Like countless other Hamilton and Kirkland alumni and alumnae, they're creative, resourceful and skilled. They prepared for their professional journey on the Hill and are now building successful careers. Unlike their classmates, however, what they actually do in the working world is, well, different. Really different. Meet eight Hamiltonians who have fascinating, demanding and distinctly ...
Don't accuse Justin Ginsberg of putting thousands of people on hold. He will immediately correct you. "I'm not the one putting you on hold," he says. "I'm the one keeping you on hold."
Ginsberg is the founder of Professional Audio Studios and TelephoneOnHold.com, a company that records custom phone messages for businesses. His interest in the audio industry stems in part from his father, who runs a professional audio laboratory that specializes in digital enhancement and forensic examination of tapes from civil and criminal trials. At Hamilton, Ginsberg became more familiar with voice recording through his work at WHCL; his friends at school knew him as "Justinio on the Radio."
After achieving campus popularity for his show, Ginsberg got a phone call from Patrick O'Connor's Alexander Hamilton Inn. The restaurant wanted him to record a hold message, and Ginsberg enthusiastically took the job. As an economics and math major, he wanted to be an entrepreneur — and he began to see that he could make a living by just talking.
His parents were not too pleased about his newfound enterprise, however, and did not consider his charismatic and lively voice worthy of a business. "My parents both asked me what I was going to do with my life," he recalls. "I told them, 'Give me a couple years. I promise you I'll get a real job if this doesn't work out.'"
It turned out that Ginsberg's company not only succeeded as a "real job," it became his passion as well. "I love Monday mornings!" he says. "Everyone else hates them but to me, it just means I get another week to do something I love."
By now, Ginsberg has mastered the art of hold messages, even if he is only one of many voice talents at his company. The tone he adopts when he turns into a message man can be robotic or spirited — or, occasionally, comedic. "I can turn it on like a switch," he says.
On the other hand, he has to tailor what he says and how he says it to the needs of the client. Ginsberg has dealt with funeral homes, for example, that ask him to keep his tone somber and comforting. A funeral home might sound like a strange company to be inquiring about hold messages, but there are many more where that came from.
"Who relies on our phone calls?" he asks. "Everyone!" From underwater SONAR to fruit bouquets, from dog resorts to exotic vets, almost any kind of company imaginable uses his service. The relationship between Ginsberg and his clients is symbiotic. With customers in all 50 states, TelephoneOnHold.com is thriving; similarly, companies that choose to invest in his services reap the benefits.
"Statistics show that our messages increase sales," Ginsberg says. "It works really well. We figure, if we're keeping them on hold, why not educate them about the new teeth-whitening service?"
A diary Constance Stellas had when she was only 9 kindled her interest in astrology. She had noticed the old signs on the inside cover and wondered about their significance. But it wasn't until after graduating from Kirkland College that she fully began to act on her love for all things celestial.
Sometime during her six years as an actress and producer, Stellas began to consider astrology as a vocation she could fall back on in case her burgeoning acting career fell short of expectations. She attended the New York School of Astrology, befriended an astrologer and apprenticed herself to him. "I found that I had an intuitive grasp of it," she says. "The planets made sense to me."
Publicity from a Working Woman magazine article helped her build a following, as did four books she has published, and success led to some unusual opportunities. Stellas once appeared on Fox's Money for Breakfast to make predictions about the stock market. Her forecast was optimistic, but despite her error in judgment — one she shared with a great many economists — she believes America is in the middle of what she calls an "evolutionary leap" that requires a restructuring of how we deal with the economy and life in general. Stellas was also paid to analyze music producer Phil Spector's chart during his trial for the 2003 murder of Lana Clarkson. She has been featured in The New York Times, Marie Claire and the Good Morning America radio show.
Stellas says that the position of the stars and planets at the time of birth can reveal a person's talents, personality and past lives. The most popular problems her clients have are issues of compatibility — and this is where a bit of counseling and psychology comes into play. Her book The Everything Sex Signs Book deals with relationships and how to best get along with others based on your planetary orientation. Stellas has even conducted a workshop at the Museum of Sex in New York on the topic. "A lot of people don't know much about astrology, but they know, 'Oh, I never get along with Geminis,'" she says.
Her Kirkland experience has shaped her life as an astrologer in multiple ways. "I think a general sense of the world in terms of a liberal arts perspective and a historical perspective gives me more ways to communicate with people," she says. "There was a wonderful combination of free flow and structure, and that gave me a very open-minded experience."
Ultimately, she wants people to know that astrologers are not infallible. "Fate is a very elastic construct, and we have some control over how we do things," she says. "So if you put yourself in the rhythm of the planets, then you have a better chance of succeeding. You may not be able to avoid difficult times, but at least you will know how to deal with them."
Nils Kulleseid has a way of disarming the curious who ask about his job. "I call myself Fred Flintstone sometimes," he says. But his work as a stonecarver and letter cutter is no cartoon. It's a calling. Kulleseid talks with an artist's vision and a lover's passion about the vocation and its history: the importance of the Arts and Crafts Movement of the 19th century, which emphasized the hand-crafted over the mass-produced; his love of cathedrals, encouraged by a course with Professor of Art History Rand Carter; the intricacies of different fonts and the play of sun and shadow across lettered stone. "When you get that beautiful raking light across a v-cut letter," he says, "it makes the subtleties stand out."
Kulleseid took his art history major into the Northwest woods to work for the Forestry Service for several years before being drawn to carving. He didn't qualify for an apprenticeship at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, "but they said their master carvers were from England, and that's where the schools were." At the library he turned up information about Weymouth College in England, applied and was accepted in 1993. "It was truly vocational," he says. "The stonecarvers and masons were at one end of the building, and the hairdressers and the bakers were at the other."
An apprenticeship in Cambridge — "kind of the Mecca of letter carving in stone" — followed. There Kulleseid worked at the David Kindersley Workshop, a prestigious shop that did a lot of carving for Cambridge University and Westminster Abbey. "Every time Prince Charles opened up a building, they had work," he laughs. After five years in England and stints in Egypt and Scotland, Kulleseid had built substantial skills. "I was kind of looking for perfection all the time," he says. "I'm a little bit anal."
A decade after returning to the United States, Kulleseid lives with his family in New Paltz, N.Y., and carves at his own workshop in nearby Rosendale. His career has turned out to be reasonably recession-proof so far, he says; "I do enough memorials to keep me busy." He's also done projects for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, St. Lawrence University and many private commissions as well as historic presentations. And if you happen to see a certain promotional video for The Johns Hopkins University, you'll see the Hamilton grad's hands wielding mallet and chisel. While he was working on a JHU project recently, "they took me aside one day and filmed me all day carving the name 'Johns Hopkins' in a piece of marble."
"People like to see it done by hand," he says. "A lot of that has been lost in the modern age. It's a shame."
Some young forensic scientists grew uo on a diet of CSI-style television shows or were inspired to enter the field by the dramatic recovery efforts in the wake of 9/11. Rebecca Hamm Just wasn't one of them. She had a pretty good idea of what she wanted to do as far back as middle school — "long before forensics was a 'cool' thing," she says. "I can remember my sister not understanding what forensics was, because it wasn't very popular yet, so she would tell her friends that I wanted to be a mortician."
Her interest was further focused on mitochondrial DNA as she pursued her senior thesis with Professor of Biology Patrick Reynolds, and after earning a 2002 master's degree in forensic science from George Washington University, she went to work at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Md. She now balances her career there with Ph.D. study at the University of Maryland.
Mitochondrial DNA is crucial to the work of identifying human remains because there's a lot of it. "You might have hundreds or thousands of mitochondrial DNA in every cell, in contrast to the nuclear genome, where you have just two copies," Just says. That means that when remains are old or damaged by traumatic force or the environment, "you can often get mitochondrial DNA data even when the nuclear DNA is too degraded to get any information. Mitochondrial DNA sticks around a lot longer."
Life in an actual DNA identification lab doesn't bear much resemblance to CSI, she says, "just like life in a prosecutor's office isn't as exciting as it is on Law and Order." But it has its occasional drama. While much of Just's work is in project management and "on the research side of things, developing new techniques and tools for identification," she also spent two weeks working in temporary morgues in Mississippi and Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina — "12 hours a day, seven days a week," she recalls. "It was pretty overwhelming." More recently, she had an opportunity to accompany military personnel on a notification visit to a family who had lost a loved one in the Vietnam War. The case had been a stubborn one, with bone samples on hand for a decade that would not yield enough DNA sequence data for a positive identification. "But one of my co-workers developed a new DNA extraction protocol" that enabled the lab to put a name to the remains. "It was very emotional and powerful," she says. "The family was so grateful." She later attended the burial at Arlington National Cemetery.
While the work can take an emotional toll, she says, "doing identifications for the military at this lab gives people an awful lot of pride. Those who do that work recognize how important it is for families to have that kind of closure — to have remains to bury, and to be able to mourn properly. And that makes it all bearable."
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