Alumni Accolades February 2015

Jacob Tobia (2010) was featured on MTV as part of The T-Word, a documentary project about transgender and gender non-binary youth directed by Laverne Cox. Watch Jacob discuss the use of pronouns in this clip. Jacob has also been featured in the Washington Post, Upworthy, and Huffpost Live over the past few months.

Nicholas Cobb (2014) was named to The Root’s 2015 Young Futurists, who are young African-American men and women who are forging a path to future greatness.

Aaron Chadbourne (2002) has taken a new job as Senior Policy Advisor within the Office of the Governor in Maine. When she learned of this news, Jennifer Cruickshank with the Coca-Cola Company in New England invited him to an event where he reunited with David Dumont of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Northern New England – the same Bottler who presented him with his Coca-Cola Scholar certificate when he won the scholarship!

Christopher Gray (2010) will be pitching his scholarship app, “Scholly,” to investors on Shark Tank on Friday, February 20 at 9 p.m. Eastern on ABC. According to the ABC teaser, interest in Christopher’s app “ignites into the most heated Shark fight ever with 3 of the Sharks walking out of the tank!” See a clip here.

Update! Scholly is now the #1 app in the itunes app store after making a deal on Shark Tank, trading $40,000 for a 15 percent stake in his company with Lori Greiner and Daymond John. Watch Christopher’s pitch and the Shark fight that ensued here.

Albert Lawrence (2003) co-hosted the Oscars pre-show and post-show on ABC as part of his new position as the Digital Media Producer for ABC7 in Los Angeles! You can follow his adventures at @talkoffame or @ABC7Albert.

Last month we shared that Raygan Sylvester became part of the State Farm Youth Advisory Board, and we have since found out that 8 Coca-Cola Scholars have served on the board in the past 2 years! Pictured above: Macie Whatley (2013), Anjali Bhatla (2013), Jake Bernstein (2012), Pavane Gorrrepati (2012), ​Justin Pearson (2013), Macy Early (2013), Raygan Sylvester (2014), and Suneil Kamath (2012).

Elizabeth Fisher’s (1996) photo is featured on a billboard in Atlanta as the face for the Georgia Tech Executive MBA program!

Amrit Saxena (2011) sold Fancy That Technologies, a machine learning and analytics company he founded, to Palantir Technologies, a large data integration and analytics company. News of the buy-out has appeared in TechCrunch, Fortune, and Entrepreneur.

Jesse Bernal (2000) was recently hired as Vice President of the Division for Inclusion and Equity at Grand Valley State University.