News & Events
Stacy Cruickshank Named 2008 Valedictorian at City Tech
Walt Whitman would have loved Stacy Cruickshank. This year’s City Tech valedictorian shares his passion for poetry and the Brooklyn waterfront.
Cruickshank, 27, will receive two degrees this June: a bachelor of technology in facilities management and an associate degree in civil engineering technology. She already holds a City Tech associate degree in construction management technology. And she’s also a two-time winner of the prize in Creative Poetry for Adults at the Grenada Arts Festival, for her poems “From Dawn to Dusk” and “Utopia.”
Cruickshank, originally from Trinidad, has made the most of her years at City Tech. She is an Emerging Scholar -- part of the next generation of researchers -- who works with English Professor Richard Hanley, founding editor of Journal of Urban Technology, under a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study the Brooklyn waterfront. To create a historical record, she is compiling an archive of newspaper articles and is writing synopses of events held at the College and Brooklyn Historical Society, focused on the waterfront’s development, Walt Whitman and other pertinent topics. Says the energetic student, “If I wasn’t graduating, I’d continue working on it!”
For the past three years, Cruickshank competed as a City Tech team member in the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and American Institute of Steel Construction Steel Bridge Building Competition. The college took third place in the 2006 and second place in the 2007 regionals, with their models of a 22-foot bridge able to hold 2,500 pounds.
To Cruickshank, an ASCE Scholarship holder, that experience is an example of the unusual opportunities City Tech provides. “I loved the engineering program for its hands-on approach,” she enthuses. “Our professors are consultants who have worked in engineering and construction businesses and can give you a real, practical sense of it. They have links to companies, they post job openings and help you choose classes. They help you uncover your true potential.”
It was a City professor who interested Cruickshank in engineering. “Engineering was something new for me, but Professor Cioffi (Construction/Civil Engineering) made it sound real and alive. My professors were very encouraging; they are genuinely interested in what you’re doing. I was really touched by that.”
For two years, Cruickshank interned at the New York City School Construction Authority as a project management assistant, helping 65 Manhattan public schools comply with local lighting, signage, power and emergency egress laws. Currently, she volunteers for the authority, helping to train others in gratitude for having been given a paid internship.
She is now working as a City Tech college lab technician, assisting professors and helping students learn to use equipment. In addition, she delivers motivational talks to high school students and their parents as part of Access for Women, a City Tech Continuing Education program for women interested in exploring career opportunities in non-traditional technical fields, and tutors for both the Learning Center and the Local 1199 Nurses Program -- not surprising, since Cruickshank was a teacher in Grenada, where she lived with the maternal side of her family since age eight.
After graduating from high school there at age 15, also as valedictorian, she attended college for two years and received an associate degree in science. Then, she taught subjects from composition to agricultural science in several lower school grades. She knew she wanted to attend college in New York since her mother had moved here and she was attracted to City Tech because, “It offered a valuable education for a good price."
Cruickshank, who received a CUNY Student Senate Academic Scholarship, is graduating with a 3.93 (out of 4.0) grade point average. She was inducted into both the National Society for Collegiate Scholars and The Order of the Engineer. She honed her leadership skills at City Tech as president of the ASCE student chapter on campus.
Last September, she founded the International Students Alliance, serving as its president. “When you come here as an international student,” she explains, “you may feel afraid and not know what to do. We can be there for one another and help each other get through.”
Now Cruickshank is seeking a company to hire her so that she can work full time for a year, then earn a master’s degree in construction management from either Columbia University or New York University.
As the first college-bound person in her mother’s family, Cruickshank had to defend her desire for higher education. “My aunt in Grenada would ask, ‘Why do you read so much?’ I always liked school; I always wanted to do more than the ordinary.”
"Ordinary" is not a word anyone would apply to Cruickshank, whose many accomplishments can overshadow the challenges she's had to face. Her parents split up when she was 12, dividing the family. Even her living situation is complex as she switches off between family in the Bronx’s Norwood neighborhood and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park area.
Cruickshank’s valedictorian message to her fellow graduates on June 3 in the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden will be to not limit themselves and to look at the big picture. “We all have the capability. The energy you take to say ‘I can never do that’ you can actually channel into doing it,” she declares. “When you’re optimistic and positive, things seem to work out -- not by sheer luck, but because people are more willing to help you when you have a good attitude."
The joy and enthusiasm Cruickshank projects would have given Walt Whitman something to sing about.
5/8/08
