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On Wednesday, the Lander College Bioethics Society held its inaugural lecture called “M.D.: To Be or Not to Be. A Halachic Perspective.” Rabbi Dr. Howard Apfel, a board certified pediatric cardiologist at Columbia University Medical Center and an expert in the field of medical ethics, spoke about whether a Jew is allowed to become a doctor. As Rabbi Apfel said at the beginning, it’s pretty obvious how he holds given that he’s a doctor, but the issue isn’t so cut and dry.

The universe is constantly in motion, from the deepest galaxy to its tiniest atom. LCM Class of 2012 graduate Ariel Hochster put this idea into psychological practice while at Touro. Along with classmates and Professor Lieb Litman, the Queens native and current Kean University Psy.D candidate conducted groundbreaking research in the area of conjoined analysis. It’s a method that uses computer software to help parcel out surveyed responses to questions with myriad variables, rather than arriving at conclusions about human behavior through conventional, fixed experiments. 

As soon-to-be LCM grad Cheskie Rosenzweig astutely observes, racism and prejudice in America have become relatively subtler to detect, but are far from eliminated in our consciousness. “It’s more about the smaller social biases that people have that they’re sometimes not even aware of,” he says.

There’s no reason a person can’t make change in the community by crunching numbers. Take senior Accounting student and President of the Accounting Society, Belgian-American émigré Kenneth Preisler. During his sophomore year, the current New Yorker volunteered for the IRS’ VITA program, which offers free assistance with tax returns for families with annual incomes of $51,000 or less. Besides providing crucial hands-on work with clients, it helped Preisler realize that finance can function as social work.

When opportunity knocks, Moishy Gerstel answers. The Kew Gardens, Queens transplant (by way of Toronto) wrapped up his B.A. in Psychology (with a minor in Finance) at Lander College for Men in 2012, to the tune of a 4.0 GPA, having achieved membership in Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology. Gerstel realized the next step toward pursuing a career in psychology would be earning his Psy.D., but also realized the application process alone was going to take months, a period he wasn’t willing to watch idly pass.