Alumna (BA '96), Dr. Virginia Lindahl, shared her experiences as a clinical psychologist in private practice with Christina Gee's undergraduate Clinical Psychology class. Thanks for coming back for a visit!
Category: Alumni Spotlight
Check out some of our amazing alumni accomplishments and updates! If you have news to share (jobs, promotions, publications, personal news), please use our announcements form. We would love to hear from you!
Alum Naomi Spinrad’s (Psychology BA ’68) wide-ranging 45-year career in journalism
Stories of Her Life: Alumna’s Global Journey in Journalism Returns Her to the Familiar Confines of GW
Naomi Spinrad, CCAS BA ’68, ESIA MA ’86, has had a career in journalism that has taken her around the world and provided adventures: dropping out of a helicopter onto an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, briefly steering an aircraft carrier and spending more time than she can count on military ships. It’s been a life far away from her undergraduate and graduate years at GW, which she started at age 15 then came back to in her early 30s.
But for a recent story, these two worlds came together. Now a contract producer with the State Department’s Foreign Press Center, Spinrad connected a team of journalists from Cameroon with Sacred Huff, LAW ’19, a GW student with a powerful story about growing up in the foster care system and earning a scholarship to study law at GW, with a mission to change the system she knows from the inside. An advertisement for GW’s Power & Promise scholarship initiative in GW’s alumni magazine spotlighted Huff and her journey, which caught the eye of Spinrad.
“I read almost anything I stumble across,” Spinrad says.
When she saw Huff’s story, Spinrad was engaged in the Cameroon project. It involves bringing a team of journalists to the U.S., with State Department funding, to report on the ground about issues important to Cameroon that also advance the U.S. interest in promoting democracy. This project focuses on women’s empowerment and civic engagement.
Who better, thought Spinrad, than a young African-American woman from a difficult upbringing who’s using her education to improve the lives of others in her situation? Huff is one of a group of American women whose stories will be broadcast in three segments in 2019 on Canal 2, the leading independent channel in Cameroon with an electronic reach across Africa.
“The hope is that it will activate young Cameroonian women to be more involved in political, business and civic life in Cameroon,” says Spinrad, “and that it will ultimately help participatory democracy there.”
Spinrad has her own story to inspire. She moved away from her New York City home and started GW as a 15-year-old freshman, having skipped fourth and eighth grades and, she says, been especially good at standardized tests. She graduated with a degree in psychology when she was just 19. Although the degree did little to predict her future as a globetrotting journalist, it did serve an important role in her development.
“I have lots of good feelings about GW,” she says. “For me it was a great place to move from the middle teenage years to early adulthood, intellectually, socially, and emotionally.”
She started what became a 26-year career at NBC News as a researcher. By year six, she was a producer. At age 31, she returned to GW to earn a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies, which NBC paid for while Spinrad also worked full-time. She found great inspiration from professors including Cynthia McClintock in political science, James Robb in Spanish literature, and Marvin Gordon in geography. But the workload strained her.
“I spent vacation one year writing my thesis and barely avoided giving up because it was tough working full-time and going to school,” she says.
In a 45-year career in journalism, she’s won an Edward R. Murrow award for NBC’s coverage of NATO’s 1999 bombing of Belgrade, Serbia and a national Emmy Award for the network’s report on the 1988 U.S. Navy shootdown of an Iranian passenger plane, which killed 290 civilians. She calls her 10 years as producer at the Pentagon the most satisfying and memorable, pointing to series she did on African-Americans in the military, HIV/AIDS in the military, and women in the military. Then there were all those high-speed adventures that counted as work.
“It’s been pretty cool,” she says in her quiet, understated way.
– Dan Simmons
Alum Jennifer Maher (Psych BA ’04) is CEO of 1776, the Northeast Corridor’s largest network of entrepreneurial incubators
Building a Community of Entrepreneurs
Originally published in GW Alumni
Jennifer Maher, CCAS BA ’04, is an Amtrak warrior, and her office is her backpack. But that’s how she prefers things.
As CEO of 1776 — the Northeast Corridor’s largest network of entrepreneurial incubators — she travels to their nine campuses (soon to be 10), with the majority of her time split between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
“We provide desks, office, conference, and event space, like a lot of providers do, but we are application based. You can’t just sign up,” she explains. “We want to curate the right membership. We pool like-minded companies together.” For example, they have a drone facility and lab space that’s focused on biotech and robotics. Their next campus, opening soon in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, will be inside a retail mall and will be product-based. They’ll help e-commerce companies that need temporary brick and mortar space for demos and collecting customer feedback.
In addition, 1776 offers accelerator programs, where companies apply for 12 weeks of intense mentoring and advising. “We council people and startups a lot on when and how to take investment money,” Maher says. “Our success is measured by the success of our members and how their companies grow – that’s the biggest mission of our company.” They also aim to strengthen economies and cities by developing a strong community of entrepreneurs.
Maher and her team know the ins and outs from their own experience. This dual-offering setup is the outcome of a merger between 1776 and Benjamin’s Desk, a co-working space company that Maher started with her husband in 2011. They built everything on their own terms for years, before taking on investors, so they understand what it takes to build a business.
After she made many successful real estate investments, after the 2
008 financial crisis, and got her commercial real estate broker’s license, she and her husband saw an opportunity when co-working spaces were relatively new. In 2012, they opened 3,000 square feet of co-working space in Philadelphia, and one of their first clients was Uber, which was gearing up for its northeast expansion. From there, Benjamin’s Desk grew rapidly.
Fast forward to the summer of 2017, when they started conversations with 1776. “We had a good real estate model, and they had the incubation and programming model. [The merger] exploded us from being in Philly to nine campuses in the northeast,” she says, adding that her goal is to expand to 20 campuses in 2019.
It’s easy to see why she’s now at the helm of 1776. But looking back, she never expected this path.
From a young age, she wanted to be a criminal defense attorney. At GW, she double majored in psychology and criminal justice – and she did it in just three years. It was at law school when her path started to change. After clerkships on both the defense and prosecutor side, she realized there was a heavy emotional toll dealing with people’s lives. “I thought it would be easier to deal with money,” she says.
Right out of law school, she got a dream job at a firm – in civil law focused on franchise law. But she quickly learned that she was much more interested in the business side than the legal side. “So, I started thinking about plotting my way,” she says, adding, “and I didn’t like working for other people.” These are more reasons why the entrepreneurial space is a perfect fit, even if it took a while to get on this path.
“GW dramatically shaped the course of my life,” Maher says. From the moment she stepped on campus, she fell in love with the school. “It was everything I needed,” she says, reflecting on the urban setting, being exposed to things on a global scale, and developing strong friendships. She’s part of a group of six women who met in the dorms and have remained best friends. They’re all overachievers, with 14 degrees among them.
When Maher was a student, the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship didn’t exist. But now, she’s giving back to GW through its entrepreneurship programming. Last spring, she was a final judge for the 2018 GW New Venture Competition. One of the semi-finalists, a company called Last Call, whose two co-founders are a recent grad and current senior, is part of a new 1776 accelerator program that started last September. In this new program, 1776 doesn’t take any equity or provide any capital.
Despite her workload, volunteering, and making sure she has enough quality family time with her husband and two kids (ages 6 and 4), she still finds time to train for triathlons, Ironman competitions, and marathons. She even did a half marathon pushing both her kids in a stroller. “I get the best business ideas and epiphanies while running,” she explains.
As a self-proclaimed overachiever, her advice to budding entrepreneurs is two-fold: keep an open mind and make sure you have grit and perseverance. “When you get knocked down, get up,” she says, because in entrepreneurship, “the highs are high, and the lows are really low.”
-Christine Cole
