Taheerah Usher, 21, raised her Belize flag on graduation day, May 17, 2014, at the State University of New York (SUNY), Cortland campus – a flag presented to Erik J. Bitterbaum, the president of the school — as the first Belizean on record to complete studies at the school.
Her father, Mark Usher, Engineering Officer – Electrical Engineer at the Public Utilities Commission, said that the Belizean flag was unveiled at the end of the graduation exercise to the attendees, as a formal recognition of the milestone achievement.
Usher notes that SUNY, Cortland, has had a long-standing relationship with Belize. Bitterbaum has noted that SUNY Cortland faculty members have been engaging Belizean educators on topics related to the natural environment and Mayan culture.
Since April, Taheerah Usher has been working as a community rehab officer with the Ministry of Human Development, Social Transformation and Poverty Alleviation in Belize City. She completed her studies last December, a semester early, due to summer courses she took online before completing a year and a half of studies in Cortland.
Taheerah, who was on a partial scholarship, obtained a cumulative GPA of 3.96 out of a possible 4.0, and she was on the president’s list and dean’s list. She also served as vice treasurer for the student government last semester (August 2013 to December 2013), when she returned home to Belize, pending graduation this May.
She is a graduate of St. Catherine Academy and St. John’s College Junior College, where she studied economics and sociology. She chose to pursue sociology as her major at SUNY, but retains an interest in economics.
Taheerah told us that she loves working with people – who she believes are the nation’s greatest resource. She plans to continue working in the field until she moves on to pursue graduate studies at the University of the West Indies, where she may have the opportunity to understudy Dr. Herbert Gayle, the Jamaican anthropologist who has also studied and published on youth and violence in Belize.
(Taheerah, the daughter of Suzette Usher, appears in the photo with her sister, Orchel, an engineering student at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad.)