Meet these graduates: Profiles of members of the YDS Class of 2023

Laurel McCormack ’23 M.Div.

Laurel McCormack came to New Haven in 2012 straight from Mercer College for an internship at Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS). She’s been there ever since, working as a youth support specialist, a case management coordinator, and a volunteer coordinator. She also launched the cultural companions program, which pairs immigrants with American families. Along the way she’s undergone a baptism by fire, learning organizational and administrative skills on the job. She wanted to learn more, so in 2019 she entered the joint program at YDS and UConn for degrees in divinity and social work. She graduated in May.

“I was already doing social work-oriented jobs, but I had not had a lot of training,” she says. “I wasn’t sure that what I was doing was aligned with a wider set of practices that are time-tested.”

Before coming to New Haven, she’d considered going to divinity school. She grew up in the Atlanta suburbs, where her family participated in congregations ranging  from nondenominational megachurches to house churches. “My parents fostered a sense of divine presence and love, but I’ve always had a lot of questions,” Laurel says. “I felt a mismatch between a Christianity that focused on inner moral life but didn’t have a lot to say about social injustices.” At Mercer, she found a like-minded community in the Glad River Congregation. “In the Sixties, at a time when the churches in Macon were racially segregated, they had formed a church where when anybody who wanted to worship could come together.”

After college, she signed up with the Episcopal Service Corps to work at IRIS. “Service Corps felt like a time to bring those things together—exploring religious practice and faith.”

She started her studies at Yale and UConn when the Trump administration was implementing anti-immigrant policies. “IRIS had to dismantle so much of what had been built up over the years,” she says. “There were so many stories of community deportations and so much anguish with people waiting for their families to come.”

Laurel plans to continue her training with clinical practices and become an LCSW. And she wants to continue working with families as she does at IRIS. “I would like to be somewhere where I can do the creative program building that IRIS let me do over the years.”

Mia Tabib ’20 M.Div.

Most mornings, Mia Tabib leaves home in New Haven early. On her way to work in Branford, Conn., she detours to the waterfront, where she strolls and takes in the breeze from Long Island Sound. It’s preparation for the day ahead, which she spends as a licensed clinical social worker treating patients for PTSD and substance abuse. Her patients include violent offenders sent there by the courts and others who have seen trauma in their lives. Despite what they may have done in their lives, Mia seeks their inner gentleness.

“I so deeply believe that every human being is inherently good,” she says. “The more I reflect that back to them, the more their internal narrative changes. I see them change in real time the more they reflect on their gentleness.”

Mia has been working in two Branford clinics since graduating in 2020 from a joint YSD/UConn program, with an M.Div. and an M.S.W. Until then she’d held different jobs, working as a Starbucks barista, an editorial intern, a preschool teacher, and a domestic violence counselor. The anchor in her life has been her love of philosophy, her major at the University of Colorado. (When she was young, her father gave her a copy of Plato’s Republic, which led her to other philosophers.) “Social work was the last thing on my radar. I genuinely loved philosophy.”

She came to Yale to continue exploring questions about life. “I wanted a community where I’m able to ask meaningful questions about what it means to be a human being in relation to others and what it means to heal, both individually and in a community.” Her interest in gentleness led professors to suggest the dual-degree program. “I jumped on it when they said there’s this track you can do. It’s everything I want to do with my life.”

Her belief in her patients’ gentleness is the core of her work. “One of the fundamental questions of religion and spirituality is whether humans can change. Biology says we are the products of the neurons in our brains. Philosophy and spirituality say that’s not the whole story. Humans have a spirit, a life force, whatever you want to call that, and there’s a will there. Humans can change.”

Jamal Davis Neal Jr. ’24 M.Div.

Jamal Davis Neal Jr. (he/they) grew up in Groton, Conn., in a church that came to embody his conflicted feelings about religion: “I loved my church,” he says. “But it had a financial crisis and decided to lay off the youth minister without having conversations with the children and youth.” The youth programs faded away, and the incident left Jamal troubled about the lack of communication. Thus began his journey of intentionally questioning bureaucratic institutions.

Jamal attended the University of Vermont as an undergraduate, studying neuroscience with the intention of becoming a doctor. A course in religious scholarship changed his path. For Jamal, religion offered a way to think about cultural history and societal issues, and a way to explore Christian identity and its meaning for those for whom “Christianity has been a space of violence, colonialism, shame.”

To make his calling not just theoretical but practical, Jamal thought about dual-degree programs in religion and social work. “I was interested in developing therapeutic skills, while also thinking through how to provide people with religious literacy as a component of community programming. It’s so critical that people think through their own development of spiritual identities, especially in a world that wants us to be leading increasingly individual and separate lives.”

Jamal began studying at YDS in the fall of 2020. After a year online, they attended and graduated from UConn’s School of Social Work during the 2021-2022 school year. Jamal is set to graduate from YDS in 2024 and is still thinking through long-term career plans. They expect to be ordained in their lifelong church, Union Baptist Church in Mystic, Conn., next year. Reflecting upon what he’s learned from his first church, he sees himself in a role that unites people. First, however, they’d like to work in higher education to further develop their capacity for this work.

“I think about organizations that aren’t functioning well because people aren’t connecting. Or I think about churches that are interested in repairing their relationship with their larger community. I want to go into that space and help people join together,” he says. “I would love to create something that helps people belong. I’m not entirely sure what that looks like yet, but I’m here to discern what that could mean.”