Julian Cyr Leaves His Mark
“I am currently traveling abroad in Brazil and have no reliable access to e-mail from March 15 through March 24. I will respond as soon as possible upon my return.”
Not many graduating seniors create an automatic e-mail reply while they’re away on spring break—but Gallatin’s Julian Cyr (BA ’08) did. Then again, everything that the overachiever does is a bit extraordinary. Before he left for Brazil, a trip he took with Gallatin’s Dean’s Honor Society, he chatted with us about his myriad academic and extracurricular achievements. In his four years at NYU, Cyr took advantage of nearly every opportunity Gallatin and the University offer; he also created a new initiative that services current and future students.
When Cyr arrived on campus in 2004, he didn’t waste any time getting involved. A fellow freshman encouraged him to apply to be a peer educator in NYU’s LGBT Office of Student Services—an organization with which he soon became heavily involved. Cyr recalls, “I think the ability to form my own community, and more crucially the opportunity to consider my own identity in the context of a socially prescribed ‘gay’ identity was perhaps one of my most seminal personal experiences at NYU.”
Cyr’s participation with the LGBT Office expanded into his serving as the LGBT peer educator in residence at Hayden Hall, a dorm that houses nearly 700 freshmen. The following summer, he took the Office’s sexual health advocates training program, and soon he and another sexual health educator, Grant Picarillo (a 2007 College of Arts and Science graduate), developed the idea for the NYU HIV Testing Initiative.
It began with the intention of offering a new format for students to partake in HIV testing. Cyr and Picarillo created three pilot programs offering free HIV screenings and information in the 2005-2006 academic year. The programs became a huge success: because screenings occurred in accessible venues such as residence halls and communal spaces, in three evenings more students were screened for HIV than would have typically been in a three- to fourth-month time period at the Student Health Center. Building on this success, and with the Health Center’s support, the Initiative subsequently offered a series of expanded programs. By the end of the 2006-2007 academic year the Initiative had reached more than 500 students, screening more than 300 of them for HIV. In the 2007-2008 academic year it incorporated 16 off-site HIV screening programs, and future plans include designing a website and more outreach efforts. Says Cyr, “I wanted to make sure that the robust program we now have exists beyond my tenure.” The Initiative also earned Cyr and Picarillo recognition: they received NYU’s President’s Service Award and a Youth Venture/mtvU Changemaker Challenge Grant, a national award that helps fund student-run community service endeavors.
Cyr came to Gallatin interested in studying public policy and cultural arts, but his activities led him to focus more on policy along with community work and health topics. He settled on a concentration in Public Policy, with a sub-focus in cultural policy and public health. Taking many of his courses at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service, along with coursework in sociology and Gallatin interdisciplinary seminars, he even made time to study abroad in London in his sophomore year. He credits Stacy Pies’s Imagining Cities course with teaching him how to “truly be a writer,” and Pat McCreery’s AIDS and its Cultural Effects course, which dovetailed well with his extracurricular interests, with challenging him “to think of HIV/AIDS in historic and artistic contexts.”
In his sophomore year, Cyr was elected to NYU’s Student Senators Council (SSC), the highest policy-making and deliberative body of students on campus. The SSC is made up of 22 representative senators who also sit on the University Senate, which is comprised of faculty, students, deans, administrators, NYU President John Sexton, and members of the University Leadership Team. By Cyr’s senior year, he had risen to vice-chair of the SSC, a role that tasked him with overseeing 13 different student committees, meeting monthly with President Sexton and members of the Provost’s office and the Division of Student Affairs, and being involved in reviewing and crafting student policy. His efforts included expanding student health services, fostering communication on mental health and suicide prevention, and amending financial aid distribution.
Though he’s held a very public role on campus, Cyr noted that his position as a volunteer HIV counselor at Manhattan’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which he undertook to augment his experience with the HIV Testing Initiative, was one of his most gratifying tasks. “It’s the interpersonal connections that you make, and the experience of helping people—not in a grand policy kind of way, but really impacting someone one-on-one. That was one of my most rewarding experiences.”
Heading into his final semester at Gallatin, Cyr landed a highly prestigious internship with the William J. Clinton Foundation, specifically working with Clinton Global Initiative University (CGIU), whose aim is to engage universities and college students. At CGIU he’s worked directly with student leaders at campuses across the country, developing “student commitments” such as conservation or upcycling programs. He’s even helped international students doing HIV work in the Ukraine. “What distinguishes CGIU from other organizations is its commitment to action and to be new, specific, and measurable,” Cyr states. On a related topic, he chose to focus his Gallatin senior colloquium on institutional activism, and how people have worked within and through institutions to create change.
Cyr’s future plans are coming together; he’s considering applying to the Peace Corps and other programs abroad or taking some time to travel. He’d like to get a graduate degree—a master’s in public policy or administration, or possibly a joint degree combining public policy with either law or business—and as a self-described “political junkie,” he may even volunteer at the Democratic National Convention. Perhaps someday he’ll be headlining at one.