The Florida International University Alumni Association will be presenting Marcia Martinez Strait, MS ’77 with a Distinguished Alumni award during FIU’s fourteenth annual Torch Awards Charity Gala on Saturday, March 28, 2015. This award recognizes alumni who have brought honor and distinction to the university through their notable record of service and achievement in a particular discipline, organization or cause.
Marcia Martinez Strait’s affiliation with FIU spans back decades, and she has been an active and influential member of the community ever since. After completing a Bachelor in Fine Arts and Languages at Barry University, she attended FIU to pursue her master’s. Her career path has included several diverse positions in education for Miami-Dade County. She also dedicates her time to mentoring, teaching and sponsoring an all-girls reading club, which serves underprivileged girls from ages 8 through 12. Strait’s business endeavors are in testing, evaluating, diagnosing and re-mediating home learning for students in the private sector. Her passion is to instill the love of learning using historical research so that students can discover the difference between the past and the present and be able to create their future. In her 35 years of professional experience, her motto has always been, “If you can search it, you will learn it.”
This year, the FIU Alumni Association will be hosting the prestigious gala at the luxurious Fontainebleau Miami Beach Hotel, located on 4441 Collins Avenue in Miami, Fla.
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About FIU:
Florida International University is recognized as a Carnegie engaged university. It is a public research university with colleges and schools that offer more than 180 bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral programs in fields such as engineering, international relations, architecture, law and medicine. As one of South Florida’s anchor institutions, FIU contributes $9.8 billion each year to the local economy. FIU is Worlds Ahead in finding solutions to the most challenging problems of our time. FIU emphasizes research as a major component of its mission. FIU has awarded over 200,000 degrees and enrolls more than 54,000 students in two campuses and three centers including FIU Downtown on Brickell, FIU@I-75, and the Miami Beach Urban Studios. FIU also supports artistic and cultural engagement through its three museums: the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU. FIU is a member of Conference USA and has over 400 student-athletes participating in 18 sports. For more information about FIU, visit http://www.fiu.edu/.
About the FIU Alumni Association:
The Florida International University Alumni Associationis a membership-based organization with over 20,000 dues paying members governed by a volunteer board of directors and currently serves a total alumni base of over 200,000, represented in every state and in more than 30 countries around the world. The mission is to serve the community of FIU alumni, students, family and friends by providing lifelong connections to FIU. The organization strives to provide opportunities to support FIU’s key strategic initiatives, which includes the revitalization and expansion of financial resources, achieving academic excellence, enhancing research and creative initiatives, and engaging the community of FIU. For more information about the FIU Alumni Association, visit FIUalumni.com.