MPS Class of 2015 Excelling in the Ivy Leagues

Mercyhurst Prep has many students who go on to Ivy League universities and the MPS Class of 2015 is a wonderful example of that. This class, as a whole, is excelling and doing many wonderful things for this world. The Class of 2015 has four students who graduated from or are currently studying at Ivy League schools. Libby Federici graduated from Harvard University, and Dan Fitzgerald graduated from Brown University this past May, both virtually, of course. Matt Benczkowski and Amanda Simmons are both working towards their master’s, Matt at Yale University and Amanda at Columbia University.

Libby received her master’s degree in Arts in Education from Harvard. She said she was lucky to be advised by some amazing art educators and gain the teaching experience she did while at Harvard. She was a graduate student teacher at the Harvard Art Museum, and she also worked with high school teachers in the area to create in-gallery lessons for students. She is currently living and working in downtown Boston in a Catholic Worker House, through an organization called Haley House. Libby, along with 9 other housemates, runs a soup kitchen and other food ministries out of the first floor of the house. She said, “I can very clearly trace my alignment with the Catholic Worker and my interest in visual art, religion, and social justice to my time at MPS.”

Dan received a Master of Public Affairs dgree with a specialization in data-driven public policy from Brown. As part of his master’s program, he worked as a graduate public policy consultant at Deloitte Belgium. While there, his job was mainly to design policy strategy for the European Union. He contributed to a couple projects, which involved modernizing government and making them more efficient via better data practices. Unfortunately, his time in Belgium was cut short due to COVID-19, but he was able to gain wonderful experience in the time he did spend working there. Dan now works for a federal government consulting firm in DC.

Matt is starting the final year of his Master of Public Health program in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases with a concentration in Global Health at Yale. He spent the first year of his program working to research, design, and get international approval for his own epidemiological study so that he can study the entanglement of war and infectious disease. He is also working on a project to standardize the identification of parasite strains using molecular biology techniques. His focus is on the parasitic disease, Leishmaniasis in Southwestern Colombia. He was awarded three research fellowships for this past summer to help fund these projects: The Wilbur G Downs Fellowship for International Health, the Jan A.J. Stolwijk Fellowship for Environmental Health, and the Yale Professional Student Medical Research Fellowship. Although Matt could not travel to Colombia as he’d hoped, he has been able to work remotely with CIDEIM, a WHO collaborating center, and in the upcoming school year, he will begin working with Yale’s Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine.

Amanda is studying for her master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University, in Secondary Science Education. She began taking classes online this summer, a semester early thanks to COVID-19. Although beginning early means she will finish sooner, it also means she will be working remote for most of her studies and will only be on campus for one semester. Amanda keeps a positive attitude about studying through this pandemic saying, “I’m actually glad to be taking education classes during the pandemic because there are so many big questions about the future of education that are being discussed right now.” She will graduate in May of 2021 and plans to teach biology at an urban public high school in NYC. She is grateful for her teachers at MPS who taught her the value of a good education, and she is excited by the opportunity she will have to positively impact her future students and inspire them like she was inspired by her teachers at MPS.