News Release

Below are three Hopkins seniors who graduate on May 22. All three are outstanding in two arenas and all have made difficult decisions. Please call me for interviews.

Ali Yazdanfar, 21, (Wincote, Pa.) came to Hopkins without any idea of what he wanted to do when he finished school. He enrolled as a pre-med major, took courses in many subjects and loved them all. He studied German language and culture each semester, plunged into physics and maintained a 4.0 GPA in his classes. His name will be on a research paper on atomic physics this summer. But he also spent four hours each day practicing the double bass, and more hours in classes and with the orchestra at Hopkins' Peabody Conservatory of Music. His parents first heard him play seriously at his formal recital at Hopkins this past February; this spring, he won Hopkins' Sudler Prize in the Arts.

For three of his Hopkins years, Ali agonized about his future and last September he had to make a choice. "I originally intended to apply to both physics and music schools, but then I realized I was doing this for what other people wanted," Ali says. "I settled into physics and am very happy I chose it, but it would really bother me to have that as my life." So while Ali graduates with honors in physics and once thought of continuing in astrophysics, he has chosen to take his huge 150-year-old double bass instrument down to Rice University in Houston for a graduate degree in music. His father, a Phildelphia cardiologist, didn't take the news too well.

Steven Hwang, 22, (Radnor Township, Pa.) enrolled at Hopkins as a double major --biology and voice--and for almost four years, his life has had a double edge. A young man with a beautiful tenor voice, he shuttled each day by bus between the Hopkins Homewood campus and the downtown Peabody Conservatory of Music, gathering 24 credits each semester in music lessons as well as rigorous pre-med science courses. In between, he volunteered at two HIV clinics in Baltimore, rowed on the Hopkins crew, ran miles each day, sang and directed others in song. When Steven arrived at Hopkins, he organized the AllNighters, an extraordinary a cappella group of young male singers which won second place in the mid-Atlantic competition and which, in less than four years, has earned Hopkins a reputation for superb concerts with the largest and most enthusiastic audiences. Singing popular music with the group, he sings classical repertoire for his teachers, winning top grades for his rendition of German lieder, and French and Russian songs.

Where to now? For Steven, the immediate choice is medicine and this fall he begins his training at Temple University, a medical school deliberately chosen for its location. Steven's Peabody voice instructor also teaches at Philadelphia's Curtis Institue of Music.

"It's not really a choice because I'm still going to pursue the music," he says. "The male voice doesn't settle down until age 30, so in ten years I'll see what I feel like then."

Nicolee Wilkin, 21 (Western Springs, Ill.), the only child of a single mother, raised in a suburb of Chicago, has taken two full-time university programs at Hopkins concurrently and will graduate with two degrees this month, one in music and the other in international relations. Not only has this young woman completed this mammoth undertaking, taking 30 credits each semester, but she has done the five-year double program in only four years and made Dean's List to boot. "She is living two lives, as an outstanding opera singer and outstanding in international studies," says academic advisor Ruth Aranow.

Nicolee starts her 19-hour days with academic classes from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. and opera rehearsals from 8:30 until midnight, then curls up to do homework until 3 a.m. In between, she plays tennis, socializes with her sorority sisters and with her boyfriend (a double degree major in mechanical engineering and economics), serves as student advisor and section leader of the Peabody chorus, and auditions for singing roles or prepares for recitals. She did 20 solo concerts in the Baltimore-Washington area last summer alone, at the same time that she worked at the Office of International Trade in downtown Baltimore.

Other than planning to attend a summer program in Graz, Austria, Nicolee doesn't yet know whether she'll study voice or work in her beloved field of international relations when summer ends. But she's not perturbed. If she doesn't get accepted by the music school of her choice, she'll turn to her other interest. "I loved my work with the trade office and Washington, D.C., would be a neat place to pursue this kind of career," she says. "Most people are worried about finding a job, but I'm not; I've had good luck before."