vivid analogy: “I guess I’m kind of like the conductor of an orchestra; I deal with designers, construction workers, lawyers, maintainers, the public—I put everything together into a cohesive whole.” She has renovated roughly 60 subway stations in the past 25 years, transforming deteriorating stations into utilitarian modern stations. This job is extremely rewarding when the final tangible product is completed—Ms. Moy takes pride in her work on the 96th Street 123 train station.

Moy wants to set an example for all current Stuyvesant students. “Some kids try to do a hundred things. There are only so many hours in a day. Cull your activities to the things and experiences that are meaningful to you versus doing a thousand activities,” Moy advised. “Do things that you want to do, not things that you ‘have to’ do. Don’t do it for the resume.”

Rebecca Pawel

By Amy Halder

Rebecca Pawel (’95) moved from the old Stuyvesant building at 345 15th Street to the current building at 345 Chambers Street as a rising sophomore. Beyond the eye-catching Olympic-sized swimming pool and 10 floors, women at Stuyvesant realized a more inconspicuous change: there were bathrooms specifically designed for women on every floor. “[In the old building] you had to search for the right floor, and get to bathrooms that had not been set up for women,” Pawel said. Upon exploring the new building Pawel exclaimed, “Yes! Multiple stall bathrooms on every floor!”

Notwithstanding the shift between buildings, Pawel’s Stuyvesant experience was much like that of today’s students. “We [women] were 50 percent of the class or some equivalent of that,” Pawel said. This statistic represents the incredible progress women have made; women have progressed from a once small minority of the student body to an entire half.

Furthermore, Pawel, like many students today, “originally ended up with teachers who were notorious for having a lot of homework,” she said. “I remember doing the thing of getting home at 7:00 p.m., eating dinner and having it be 9:00 p.m., and staring at three hours of homework, saying, ‘I can’t do this.’ The homework was definitely a killer.” Even more, students’ diversity of interests in over 200 clubs and activities existed even then. “There were people interested in all kinds of different stuff, whatever you thought you could do was cool,” she said.

Pawel did not let her initial trepidations stop her from excelling. Having studied flamenco and classical Spanish dance in junior high school, she enrolled in Spanish as a freshman. At the time, Stuyvesant students needed to take Spanish IV as a prerequisite for AP Spanish. Wanting to take AP Spanish, Pawel spent a summer living in Madrid as a rising senior. She took part in an intensive Spanish immersion program led by the husband-wife duo, former Assistant Principal of World Languages Arlene Ubettia and former Spanish teacher Juan Mendez.

On the trip, Pawel fell in love with Spain so much that she majored in Spanish language and literature as an undergraduate, obtained a Master's degree in teaching English and Spanish, and wrote four historical fiction novels set in Spain while also teaching high school. After 13 years of teaching, Pawel decided to shift gears and pursue a Ph.D.

Today, Pawel is attending Columbia University, simultaneously revising her Ph.D. dissertation and teaching undergraduates. She jokingly said, “I live in hopes of coming across a Stuyvesant student, but have not yet.” Her Ph.D. relates once again to her first trip to Spain, focusing on African American authors such as Langston Hughes, who had visited and written about Spain.

To today’s Stuyvesant students, Pawel offers: “Whatever you are doing, try to enjoy it. Ultimately, this is not something that is going onto your permanent record; nobody is going to check that you took a stuffed animal to your ninth grade Regents.”

Dr. Lisa Randall

By Amanda Peng

Dr. Lisa Randall’s (’80) career after Stuyvesant is a clear example of a success story. A current physics professor at Harvard University, Dr. Randall has created a name for herself as a prominent theoretical physicist through her fascinating theories on extra dimensions. Her interest in the sciences began at a young age and she had decided to apply to Stuyvesant on her own. “I came to Stuyvesant to get a good education—and to get out of Queens which I found stultifying and homogenizing,” Dr. Randall said in an e-mail interview. “Everyone was supposed to be and dress the same, and being smart even meant a deviation from the norm! But I wanted a good education and liked that it was available.”

Thankfully, Dr. Randall’s hopes of escaping the uniformity of Queens were greatly satisfied at Stuyvesant. “The thing that sticks with me about Stuyvesant at the time was how refreshing it was to see all sorts of students celebrated for who they were without the enforced social conformity of my neighborhood in Queens,” Dr. Randall recalled. To her, Stuyvesant was diverse in both the socioeconomic and racial sense. “Being from a wealthy family didn't give you automatic status the way it did in college, for example. Being talented, smart, [and] interesting counted. I might be idealizing but [Stuyvesant] was pretty great—and I've never seen any place quite like it since.”

Like many current students at Stuyvesant, Dr. Randall found opportunities to highlight and practice her interest in the sciences. While many students today seek out internships and competitions, Dr. Randall entered the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Remembering the moment when she won, Dr. Randall said, “There were three finalists from Stuy and they announce[d] winners in reverse order. One of the others was a runner up and another placed so I was either going to be the only one to go home empty-handed or a winner. [I was] glad when I heard the announcer say ‘from Fresh Meadows.’ [That] might [have been] the only time I was happy to hear those words!”

However, Dr. Randall occasionally faced challenges in pursuing her talents at Stuyvesant. “When I first arrived in 10th grade, I wasn't allowed to go into the honors math class since they didn't trust any other school,” she said. “Another girl and I were clearly the best in the class and the teacher appreciated it but still mourned for the old male days in Stuyvesant.” Dr. Randall recalled the irony of the situation once she was allowed to take the course, describing that the extra time she needed to catch up on the policy actually set her back. “In retrospect, who knows if they would have done this if I was a boy. And now that I think about it, there was probably at least one teacher who noticed boys' contributions more than [those] of girls,” she said.

Despite this setback, Dr. Randall went on to attend Harvard University where she earned a B.A. in physics as well as a Ph.D in theoretical particle physics. “I get to study cool aspects of the universe, ranging from the very small (particle physics) to the very large (cosmology and astronomy), and work with amazing colleagues and students,” Dr. Randall said. She has also written multiple books on physics, two of which have covered the recent exciting discovery of the Higgs Boson. “Trying to do research, write, give public appearances, [and] teach all at the same time is challenging! [It] can also be rewarding. For example, I never thought I'd be a public person, and seeing how it has influenced others is very gratifying. [What is] also gratifying is the feeling of discovery—having a cool new research result no one else had thought of before.”

To current students, “Don't immediately rate yourself compared to an abstract idealization of what you need to be,” Dr. Randall advised. “Look at the person next to you. If you think you can do as well or better and you want to pursue something, go ahead. Do your best and try.”

Laurie Gwen Shapiro

By Amy Huang

“My job is I’m a writer. How great is that to say?” Laurie Gwen Shapiro (‘84) is a writer, filmmaker, and journalist. She had always been a humanities student, and it only took one person to help her realize that. The late English teacher and Pulitzer Prize recipient Frank McCourt told her, “I have really terrible news for you. You’re a writer.”

And it always came back to writing. Shapiro worked in radio and TV as an assistant at ABC News, and while that world had initially been glamorous, she wanted to tell stories herself, despite the financial instability of being a filmmaker or journalist. She has, however, recognized the avenue through which success can be found. “The power is in the stories,” she said. “If you're the person [who] can nail down a story that no one else can get, whether it's fiction or journalism—if you have the best story in the room, you're golden, and you don't have to be famous to have a great story.”

This lesson narrates the inspiration behind Shapiro’s article in The New Yorker, titled “How a Thirteen-Year-Old Smashed the Gender Divide in American High Schools.” The article told the story of a teenage girl who became a national icon in the youth movement to gender desegregate American schools. Working with two activists, one of whom was a lawyer, Alice de Rivera requested admission to Stuyvesant. The principal at the time, Dr. Leonard J. Fliedner, denied her request, prompting de Rivera to file a lawsuit against the New York City Board of Education (BOE) on January 20, 1969.

De Rivera’s win set off a domino effect: over the years since 1969, 13 girls became 200 and one co-ed high school became the precedent for the gender desegregation of other high schools, universities, and prep schools. “The idea that she did this at 13 just blew my mind,” Shapiro said. When she met de Rivera at an alumni event, she channeled McCourt’s advice: “Write what no one else has.”

“I felt a responsibility,” Shapiro said. “I knew what other people didn't know, which was that hundreds of thousands of women had been affected by that one girl's decision. I felt that not [only] was this a great story, but I [also] had access to it.” Shapiro created her own access, finding de Rivera’s phone number and traveling to Maine to speak with her. “I use my documentary skills,” Shapiro said. “You go to the place, you don’t just write about it from your desk.”

The article was more than a celebration of de Rivera’s story; it was also a dedication and a thank you to the woman who had opened doors for others. “I was a Stuyvesant girl who benefited from her,” Shapiro said. It is not uncommon to find people who are “gatekeepers,” those who harbor experiences and resources from others. Shapiro advocates for being a connector, someone who shows support and gives. “One of the things that I do for other writers [when] they have a book that comes out—I go to the readings. I buy their book,” Shapiro said. “People want to be acknowledged in the world. It’s just human nature.”

Having once been a humanities student at Stuyvesant, Shapiro shares advice with students like her: “[Your timetable] doesn’t look like [that of] the people [who] are going into business and law. Your life doesn’t have to look like what everyone else’s life looks like. You really have to not compete with other people. You have to be your own best friend.”