Cecilia Burtis

Tiffin, Ohio | Sociology and Spanish Double Major, Management & Leadership Minor

Cecilia, or Ceci, has made serving others a theme of her time at Miami. She has served as an orientation leader, a UNV 101 undergraduate associate, tour guide and tour guide manager. As a program manager in the Office of Community Engagement & Service, Ceci refined two longstanding programs – Greek Spring Clean and Service Saturdays, and created Speed Dating for Change, which brings together multiple campus initiatives to identify opportunities for collaboration.

While conducting research on the history of drug control in California, Ceci chose to undertake additional research on the topic of substance abuse among women celebrities in the early years of Hollywood. She compared the experiences, interactions with law enforcement, and media coverage of Judy Garland and Billy Holliday, both singers who abused drugs from a young age and died of overdoses in their 40s. The faculty researcher she worked with wrote that Ceci approached her work with a sociologist’s sensibility, discerning differences between the public’s perception of the two celebrities.