Summer 2023 Alumni Volunteers
Abby Easton – 2016
My name is Abigail (Abby) Easton (she/her). I graduated class of 2016, majoring in American Studies and concentrating in Educational Studies, African/African American Studies, and (almost but not quite) American Music. At Carleton, I was involved in music (student bands and jazz ensemble), Women Circle (CCCE volunteer program at Northfield Middle School), KRLX most terms, Late Night Trivia, and intramural softball.
I’ve lived in Brooklyn, New York since graduating. Right after Carleton, I worked at StoryCorps, an oral history non-profit in various roles including helping managing their 30-lesson social emotional learning curriculum for middle/high school students. I was also an educator through the Brooklyn Historical Society, an executive functioning and writing tutor for mostly students with ADHD, and was a host at a music venue called City Winery (did a lot of different jobs!). From 2018-2022 I was a Community School Director at a 6-12th public school in the South Bronx. In that role, I sat on the school leadership team with the Principal and Assistant Principal to program arts and enrichment opportunities, organize mental health resources, create family engagement opportunities, and more. In that role, I was also in charge of most of the school’s data management, including a significant part of the school budget. I’m now half way through a 2-year full time graduate degree for social work (MSW) concentrating in child welfare at Hunter College Silberman School of Social Work in East Harlem. In my free time I love to go to my ceramics studio and run. I look forward to meeting you all!
Alex Kosanovich – 2014
Alex Kosanovich graduated from Carleton in 2014 with a BA in chemistry and a love for molecular curiosities as well as a strong appreciation for the broad interests fostered through study with the Carleton Chemistry Department and its extremely generous faculty. That time at Carleton brought him to Texas A&M University to earn a PhD in inorganic/organometallic chemistry before moving to take a position with Dow Chemical. At Dow, Alex works in the North America Polyurethanes Product R&D group as a research chemist, managing projects and designing experiments with applied expertise across the fields of catalysis, formulation science, and next-generation materials development.
Anna Callahan – 2013
Anna Callahan ’13 currently works as a Program Manager for Trust for Public Land, managing their Community Powered Parks and Schoolyards program in Minnesota. Previously, she’s worked as a neighborhood planner for the City of Boston and as a Community Planner for JM Goldson, a small women-led consulting firm based in Boston. As an urban planner, she’s led robust community planning processes including comprehensive and neighborhood plans, housing and zoning studies, community-led grant programs, and site-specific master plans.
Prior to planning, Anna worked in membership and fundraising for the Museum of the City of New York. She holds a Masters in Regional Planning from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Arts in Asian Studies from Carleton College. She currently lives in Northeast Minneapolis with her husband and puppy.
At Carleton, she could be found dancing with Synchrony II (known then as Ebony II), dee-jaying for KRLX, or hosting brunch as a student resident at the Dacie Moses house.
Audrey Carlsen – 2012
I have had quite a meandering path since graduating from Carleton. I spent two months in medical school before realizing that I needed more time to figure out what I really wanted to be doing. I took a leave of absence and spent a year working in public radio. That year convinced me that life had other plans for me than becoming a doctor. From there, I enrolled in a coding bootcamp and spent the next six years in local and national newsrooms as a reporter, designer, and developer, working on data-driven journalism and interactive visual projects. I now work remotely as a data visualization developer at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology on projects including the bird identification app Merlin, eBird, and BirdCast. The breadth of my education at Carleton has supported my numerous career paths – while focusing on pre-med requirements during school, I also wrote for The Carl magazine, produced a radio show for KRLX, and dabbled in many other courses like computer science and creative writing. At the time I thought these were “just for fun” but they later proved to be foundational to the work I have ended up doing.
Beth Friedman – 2008
I graduated from Carleton in 2008 with a degree in chemistry. A fantastic undergraduate research opportunity doing field work in the Arctic led me to pursue a PhD in atmospheric sciences, where I conducted field and lab studies to study how particles in the atmosphere contributed to cloud formation. After a postdoc in atmospheric chemistry, I transitioned into government work and started working in the Air Quality Program at the Washington State Department of Ecology, where in my current role I am an air quality modeler and forecaster.
Carisa Skretch – 2008
I graduated in 2008 and majored in Asian Studies (focus on East Asian Art History). I now own a personal training studio in Los Angeles. My boyfriend, Rob, and I have owned the business since 2017 and are proud to have survived the pandemic and we are looking forward to our strongest year yet as we approach our 7th year. Our studio is designed to meet the needs and appeal to general population clients mostly between the ages of 40 and 70. Most chronic and common pains such as back, shoulder, and knee often arise due to years to sitting at an office job and muscle weakness leading to dysfunctional movements. With just 1-2 hours of appropriate strength training, most of our clients have amazing results on top of increased energy, balance, and cognitive ability. My role in the studio is all the administration, bookkeeping, and scheduling clients. In addition, my focus is client experience, and most of my continued study involves customer service, customer mapping, psychology, and anything else I can learn to provide the most exceptional experience to our clients to keep them coming back (a true win-win as the more consistent they are, the better results, and the happier they are).
At Carleton I mostly focused on Art History and I attended the Studio Art in the South Pacific study abroad program. Outside of studies, I was a frisbee and broomball intramural czar as well as captaining Eclipse, our women’s ultimate B team (who have since gone on to compete at DIII nationals and win since my time!). I also played a LOT of World of Warcraft!
Like a few other alumni, I graduated immediately into a recession in 2008 and my career path was far from straightforward. I temped, painted portraits, and worked for a commercial tenant rep where I gathered a lot of organizational, spreadsheet, and financial skills that have come in handy running my own business. Now I get to focus on connecting with our clients and building the type of service business we all wish existed – one completely dedicated to the success of its clients.
Felix K. Amankona-Diawuo – 2008
I enjoyed many aspects of life at Carleton. I majored in Chemistry and took lots of math and physics classes. I worked at the Math Skills center and in the the chemistry department as TA and tutor. I had the opportunity to do computational chemistry research with Dani Kohen, which helped me decide to pursue further studies in Theoretical/Computational Chemistry at Northwestern University. Since graduating from Northwestern in 2013, I taught at Truman College in Chicago for a semester and then at the Latin School of Chicago. Currently, I’m back to Ghana waiting for my immigration case to be sorted out. I’ve decided to change careers into Data Analytics when I return to the US and have been spending most of my time acquiring the necessary skills.
Jay Shen – 2015
I graduated from Carleton in 2015 as a History major and Africana Studies minor. I was also heavily involved in the music department as a singer. I am currently a supervisor with UnitedHealthcare leading a team of language interpreters who also support a telephonic sales environment. I started my career with the very same team as a Mandarin interpreter and within the recent 3-4 years became a team lead and then a supervisor for the very same team.
Joseph Brown – 2009
My is Joseph Brown. I graduated from Carleton in 2009 with a major in Chemistry. Carleton has had a profound impact on my life. I met my wife and many of my best friends there, and my academic experience set me up for success after graduation. I currently work in pricing strategy at a software company called Salesforce. In this role I help think through what features go into a product and how much we sell the product for. Since graduating from Carleton I’ve had many roles in pricing. I love the blend of art and science inherent in the role , and the opportunity to learn about new products and work with people with different backgrounds across the company.
Julia Bakker-Arkema – 2014
Julia Bakker-Arkema is a research scientist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art specializing in volatile chemical emissions and air quality. She graduated from Carleton in 2014 and earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2020. Her graduate research focused on the atmospheric oxidation of volatile organic compounds and the subsequent formation of atmospheric aerosols, a process that contributes to particulate matter pollution. After receiving her Ph.D., Julia served as a science policy advisor in the Colorado state legislature, specifically addressing ozone pollution to improve the Colorado Front Range air quality. She then spent two years back in Northfield teaching chemistry at Carleton College as a visiting professor. She now works in the Preventive Conservation Science Laboratory in the Department of Scientific Research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to identify and quantify reactive volatile emissions from conservation materials in order to protect cultural heritage objects.
Kayla Jackson – 2014
Hi! I’m Kayla (she/her). At Carleton, I majored in Religion and concentrated in African/African American Studies. I enjoyed that I didn’t have to choose just one side of myself at Carleton too but could explore subjects like studio art, psychology, and economics at the same time. I benefit from this interdisciplinary approach in my current day-to-day life: In my professional life, I combine data analysis with written communications in my work in local government. In my free time, I enjoy learning about the chemistry of glazes as a ceramic artist.
After I graduated from Carleton in 2014, I moved to New York City to participate in a Jewish social justice fellowship called Avodah. I then moved to New Orleans, where I taught high school math and then worked at a non-profit preparing high school students for college. After this, I attended graduate school in public policy in Seattle, WA to focus on creating more equitable systems.
For the past few years, I have been an organizer and policy analyst at nonprofits and local government agencies in Seattle, focusing now on housing and anti-displacement policy and programs. I currently work for King County as an Equitable Development Policy Analyst. Outside of work, I like to make pottery and explore the outdoors.
Melissa Mitchell – 2004
As a Certified Professional in Project Management, Melissa has a robust background in project management involving multiple constituents. She has strong acumen in getting sometimes complex and off-course projects back on track and aligned with grantor expectations and deliverables. Her experience also includes documenting, organizing, and communicating all aspects of a project, from ideation to implementation to evaluation. She has a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and African American studies from Carleton College and a Certificate of Professional Project Management from the University of St. Thomas. She has been with Youthprise for six years, working on various federal, state, and foundation-funded grant programs.
Sarojini Rao – 2009
I attended Carleton from 2005-2009; I was an Economics major and Cross-Cultural Studies minor. I was an international student, from India, and it was my first time in the US, so most of my memories of that time are a blur of culture shock and learning to navigate everything. The first highlights of my Carleton experience were working at PEPS on a project that digitized cassette tape recordings of old Convocation talks — I learned a lot of Carleton history doing that. I also loved taking Women’s and Gender Studies courses and working as a Gender and Sexuality Center Associate and being involved with a number of great events and initiatives.
Other highlights from my time at Carleton include living at WA House, studying abroad in China, traveling to Guatemala on a volunteer trip that was funded by a grant from the college, and working for the international student orientation my senior year. I really enjoyed the upper-level Econ and Math classes I took in my junior and senior years, and have surprisingly fond memories of working on my comps late into the early morning in the CMC Mac lab. I’m constantly grateful to Paula Lackie for the time we spent figuring out my comps data and Stata, and for the time I spent with her and Andrea Nixon at their house, and visits with Paula’s mom and with Eleanor Zelliot. But for the warmth of Minnesotans, I would never have survived the cold.
After graduating in 2009, I worked as a Research Assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston from ‘09-’11, and then went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, where I got my MA and PhD in Economics. I moved to Richmond, VA in 2019, where I work as an economist in the Department of Planning and Budget for the Commonwealth of Virginia. I analyze the likely economic impact of changes to certain state regulations. These regulations can cover a wide range of topics, like opioid prescriptions, upholstered furniture that uses recycled materials, online beer retail, certification of doulas, chemicals in vaping products, and changes to water quality standards.
During the fall, I support the budget development process by forecasting expenditures for Virginia’s safety net programs. In the spring, I teach an economics class in the Public Policy PhD program at Virginia Commonwealth University. And in the summer, I try to be outdoors as much as possible. Outside of work, I serve on the board for the local Planned Parenthood affiliate and organize with Southerners on New Ground. In my ample spare time, I powerlift, meditate, try to keep some plants alive, and spoil my two dogs, Copper and BB.
Sebastian Tovar – 2018
I majored in Political Science/International Relations at Carleton with two minors one in Africana studies and the other in Cross-cultural studies. I enjoyed my time at Carleton because given the school’s size, I was able to get closer to my peers and my professors. Additionally, I would say that Carleton’s liberal arts education has helped me to be very versatile in the various professional environments and tasks that I have encountered.
Currently, I am taking a year of self-development around the world to learn more about myself, other cultures, and other languages. Before starting this journey, I was a Data & Research Analyst for the Equity, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion team at AbbVie. In that role, I got to use data to ensure that there was enough representation across the company, especially at the leadership levels. Prior to joining AbbVie, I was a Revenue Management Analyst at United Airlines, where I analyzed trends to optimize the revenue for the airline and to provide the right ticket to the right customer at the right time.
Looking towards the future, I may shift my career in something more along the lines of public policy, diplomacy, or international development. All of that while also utilizing the data skills that I have acquired in my professional career so far.