May 10, 2013
Temple University Ambler's graduating students are an exemplary group of diverse students who will soon begin the next chapter in their lives in a wide variety of fields.
To honor our graduating class, Temple University Ambler is profiling just a few of the shining examples of the class of 2013! To learn more about each graduate, be sure to click "READ MORE" in each profile box.
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Temple Community and Regional Planning graduate student Terrence Harrington came to urban planning as a profession from a decidedly atypical angle, receiving inspiration from the unlikeliest
of sources.
George Costanza.
“I was watching an episode of Seinfeld where George was pretending to be a city planner. It was the first time that I thought about urban planning as a career,” said Harrington, a career military officer with more than 17 years of service to his country. “At the time I was being redeployed to Iraq, but I knew that city planning was my future.”
It’s a future firmly rooted in his military career, which has incorporated planning in some aspect at nearly every turn.
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It takes a certain confident “jump in feet first” attitude to apply for the coordinator position of Bike Temple when you have only rarely touched the pedals of a bike.
Community and Regional Planning Master’s degree student Lindsey Graham simply saw it as another challenge.
“I had been on a bike maybe four times in my adult life — I was no bike rider — but I applied because I have a passion for transportation planning,” said Graham, 27, who will be the School of Environmental Design Graduation Ceremony Student Speaker on May 16. “In 2011 I decided to take a chance and really learn how to ride a bike in the city. I took Bike Temple’s Urban Riding Basics course and it truly changed my lifestyle.”
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It’s no secret that Horticulture major Brandon Huber has a passion for plants. A 300-plus strong plant collection and nearly that many ribbons from the Philadelphia Flower Show has a tendency to remove all doubt on that front.
Huber, 23, will happily tell you he’s been a “plant person” since his parents took him to the Flower Show when he was 8. He’s added more and more greenery to his exceedingly diverse collection — and every spare inch of his parents’ Northeast Philadelphia home — ever since. While truly in his element with his plants, Huber never wanted to remove people from the equation.
“Some plant people genuinely feel most comfortable around in their gardens or greenhouses, surrounded by plants. They don’t really like being placed in social settings and certainly avoid the spotlight — they’re not ‘people people,’” said Huber, who will graduate with his degree in Horticulture from Temple on May 16. “I saw that as a weakness in myself as well. Taking on leadership roles and public speaking was a real challenge. I knew I wanted to improve because I want to be a leader in the (green) industry in the future.”
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Yinqi Dai is an artist. She doesn’t paint landscapes, however, she creates them.
Her canvas is the land. Her brushes — pen, pencil and 3-D imaging. Her paints — a vast palette of plants, flowers, trees and stone.
“When I went to school in China, I majored in Art — oil painting. I wanted to find a career related to drawing,” said Dai, who will soon graduate from Temple’s Landscape Architecture program. “I looked at landscape architecture master plans and city plans and I found beauty there. There is art in those plans — it’s just a different canvas.”
Dai moved from Shanghai, China, 6 years ago with her husband, Patrick, who was a graduate student at the University of Colorado at the time. There was a bit of moving around in those first few years of acclimation, she said, while also adding an addition — her son Ethan, who is now 4 — to the family.
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During the summer of 2012, Landscape Architecture major Anthony Buscaino spent a two-month stint at Rikers Island Correctional Facility in New York.
Fortunately it wasn’t as an inmate. Buscaino provided mentoring — and often just a caring ear willing to listen — to inmates as part of the Horticultural Society of New York’s “GreenHouse” program, an initiative dedicated to reducing the rate that inmates return to criminal activity “by offering men and women who are incarcerated an innovative jail-to-street program using horticultural therapy as a tool to prepare them for reentry.”
“I would spend three days a week working with people who were sentenced to a year or less and detainees who had not been sentenced yet — two different gardens with two very distinct inmate populations,” said Buscaino, 21, who will receive his Landscape Architecture bachelor’s degree on May 16. “While it’s designed to teach a helpful skill set, it’s just as much about the process; about giving them the opportunity to express themselves. For me, it was as much about giving them someone to talk to and someone who would listen to them as it was about horticulture — it was a profound experience.”
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Master of Landscape Architecture (MLArch) student Sara Street has a different sort of commute than her peers. Her home is in Laporte, the county seat of Sullivan County, a good three hours away from Temple University Ambler.
The logistical nightmare of such a daily trek, particularly while raising her 8-year-old son, Rowan, seems overwhelming on the surface. However, Street’s dedication to continuing to hone her talents as a landscape architect — and a particular passion for ecological restoration — has helped her surmount the insurmountable.
“Basically I get all of my school work done during the week while I’m here,” said Street, 39. “I rent a room at a property adjoining Temple Ambler and walk the trail to campus. At home, I have a really wonderful support system with my parents taking care of my son — without them, none of this works.”
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