Virtually Advising: The Advisors

Virtual Advisors
Myles Helfand, Director, General Advisor
Mary Anne Feeney, Associate Director, General Advisor
Anahid Kassabian, Chief Advisor
Christopher Clough, Prelaw Advisor
Dina Goldstein, Psych Advisor
Anna Kaltsas, Premed Advisor
Mariam Mourad, Psych Advisor
Elizabeth Stone, Media Advisor
Leo Svendsen, Industrial Science Advisor
Darin Woolpert, Liberal Arts Advisor

Guest Advisors
John Acquaviva, general
Lauren Pachman, prelaw
Seeta Persaud, media
Ian Richards, compsci
Pat Richards, education

Myles Helfand, Director, Co-Founder and General Advisor

Like his father, his father before him and his father before him, Myles Helfand was born a baby at a very young age. As a child growing up in central New Jersey, he competed intensely for the honor of being the worst player on his little-league baseball team and bore a striking resemblance to all of Malcolm's friends on Malcolm in the Middle.

Myles somehow managed to survive high school without being beaten up, though, and no longer sucks at baseball. Four years at New Jersey's picturesque Drew University earned him a B.A. in political science and English, grass stains on his shorts from playing ultimate frisbee, and several early grey hairs from running his school newspaper. In 1999, before the ink on his diploma had dried, Myles was hired by Student Advantage, a commerce company aimed at the college market. He spent the next two years as Academic Life editor for Student Advantage's short-lived college news, information and advice Web site. Since then, Myles has whiled away his daylight hours as Managing Editor of The Body, the Web's most complete source of HIV/AIDS news and information, and The Body Pro, The Body's sister site for health care professionals.

While at Student Advantage in the fall of 2000, Myles, his Assistant Editor Mary Anne Feeney, and Fordham University professor Anahid Kassbian decided they still had too much spare time on their hands. To solve that problem, they started up a service offering students one-on-one, online counseling to help them through their academic troubles. The rest, as they say, is... whatever they say it is.

To learn more about Myles than any reasonable person should want to know, you can visit his MySpace page.

Mary Anne Feeney, Associate Director, Co-Founder and General Advisor

Mary Anne Feeney is the Assistant/Media Coordinator to the
Executive Director at Amnesty International USA. At Amnesty she acts as the
liaison between the executive director and the staff, works on various
research and media projects and edits the national internal newsletter. She also works on drafting urgent actions for asylum seekers and has visited and interviewed asylum seekers detained in the U.S. She helped organize a refugee workshop for Amnesty's regional conference, where she spoke on the topic of the refugee situation in Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. She has spoken at various schools, the National Organization of Women and the League of Women Voters on topics including post-9/11 concerns and women's human rights.

While growing up, Mary Anne was involved in many activities, including Peer Support, a group started by her high school's social worker to help troubled teens. During high school she spoke at several schools on Long Island on topics such as AIDS awareness, teen pregnancy and eating disorders.

Mary Anne majored in journalism at Fordham University, from which she graduated with a B.A. in 2001. Sophomore year she was inspired by an individual she met from The New York Times to put her college newspaper, The Observer, online.

Mary Anne has many interests, including politics, history, law, literature and investigative journalism. She enjoys writing, acting, cooking healthy vegetarian food, playing her guitar, reading stream of consciousness novels, and spending time at the beach.

Anahid Kassabian, Chief Advisor

Anahid Kassabian, Ph.D., is the James and Constance Alsop Chair of Music at the University of Liverpool. Prior to her stint on the other side of the pond, Anahid was Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies and Director of the Literary Studies Program at Fordham University, where she also served on the program faculty in Women's Studies. She has curated Armenian Film Festivals, served as chair of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and is a former editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies and Stanford Humanities Review. She's a mom, an occasional film critic and was formerly a three-time undergrad transfer, labor organizer and activist. Her first book, Hearing Film, is available online and in bookstores.

Christopher Clough, Prelaw Advisor

Christopher Clough, Esq., currently plies his lawerly trade in the Texas attorney general's office in Austin, one of somewhere around two Democratic cities in the sea of red known as the southern United States. He earned his law degree from the University of Texas in 2003, four years after picking up a bachelor's at Columbia University, where he majored in political science. While in law school, Chris specialized in copyright law and legal education, and whiled away much of his spare time acting as an LSAT teacher and adviser for prelaw students. Believe it or not, there are no visions of multimillion-dollar lawsuits dancing in this law-school grad's head; his heart belongs to academia, that heavenly netherworld of higher education to which he hopes to one day return.

Dina Goldstein, Psych Advisor

After earning her Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Temple University in Philadelphia in 2007, Dina is now conducting her post-doctoral work with the VA Connecticut Healthcare System and the Yale University School of Medicine.

Dina was born in Moscow, Russia, and immigrated to Dallas with her family at the age of 13. After realizing during her freshman year at the University of Texas-Austin (Hook'em, Horns!) that molecular biology was not her life calling, she went on to complete her B.A. in psychology before earning an M.A. and Ed.M. in psychological counseling from Teachers College at Columbia University.

In Dina's spare time (what spare time?), she enjoys spending time with her fiancé, family and friends, traveling (she has been to more than 20 countries), singing and listening to music, cooking and going out to eat, reading and photography.

[Please note: Though Dina holds graduate degrees in psychological counseling, her role at VA is to provide academic advice, not psychological support. If you're looking for counseling or psychological therapy, please seek the help of a professional therapist!]

Anna Kaltsas, Premed Advisor

Anna Kaltsas, M.D., is completing her infectious diseases fellowship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center in New York. She was born (and now lives) in the Big Apple but was raised in Zeus' playground, better known by us mortals as Athens, Greece. In May 2004, Anna made ol' Hippocrates proud when she joined the ranks of America's white-coated lifesavers, completing her medical degree with honors from Albany Medical College. She completed her residency at Weill Cornell Medical Center In 2007.

Believe it or not, Anna also had a life before she became a physician. She spent most of her childhood romping through Athens with her parents and twin brother, both of whom attended ACS Athens, an international, English-language school. She returned to the States with her family in 1996, where she promptly dove into her studies at Drew University in New Jersey. While at Drew, Anna ran the school's chapter of Alpha Phi Omega (a coed service fraternity), was Copyediting Manager of the student newspaper, The Acorn, and served as a tutor and teaching assistant for the college's biology department. She graduated with a B.A. in biology and English in 2000 before moving on to Albany Med, where she served for two years as a student representative on the school's admissions committee.

In Anna's spare time... Haha! Just kidding. Ah, that was a good one. In Anna's dream world, which is overflowing with spare time, she enjoys relaxing on the pillow-soft sands of pristine Greek islands and spending quality time with her loving family and friends.

Mariam Mourad, Psych Advisor

During and since her graduation from Fordham University in 2001 (with a B.A. in psychology, of course), Mariam has dived into psychology research with a passion: Working closely with established academic researchers, she has helped conduct studies on topics ranging from HIV risk reduction to substance abuse among mothers on welfare. In her spare time, she volunteers as an advocate and counselor for sexual assault and domestic violence victims. She's now in her third year at Michigan State University's psychology Ph.D. program.

Elizabeth Stone, Media Advisor

Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., is a professor of English, communication and media studies at Fordham University. She also is the faculty adviser to The Observer, Fordham's primary campus newspaper. Elizabeth's writing focuses on issues of ethnicity, psychology and literature; she has written three books and many magazine articles for an array of publications, including The New York Times. Her most recent book, a memoir, is A Boy I Once Knew: What a Teacher Learned From Her Student (Algonquin Books, 2002). It is based on 10 years' worth of diaries left to her by Vincent, a former student who died from AIDS in San Francisco in 1995.

With one foot in the academic world and the other outside it, Elizabeth is aware of the sometimes odd ways the two worlds regard one another. As a result, her point of view on just about anything relating to student life is likely to be neither solely academic nor solely Real World. Not at all incidentally, she is the mother of two sons, one of whom recently graduated from George Washington University and the other who started his four-year tour of college duty last fall.

Leo G. Svendsen, Industrial Science Advisor

Leo earned his Ph.D. in Materials Science from Aarhus University in Denmark. He has since worked in England, California, and New York as a research and development manager in high-tech materials. He often arranges cooperative ventures between industry and academia.

Darin Woolpert, Liberal Arts Advisor

Darin is a Ph.D. candidate in the language and communicative disorders joint doctoral program at San Diego State University and the University of California-San Diego. His current research focuses on the written language outcomes of children with prenatal stroke, and the development of literacy skills in Spanish-English bilinguals. In the future, he plans to focus more on the neuroscience aspect of his discipline, using fMRI and ERPs to further understand the neural correlates of linguistic ability. He does not know when he is going to finish his program, so please don't ask.

Over the course of his life, Darin has worn many hats. He has also worked in a number of diverse jobs, as an ESL teacher, an editor, a playwright, a columnist, a technical writer, and an academic tutor. Darin graduated cum laude from Drew University with a B.A. in English and theatre arts in 1999, and is currently working towards getting his clinical certification as a speech-language pathologist as well as completing his Ph.D. He is fluent in both Spanish and ca-razy (but not karate).

Guest/Former Advisors

John Acquaviva (general)

John, a 2000 graduate of Fordham University (the alma mater of many of our Virtual Advisors), currently works in the student services department at the Fordham University School of Law. The first member of his family to earn a college degree, John remembers running into more than a few rough patches on his way through -- yet, in a frightening masochistic twist, he plans to head to graduate school as well. Speaking of which, here's another fun fact about John: He loves horror films, especially those cheezy straight-to-video ones. (The Dentist 2: Brace Yourself is one of his favs.) John was a Virtual Advisor from 2002 to 2003.

Lauren Pachman (prelaw)

Lauren Pachman, Esq., works for a a law firm in Washington, D.C., specializing in personal injury and medical malpractice litigation. She earned her law degree in 2001 from George Washington University Law School, and is licensed to practice law in New Jersey and Maryland. Lauren was a guest advisor at VA from 2002 to 2003.

Seeta Persaud (media)

When last we were in touch with Seeta, she was at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, where she was well on her way to earning a master's degree in public administration. Prior to her return to academia, Seeta donned a number of professional hats, including graphic designer and programmer for the NBC News Web site in New York City. This multi-disciplinary job allowed her to dabble in a range of areas that have long held her interest: newswriting, graphic design, Web programming, sales and management.

Seeta majored in communications and minored in computer science at Fordham University, where she graduated with a B.A. in 2000. Her interests include astronomy, classic American literature, alternative fiction, Guyanese literature, TV production, independent film, journalism (particularly media literacy), computer programming, creative writing, Ancient Greco-Roman history, N.Y. and national politics, foreign relations and sexy librarians.

An advocate of cultural, intellectual, ethnic, and sexual diversity and equality, Seeta is a full-time activist and tries to implement positive change wherever she can. She aspires to become a lawyer and hopes to one day hold public office. Seeta was a Virtual Advisor in 2001.

Ian Richards (computer science)

Ian came to answering computer science-related questions from a long
history of denying his affinity for the field. A political science major who left law school early because it lacked adequate coverage of operating systems and compilers, Ian then plied his computer trade amidst the halls of the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., the software laboratories of Cambridge, Mass., and most recently the canyons of Wall Street in New York City. Ian graduated from American University in 1998 with a B.S. in political science. He was a Virtual Advisor from 2001 to 2004.

Pat Richards (education)

Pat Richards recently retired from her long-held position as assistant superintendent of the Onondaga - Cortland - Madison BOCES in upstate New York, a school district that includes the city of Syracuse. Pat was a VA guest advisor in 2005.

Got a question for our team of Virtual Advisors? Ask away!
(We may use your question on our site, but we'll always respect your privacy.)