Excellence Honored

Melanie Berdecia '12 and Gleb Drobkov '12 have been named winners of the state Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence.

The designation is made annually to State University of New York students “who have best demonstrated and been recognized for their integration of academic excellence with other aspects of their lives, which may include leadership, campus involvement, athletics, career achievement, community service or creative and performing arts.”

ILR, established by the New York State Legislature in 1945, receives partial state funding and is a SUNY partner college.

Berdecia, the daughter of Dominican immigrants, is the first in her family to go to a four-year college. She is studying Japanese and hopes to work in the international law arena, where she can use her language skills, including fluent Spanish.

Through a travel grant from ILR International Programs, she researched labor conditions in the Dominican apparel industry and interviewed labor court judges about apparel factory cases.

Berdecia works as a multicultural affairs assistant in the ILR Office of Student Services.

Drobkov, concentrating in managerial finance as a 2013 MBA candidate at the Johnson School, is a native Russian speaker.

As a consultant in the Global Transfer Pricing practice at Deloitte, he has experience in the homeland security and oil and gas sectors.

Drobkov was a law intern at Proskauer Rose LLP in New York City and at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. He hopes to pursue a career in international business.