Senior D’Errico is More than a Scholar
Gallatin Today caught up with senior Nikki D’Errico (BA ’06) because she received the prestigious honor of being Gallatin’s Helbein Scholar for the 2005-2006 academic year. (The William and Pearl C. Helbein Scholarship awards are given by NYU to students who have outstanding potential for leadership and service to their professions and communities.) But in speaking with this exceptional student, it became quite clear that her achievements go far beyond this single recent award.
Through both her studies and extracurricular activities, D’Errico has truly taken advantage of every opportunity that her Gallatin education has afforded. She has been an active participant in Gallatin’s Writing Program, a member of the Dean’s Honor Society, an Orientation Leader, a campus sexual health advocate, a member of the Peer Health Awareness Team, and a DJ for WNYU. She interned at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the PEN American Center for Writers, and spent a summer studying abroad in Florence. In her junior year, she won an NYU Office of Community Service Project Grant to buy books for adult students in the University Settlement Society’s ESOL class. This past summer she worked as an assistant to the director of the International Oral History Conference at Columbia University. She has also won the NYU President’s Service Award for Leadership for her dedication as a dormitory Resident Advisor and for her community service. Surprisingly (or perhaps not so) these aren’t even all of her accomplishments.
Her adviser, Gallatin Professor and Writing Program Director June Foley, describes D’Errico as a “gifted, passionate, and diligent student who displays outstanding intelligence, industry, sensitivity, and grace.” D’Errico brought exactly these qualities into her discussion with Gallatin Today—following are some of the highlights.
GT: Why are you interested in the subject matter you chose for your Gallatin concentration: Narrative for Empowerment and Healing?
ND: I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was six years old. [Through the Gallatin Writing Program] I began teaching English and writing to adult immigrants at the University Settlement Society, on the Lower East Side. This made me realize how incredibly important writing is as a life skill….My students wanted to learn how to fill out job applications, how to read street signs so they could get licenses, or hospital signs in case their children got hurt. I also began to witness and study how a language barrier creates a rift in the generations of a family. So I taught, with June Foley, a class that helped close that rift by reading children’s books with mothers who could then bring the books home. This empowered them, encouraged them to read with their children, and hopefully cultivated stronger bonds.
But writing is also healing, and I’ve studied the effects of journaling and crafting a narrative through times of emotional tumult. My studies have focused on how metanarratives are created by culture, and how we can empower and heal people by giving them the autonomy to create their own narratives.
GT: Have any Gallatin courses in particular had an effect on you?
ND: I was really impacted by Brad Lewis’ class, The Philosophy of Medicine. We studied how the process of being ill in this country has been problematized by the use of the biomedical model in our doctoring practices. I realized that ill people, as a group, like the immigrants I taught, were also demoralized by the experience of being assigned a narrative. I’m interested in the importance of giving that narrative back to the patients, for them to create their own narratives that aren’t defined by medical phrases, measurements, and science, but by their grief, their emotions, their experience—which is never talked about during the clinical encounter.
My mother had lung cancer during the time I was taking Brad’s class, so I was able to see firsthand what it was like for her to die in the Western world—a world that struggles to prepare someone to accept and understand death and illness. This idea of the importance of narrative was unduly proved for me in my mother’s last weeks….She needed to understand her life as a story—a story that had a beginning, a middle, a narrative arc (a purpose), and then, an end. An end that had arrived, but was sequentially the next phase, and thus, maybe a phase she was ready to accept.
Also, I could, and maybe one day will, write a book about June Foley’s impact on my life. In her class, when I was a freshman, she turned me on to the idea that writing can be therapeutic. I was her student-teacher at the University Settlement Society, where I was able to witness her genuine kindness and love for writing and for her students.
She has also provided me the safest of havens—in her office, electronically through her check-in emails—which has brought a sense of home to my time at Gallatin.
GT: Can you talk more about your involvement in Gallatin's Writing Program?
ND: It started with the Literacy in Action course taught by Paul Jurmo and then spiraled forward. I have been on the editorial team of The Literacy Review [an annual journal of literacy student writing] since I was a sophomore and I’m now the editor-in-chief. This year I went to a conference called SCALE: Student Coalition for Action in Literacy Education, and taught a workshop called “Using The Literacy Review as a Writing Class Text.” This spring I’m teaching a writing class for refugee students from the International Refugee Committee and the Bellevue-NYU Survivors of Torture program, and I’m a peer writing assistant in the Writing Center.
GT: What about your plans after graduation? We hear that you've been accepted to the Peace Corps.
ND: I’ll be leaving in July for Morocco, where I’ll teach women’s reproductive health education and maternal health education workshops. I’m a trained doula, which is a woman who provides emotional and physical support to women and their partners during labor, birth, and in the beginning stages of breastfeeding. This semester I’m doing an independent study on cross-cultural birthing traditions and rituals and how the process of childbirth became so medicalized. I hope this will prepare me to work with pregnant mothers in Morocco, a Muslim country.
GT: What are your ultimate career aspirations and goals?
I hope to write books about my experiences in public health and literacy education, and memoirs that are accessible to people on a wide scale. And then of course I’d like to be a professor, to inspire others in their own passions.