Katherine Mateo '11 Wins Rosemarie Kutza O'Neill Award

July 5, 2011

Katherine Mateo

The honors just keep coming for recent Lehman graduate Katherine Mateo (B.A., '11), who won a full scholarship this spring to Stanford Law School. Now, Mateo has won Lehman's 2011 Rosemarie Kutza O'Neill Award. "It's a great honor," she says.

The award was created in 2008 by Lehman alumna Melissa O'Neill (B.A., '00) in honor of her mother, Rosemarie Kutza O'Neill, who died suddenly at age 30, when Melissa was just eleven years old. Each year the honor, which includes a $1000 award, goes to an outstanding female graduating senior who has been admitted to law school.

"My mother always dreamed of becoming a lawyer one day, but she was never able to fulfill that dream," says O'Neill, now a litigation associate at the New York law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP. "This is my way of honoring my mother's memory."

"I feel very connected to Lehman. I have so much in common with the students, so I wanted to do something to give back to the Lehman community," says O'Neill, who graduated summa cum laude from Lehman and magna cum laude from New York Law School.

Mateo, who was born in the Dominican Republic and lives in the Bronx, is a self-described high achiever—with a goal set to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. She is a graduate of the CUNY Macaulay Honors College at Lehman, where she majored in three fields: political science, physics, and philosophy.

Mateo also held a number of impressive internships, 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.

At the Macaulay Honors College, she took part in its Goldsmith Scholars Program and was a student ambassador, giving tours through its Upper West Side headquarters and providing information at open houses.