Staff Biography

Jo Fitts
Ms. Jo Fitts joined the Honors Center in July of 2005 and finds it a very rewarding experience. As a College Office Assistant Ms Fitts keeps track of all aspects pertaining to Honors Program and Honors College students. From group emails to keeping the students abreast of on campus happenings, Ms Fitts is “the one to get it done”. She performs puppets in Central Park on the weekends and occasionally can be found performing her standup act in local Comedy Clubs through out New York. Quote to live by: “Live long and prosper”.

Lindsey Freer
Lindsey Freer is a Ph.D. student in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she specializes in twentieth-century American poetry. She holds a bachelor's degree from Barnard College. Her dissertation examines the effects of Cold War political strategies on the composition of contemporary epic poems. Lindsey has taught writing and humanities courses at BMCC, York College, and the City College Center for Worker Education. She also served in the AmeriCorps national service program, where she developed and taught computer skills classes for recent immigrants seeking employment in the U.S.


Margie Hinonangan
Margie Hinonangan Mendoza is the Macaulay Honors College Advisor at City College. Margie assists students with academic issues from registration, selecting a major, graduate school planning as well as advises students about co-curricular  activities including internships, study abroad and community service.

At City, Margie is the faculty advisor for the Honors Student Activities Council (HSAC) and coordinates the City Honors Freshman Mentoring Program, New Student Seminar and the Ambassador Program. Margie has a Masters degree in College Student Personnel from the University of Maryland, College Park and majored in Political Science at Douglass College, Rutgers University.

Margie enjoys blogging, taking pictures and wants to travel the world. Ask her about her dog, Einstein!


Alia Tyner
Alia Tyner went to alternative public high school in Manhattan and attended Oberlin College in Oberlin, OH. She graduated with a BA in English and went on to teach mathematics at a different alternative high school in New York. After two years of teaching, she returned to school to pursue a doctorate in sociology at The CUNY Graduate Center, which I am currently finishing. She hopes to complete her degree by January 2008. During her doctorate degree, she was a teaching assistant in statistics at The Graduate Center for a year, a teaching fellow at Hunter College for two years and a writing fellow for two years, also at Hunter.
 
CUNY has always been an important educational institution in Alia's life. Her mother's entire family was able to attend college because of CUNY's free and open admissions policy. Having grown up in New York (and less than 10 blocks from the campus), The City College has always held opportunities for advancement and, when Alia got the chance to work here, she jumped at it.
 
Currently, Alia is the Study Grant Coordinator for the Honors Center. She assists students in searching for internships and study abroad programs. This semester, she has also worked to develop a speaker series where leaders in different industries are invited to speak and eat with Honors students.
 
One important lesson that she has learned over her life is that there are many different paths to a goal so you don't have to follow the same path as everyone else.