Meet the Class of 2011: Katherine Mateo
May 6, 2011
Katherine Mateo
This is the first in a series of profiles of Lehman College 2011 graduates.
Lehman senior Katherine Mateo was at work—she's a private consultant in HBO's Legal Corporate Offices—when the call came in from the dean of Stanford Law School. Not only had she been accepted to the School, but she also was offered a full scholarship covering tuitions, fees, and books. It was one more accomplishment in a very long list for the twenty-one-year-old native of the Dominican Republic—and the one she wanted most.
A self-described high achiever—with a goal set to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court—Mateo is a member of the CUNY Macaulay Honors College at Lehman, where she is majoring in three fields: political science, physics, and philosophy. The three majors reinforce her interest in law. Political science and philosophy are traditional majors for aspiring lawyers, and physics is important, she says, "because it has shown me about quantifying life."
For her senior thesis in political science, she compiled a 100-page study on the welfare system of New York City and New York State over the last century, including the impact of legislation and regulations at the Federal level. She worked with her long-time mentor, Professor Ira Bloom (Political Science), whom she first met while taking part in a public leadership program at Lehman for gifted high school students.
In her final project for philosophy, she looked at how the brain reacts when making rational decisions—or, as she describes it, "neurobiology meets philosophy." Working with her mentor on that project, Philosophy Professor and Chair Massimo Pigliucci, she compared long-held beliefs by philosophers with newly published reports by neuroscientists. Her research showed that no decisions could be made solely by reason or solely by emotion; therefore, she concluded, "all rational decisions are tied in with emotional pull."
In her third major, she's currently taking an astrophysics course at Baruch College, where she's building a telescope and writing a report on the physics of lenses and the science of the solar system, and also an electricity and magnetism course at Hunter College.
She does all of this while participating in as many social and extracurricular activities as Lehman and CUNY have to offer, including serving as the president of her Macaulay Honors College class for the past four years. Mateo says she accepts any and every invitation to lectures, conferences, workshops, or volunteer service because "you never know whom you're going to meet and what you're going to learn."
Mateo has a long list of internships under her belt, including ones at NBC, where she put together a voter video guide for candidates; at the State Attorney General Office's Consumer Fraud and Protection Bureau, mediating cases for consumers and working on landlord-tenant issues; and as a filing clerk with State Supreme Court Judge Nelson Román. Last summer, she was an aide in New York Congressman Anthony Weiner's office in Washington, D.C.
At the Macaulay Honors College, she takes part in its Goldsmith Scholars Program and serves as a student ambassador, giving tours through its Upper West Side headquarters and providing information at open houses.
Mateo credits the Macaulay Honors College at Lehman with helping her to achieve her goals. Accepted to several top colleges and universities for undergraduate study, she chose the Macaulay program because of its small class size and the caliber of its faculty. "From the faculty and staff to the overall open feel of the campus," she says, "I felt that Lehman had the best to offer."
Mateo was five when she and her family moved from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico, and six when they emigrated to the U.S. and settled in New York. What motivates her, more than just wanting to succeed, she says, is a strong desire to help others. Her desire to sit on the Supreme Court stems from her belief that this would offer her the best position to effect change.