Talent on Tap at Harvard

Using the Tuition Assistance Plan, University Staff Become Extension Alumni and Alumnae

Harvard University staff members who are on the regular payroll and have worked at least 17.5 hours per week since July 1 for fall courses and November 1 for spring courses are eligible for the University's Tuition Assistance Plan (TAP). To register for Extension School courses using the TAP benefit, eligible students must submit completed TAP forms and TAP fees ($40 per course) with Extension School registration forms.

Each year hundreds of Harvard University staff use their TAP benefit to study at the Extension School. Indeed, the Tuition Assistance Plan (TAP), offering undergraduate and graduate credit for a fraction of the catalogue price, is often cited as a leading reason for seeking employment at Harvard. Like many thousands of Extension School students, most TAP students take courses that satisfy personal and professional interests, with no thought of matriculating for a degree or certificate. But also, like classmates who have no other affiliation with Harvard, there are a dedicated few among the TAP students who have a greater goal in mind--graduating from Harvard and savoring the pride in a Harvard education that all Extension School alumni(ae) share. Here we meet four such alumni(ae), newly minted members of the Class of '02.

Mark Petrino, ALB '02

Mark Petrino, ALB '02, manager of dining services for Quincy House, Harvard College, began his Extension School studies in 1984. While this did not qualify him for this year's "tortoise prize" for the slowest race to the finish line, it does recall a wonderful story of ambition and persistence. Petrino lived on Beacon Hill in the 1980s during his "salad days." He was in his twenties and developing an interest in the food industry, as a waiter and an employee at a gourmet delicatessen. But he was also pursuing his education at night, taking courses in Soviet history and international politics at the Harvard Extension School. "The classes seemed smaller then," he recalls, "and the Yard was darker, but the faculty was first-rate and I loved being in school at Harvard."

In 1989 two events interrupted Petrino's Soviet studies: the chance to start his own restaurant in Philadelphia and the fall of the Soviet Union. The restaurant was a great success. Petrino's business partner and head chef--his mom--believed she could feed the city of Philadelphia if they would only show up, and this family atmosphere marked the restaurant's strong appeal. But Petrino began to regret having walked away from the chance to earn a Harvard degree. So, in 2000, when his mother announced her retirement, they sold the restaurant for a profit and he returned to Boston with his wife (a Boston native) and two-year-old son, Anthony.

When a position opened with the Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS), he leapt at the opportunity to work and study at the same place. He interviewed with HUDS directors and, as luck would have it, with Dr. Michael Shinagel, dean of university extension and Master of Quincy House (which needed a new dining hall manager). Petrino and Shinagel hit it off from the start as Mark's dream career and the continuation of his Harvard education converged.

The Tuition Assistance Program was icing on the cake, a benefit that Mark Petrino only heard about after he was hired. Now, as an older student, he relished the chance to study the sciences, writing, and the world's religions. "Everyone was great, from Suzanne Spreadbury, my advisor, to Ben Abrahamse, the doctoral student who was my teaching assistant in World Religions. When I had to miss class to manage a banquet at Quincy House, he brought the draft of my paper to the kitchen, filled with useful comments."

As a Harvard alumnus, Petrino is looking ahead again. He and his wife have a new home in New Hampshire and he can't imagine leaving Harvard. "I love coming to work each day. And TAP will keep me in school for a long time to come. I'm planning to continue with the ALM degree or one of the certificate programs." How might the Extension School improve its services? we asked an expert in customer service. "Don't change anything," he replies. "It's perfect."

Tatiana Murnikova, CSS '02

Tatiana Murnikova, CSS '02, is the administrator of Professor Jack Strominger's immunology laboratory in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. Born in Moscow, Murnikova worked as an architect and civil engineer in the Soviet Union. When her country was approaching collapse in the late 1980s, her husband, Vlad Murnikov, designed, built, and entered a 90-foot racing yacht in the Whitbread Round the World Race. After a stopover in Florida, the Murnikovs decided to immigrate to the United States, eventually choosing Boston as their new home. Murnikova remembers "flying into Boston for the first time on July 4, 1990, at night, and seeing the city illuminated by the fireworks of Independence Day--it was an unforgettable sight."

The Murnikovs set out to discover America, first by sailing up and down the East Coast, and then on a cross-country car trip that touched nearly all of the national monuments and parks. In 1997, Murnikova took a job at Harvard and enrolled in the Extension School without delay. The first order of business was English language training. But when the possibility of continuing her professional education became increasingly clear, she recalled suddenly wanting to take all 600 courses in the catalogue. The Certificate of Special Studies in Administration and Management (CSS), with a concentration in human resources, was a perfect fit for Murnikova, who manages 20 people along with the payrolls and budgets for her lab. The Tuition Assistance Plan was an added incentive. "I would encourage everyone who works at Harvard to take advantage of this resource," she says.

Commencement Day 2002 was marked by something more than the "heavy mist" of Harvard legend. It poured on the 35,000 graduates and supporters who huddled in Tercentenary Theatre for the morning program. But Tatiana Murnikova was still happy. "In Russia, rain is good luck," she explains. "So a rainy Harvard Commencement is the best luck of all."

Elise Ciregna, ALM '02, is an administrative coordinator at the Harvard School of Public Health, winner of the Dean's Thesis Prize in the Humanities, and, with her 3.95 grade point average, an Extension School Class Marshal at Harvard's Commencement. Ciregna's master's thesis, "Museum in the Garden: Mount Auburn Cemetery and the Development of American Sculpture, 1825-1875," was praised by her thesis director, Professor John Stilgoe, as "one of the finest theses I have read . . . a genuinely original contribution to the still-emerging field of art history welded to material-culture and visual-cultural studies."

Elise Ciregna's fascination with public art history and restoration took root in childhood as her French father and American mother darted back and forth across the Atlantic visiting every museum and art-historical restoration they could find. Ciregna attended "restoration camps" in France in the summer and explored the Roman ruins in the basements of the family's French apartments in the winter. Perhaps doubting the practicality of these interests for a career in today's world, Ciregna earned a BS in mass communications from Boston University. But soon she returned to her first love, becoming a project manager for the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, and a board member of the New England chapter of the Victorian Society of America.

Ciregna's attraction to Mount Auburn Cemetery evolved from her discovery that many of its patrons were the forebears of the museum movement in nineteenth-century New England. Indeed the cemetery, established in 1831, contained the first marble sculpture carved by an American on American soil, the "Child in White" (now sadly removed from Mount Auburn's rolling landscape). Ciregna's thesis, unlike scores of earlier studies on the Mount Auburn Cemetery, linked it to the fine arts tradition that was maturing in the early decades of the new republic.

"The Harvard Extension School and the Tuition Assistance Plan have been crucial to my professional development," Ciregna said in June. She began her doctoral studies at the University of Delaware and the Winterthur Museum in September 2002.

Elaine Fortin, ALM '02, is a senior Oracle application developer in Harvard's office of financial systems and a web designer for the Harvard-Smith-sonian Center for Astrophysics. As one of the first Extension students to earn the Master of Liberal Arts in Information Technology, Fortin applied computer technology to the challenge of teaching introductory astrophysics. In the words of Dr. Eric Chaisson, director of the Center for Science Education at Tufts University, co-author of a popular textbook on introductory astrophysics, and a lecturer at Harvard Extension School, "The subject of light, electromagnetic radiation, and spectroscopy is the most difficult material to teach and to learn." To address this challenge, Fortin created a website and a CD containing two- and three-dimensional interactive graphical animations and text. The cosmic images were created from actual telemetry files captured by telescopes on Earth and in space.

Born and raised in eastern Ontario, Fortin is descended from seven generations of French- and English-speaking Canadians. As a ham radio enthusiast interested in astrophysics, she became involved in "moon bouncing"--echoing radio signals off of the moon to communicate with other ham operators in places as far away as Japan and Australia. So, when a recession in Canada led to layoffs in 1997 and Fortin suddenly found herself unemployed, she jumped at the opportunity to seek a "dream job" that integrated her love of computer programming and her rising passion for astrophysics. After searching for work with space researchers at NASA and the Lockheed-Martin Corporation (builders of the space shuttle), she found an opening at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Soon she was working with images generated by the Ultraviolet Coronagraph Spectrometer on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located "a million miles from earth toward the sun."

In connection with her master's thesis work at the Extension School, Fortin developed a method of animating these images and images of the planets in the solar system, and putting them on a website in such a way that an internet visitor can zoom in and out, turn, and "spin the planets" using a regular keypad and mouse. Now that astrophysicists at NASA, scientists in Russia, and scholars at the UCLA/Mt. Wilson Observatory in California are familiar with Fortin's work via the Internet she hopes to present her Harvard Extension School thesis findings at international conferences.

All of this has happened in the last five years to a financial systems programmer suddenly laid off from a dead-end job in the Canadian government. Arriving at the Harvard Observatory in October 1997, Fortin wasted no time in applying for her TAP benefits. Soon she was registered for Cosmic Evolution at the Harvard Extension School and discovering the potential of computer graphics for introductory astrophysics. From this point on, to Elaine Fortin's way of thinking, the sky was the limit--and in that vector there is no end in sight.