Category: Alumni

Women’s Football Champion Inspires Campus with Tale of Perseverance

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Every year Kalamazoo College athletes and coaches present a Community Reflection session titled “Why We Play” where they share with the entire campus stories of what motivates them to compete, and the lessons and rewards of NCAA Division III athletics.

Women's Football Champion Liz Okey
Former women’s football champion Liz Okey ’07 displays the gold medal she won as part of the 2013 U.S. team.

Inevitably, a few seniors also express regret that their sporting careers are about to end. In 2007, Liz Okey was one of them. A Hornets volleyball player who served as team captain, Okey was moving on to graduate school and a career in Chicago.

“When I graduated … I thought my athletic career was over,” she told the audience in Stetson Chapel as she returned to K share her story at this year’s “Why We Play” reflection in late January.

Instead, she began a completely new adventure, discovering women’s tackle football, and in 2009, becoming a lineman for the Chicago Force, part of the Women’s Football Alliance.

“I tried out for the Force and traded my knee pads for shoulder pads,” she said.

Women’s tackle football is just like the men’s game, she said, except the ball is slightly smaller — and there’s no pay. She loved the game, and kept on playing until her fourth year. In the home opener of that season, which would see the Force contend for a national championship, she suffered a devastating injury.

Recovering from surgery for a fractured fibula required extensive physical therapy, she said, and after the Force lost a “nail-biter” championship game, she thought about retiring from football.

Women's Football Champion Liz Okey at center
Former women’s football champion Liz Okey ’07 lines up at center for the Chicago Force during the 2014 season.

“My body had been through it all, and I had spent eight months a year for the last four years living and breathing football,” she said. “After a lot of soul searching, I returned to the questions that brought us all here today: Why do I play? And I realized I was not ready to hang up my cleats. I had more to give.”

She recalled an annual volleyball drill at K that, as she put it, was “designed to cause players stress” by forcing them to compete against a numerically superior squad while repeatedly changing up their offense.

“Essentially, these players had to achieve the near-impossible, and yet the rule was they couldn’t quit. Every year we knew we were going to be pushed to the edge, and we only had one choice: to dig deeper and overcome,” she said. “I knew following that injury that I had more inside of me. I had more to give to my teammates, to my coaches, to the city that I represented and to the sport of football. I was not done yet.”

Nine months after her surgery, she won the competition to become the starting center on the U.S. Women’s National Team. The team went on to win the world championship that July in Finland, where the Americans crushed opponents from Sweden, Germany and Canada.

Women's Football Champion Liz Okey kneels
Former women’s football champion Liz Okey ’07 in a Chicago Force official team photo.

After that, Okey returned to the Force, which won a national championship the next month. When the team failed to repeat in 2014, she retired. She still proudly wears her championship rings and serves on the executive committee of the board of USA Football, the official youth football development partner of the NFL.

“There’s a magical thing about sports,” she said. “It teaches you things about life. How to withstand, react and rebound from life’s greatest adversities.”

She said returning to speak at K had been a dream of hers, and she urged current Hornets to pursue their own dreams with similar dedication.

“Future Hornets, this amazing campus and community has not seen your talents yet. Prepare to give it your all. Current students, your adult life is about to take off. Give the world everything you’ve got,” she said. “Faculty and coaches, you’re shaping the leaders of tomorrow. Protect them, push them and give them all the tools they need to succeed. Each of us will be tested on a regular basis. And under the layers of doubt and fear we each have more to give. So do one more rep, run that extra mile, volunteer one more hour and give it one more shot. You never know where that extra effort will take you.”

Trustee to be Tapped as Peace Corps Chief

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Kalamazoo College Trustee Josephine “Jody” K. Olsen will be nominated to head the Peace Corps, the agency has announced.

Peace Corps Chief Nominee Josephine Olsen
Photo provided by University of Maryland, Baltimore – Peace Corps chief nominee Josephine Olsen is a Kalamazoo College trustee.

A K trustee since 2010, Olsen previously has served as acting director of the Peace Corps and was the agency’s deputy director for seven years. She is currently a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Social Work. Her pending nomination by President Donald Trump is subject to confirmation by the Senate.

Kalamazoo College has a long relationship with the Peace Corps, ranking 13th among small schools on the agency’s 2017 list of Top Volunteer-Producing Colleges and Universities, and hundreds of the College’s alumni have served as volunteers since the Peace Corps was established in 1961.

As part of the confirmation process, Olsen will resign as a trustee. College President Jorge G. Gonzalez praised her service.

“Jody has been a great asset to our board and I am certain she will provide distinguished leadership for this crucial organization at a time when its work is more important than ever,” he said. “The Peace Corps has provided many Kalamazoo College graduates opportunities to make the world a better place while also helping them as they launch internationally focused careers.”

Olsen herself was a Peace Corps volunteer, serving in Tunisia from 1966 to 1968 after her graduation from the University of Utah, where she received a bachelor’s degree in sociology. She also holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.

In addition to serving as acting director and deputy director of the Peace Corps, Olsen has been the agency’s chief of staff and regional director for North Africa, the Near East, Asia and the Pacific. She has also directed scholarly and international education organizations and is currently head of the University of the University of Maryland, Baltimore center for Global Education Initiatives, which provides experiential learning opportunities with international health organizations.

 

Inaugural K-Talk Shows Power of Alumni Ties

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[Hear more from Matt Thieleman in a TEDx Talk from Sept. 8, 2018.]

It’s an experience many Kalamazoo College alumni can relate to: spending four years working and learning with amazing and inspiring classmates, then going your separate ways, never to have the same sort of connection again.

Karman Kent and Matt Thieleman talk to the K community at the first K-Talk
Friday, Oct. 20, was the first event in a planned K-Talk series that Joan Hawxhurst, director of the College’s Center for Career and Professional Development, said will make it possible for alumni such as Karman Kent (left) and Matt Thieleman, both ’07, to share their ideas and experiences with the K community.

But for Karman Kent and Matt Thieleman, both ’07, a convergence of opportunity and expertise launched a post-college professional collaboration aimed at bringing the beneficial effects of mindfulness to stressed-out college students – an experience the two spoke about before an audience of students and fellow alumni in Dewing Hall on Homecoming Friday.

It was the first in a planned K-Talk series that Joan Hawxhurst, director of the College’s Center for Career and Professional Development, said will make it possible for alumni to share their ideas and experiences with the K community.

The project that renewed the ties between the two former classmates began after Kent joined Morehead-Cain, a foundation that provides full-ride merit scholarships at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Now the foundation’s director of scholar selection, Kent found a community of high-achieving students, not unlike those at K, who were often severely stressed by the difficulties of meeting their own high expectations and those of others.

Thieleman, meanwhile, had launched a career in social media marketing, then discovered a passion for developing future leaders through training in mindfulness, the practice of focusing one’s attention on what is happening in the current moment. He launched a Nashville-based consultancy that, as he puts it, helps people recognize that actually “being present” in a situation is key to developing the ability to see the way forward in an increasingly noisy world.

Kent – seeking a way to get students to open up about their troubles – reached out to Thieleman, who brought his expertise to UNC for a seminar. He and Kent said they saw a surprising and “profound” transformation in the Morehead-Cain students who participated, with 95 percent recommending the program to others.

Thieleman continues to counsel students. And Kent said the foundation was so impressed with the results that it has hired a full-time adviser to coach its scholarship recipients in mindfulness techniques.

Hawxhurst said Kent and Thieleman’s experience points out the potential power of the K experience during and after college. Kent concurred.

“At Morehead-Cain … the alumni network is one of the biggest benefits to being in the program,” she said. “We have so many amazing alumni here at K. If we can have that kind of openness to working together, it can be transformative.”

Biology Alumnae Present at Reflections and Connections

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Kalamazoo College’s Biology Department welcomed alumnae Melba Sales-Griffin ’12 and Emily Cornwell ’07 to campus today for the department’s annual Reflections and Connections event as a part of Homecoming 2017. The event, established in honor of Professor Emeritus Paul Sotherland, shares the career highlights and happenings of K alumni as they reflect on their K experiences and beyond.

Kalamazoo College alumna Emily Cornwell Presents at Reflections and Connections
Kalamazoo College alumna Emily Cornwell ’07 told students Friday, Oct. 20, at Reflections and Connections that a series of seemingly inconsequential events in their education might someday create their career paths.
Biology Professor Binney Girdler introduces Melba Sales-Griffin
Biology Professor Binney Girdler introduces Melba Sales-Griffin ’12 Friday, Oct. 20, at Reflections and Connections.

Sales-Griffin, a Chicago native, majored in biology and minored in art. She studied abroad in Ecuador for six months as a junior. She also held a leadership role on the Student Activities Committee and was a senior resident assistant. After college, she learned HTML, CSS and UX/UI at the Starter League in Chicago before becoming its office manager. She also worked at the University of Chicago Survey Lab administering phone surveys in English and Spanish. Now, Sales-Griffin is a service delivery coordinator at MATTER, a health care technology incubator that supports startups in the health care space.

Cornwell spent a year in Australia as a Fulbright Scholar researching the physiology of osmotolerance in a native mollusk and earning an honors degree from Deakin University. After returning from Australia, she started a dual Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine and Ph.D. program at Cornell University, where she focused on the infection dynamics of an invasive fish virus in the Great Lakes. She later completed additional training to become a certified aquatic veterinarian.

After serving as an emergency small animal and exotic species veterinarian in Virginia, she became a general practice small animal and aquatic veterinarian in Maryland. At work, she enjoys educating pet owners, solving issues in internal medicine and training veterinary technicians.

Alumni Return for Homecoming 2017

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As many as 1,000 alumni from around the nation and world will gather on the Kalamazoo College campus Friday-Sunday for K’s annual Homecoming.

Topping the list Friday night will be the annual Distinguished Alumni Awards and Athletic Hall of Fame Inductions. And Hornet Pride will be on display at football, men’s soccer and women’s soccer games on Saturday, alumni volleyball, softball and baseball games on Friday and an alumni swim meet and 5k Run/Walk on Saturday.

Homecoming Welcomes Alumni Stetson Chapel
Kalamazoo College will conduct its annual Homecoming festivities Friday, Oct. 20-Sunday, Oct. 22.

Also among the Friday-Sunday events:

  • Reunions of the classes of 1967, 1972, 1977, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2002, 2007 and 2012. There is also an informal gathering for the class of 2017.
  • Receptions and gatherings for groups including LandSea alumni, 1833 Society Young Alumni, Alumni of Color, the Emeriti Club, theatre arts alumni and athletics teams, plus a chance to socialize with faculty and staff in departmental receptions throughout the Weimer K. Hicks Student Center on Saturday morning.
  • Guided campus tours and opportunities to visit new facilities including the Fitness and Wellness Center, the Intercultural Center, the Hornet Golf Lab and revamped weight room at Anderson Athletic Center and the Batts Pavilion at the College’s Lilian Anderson Arboretum.
  • A student film festival, performances by Monkapult and Cirque du K.
  • A chance to sip hot chocolate and reminisce about campus experiences at Story Zoo around the Cavern Fire Circle next to Stetson Chapel.
  • Poetry readings honoring the late Conrad Hilberry, K’s former poet laureate.
  • Gatherings where alumni can offer advice and compare notes with current students.
  • Fun, games and treats with the Fresh Food Fairy.

You can still join the fun and renew connections with your classmates. Visit our homecoming website for a full schedule, details and registration information. And watch the College website, Facebook page and Twitter account (@kcollege) for photos and updates throughout the weekend.

 

2 K Alumni Among 40 Under 40 Honorees

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Crain’s Detroit Business last week honored its 40 Under 40 honorees, and they include two Kalamazoo College alumni. They are:

  • Ed Mamou ’00, 39, who is the owner of the Root and Mabel Gray restaurants, vice president of GFL Environmental Recycling Services Inc., and vice president of Royal Oak Recycling. Mamou earned a degree in mathematics at K and later earned a master’s degree in applied math at the University of California-San Diego; and
  • Sean Mann ’03, 37, who is a former lobbyist and policy adviser in Michigan politics. Mann quit his job with Michigan Legislative Consultants in Lansing on Sept. 5 to become the full-time CEO of Detroit City FC, a semi-pro soccer club that could soon turn professional. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and history from K and holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Bristol.

Crain’s Detroit Business says all of its 40 Under 40 honorees are professionals who have made “big decisions and bold moves.” They’ve also reinvented themselves and their companies across a variety of sectors and challenges involving fields or attributes such as autonomous vehicles, educational attainment, regional transit, home mortgages and health care.

The honorees were selected by the Crain’s Detroit Business editorial team through nominations selected based on their impact and achievements in business. Read more about the honorees and hear in their own words what they think the next 40 years will hold for Michigan.

 

 

3 with K Connections Compete in ArtPrize

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If you visit ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, be sure to check out three entries from artists with Kalamazoo College connections. Help Desk Administrator Russell Cooper ’89, Web Services Director Carolyn Zinn ’82 and Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Firth MacMillan all are participating.

Russell Cooper ArtPrize 2017 Entry
Russell Cooper is competing in ArtPrize for the sixth time. His art shows a black-and-white image of his daughter holding an oval frame at a playground. That frame is reflecting a color image of Violette on a swing.

Cooper is competing for a sixth time at ArtPrize, the event touted by organizers as the world’s most-attended public art event. His two-dimensional work again features his daughter, Violette, although the end result reflects inspirations from photographers and artists who create optical illusions, and the Persian Poet Rumi, who said: “There is a life-force within your soul, seek that life. There is a gem in the mountain of your body, seek that mine. O traveler, if you are in search of that, don’t look outside, look inside yourself and seek that.”

Cooper’s art shows a black-and-white image of his daughter holding an oval frame at a playground. That frame is reflecting a color image of Violette on a swing. The final product is on display at PaLatte Coffee and Art, 150 Fulton St. E.

Zinn is entering ArtPrize for the first time. Her quilt – which is an image of her daughter, Kirsten, that uses 480 hexagons and 60 commercial fabric prints – was designed through a technique called English paper piecing. She said the technique involves wrapping paper shapes in fabric and then stitching the fabric by hand with a thread and needle. The paper is removed before the quilt layers are stacked and topstitched.

Carolyn Zinn ArtPrize
Carolyn Zinn’s quilt is an image of her daughter, Kirsten, that uses 480 hexagons and 60 commercial fabric prints.

Zinn added she has been sewing her entire life, although she became fascinated with geometry and the color of traditional Amish quilts when she was a teenager. She made a quilt for the first time when she was a student at K and living in DeWaters Hall. In recent years, Zinn has become involved in art quilting, focusing on original design and nontraditional materials and methods.

“I believe fiber art is an underrepresented medium in the art world,” she said. “By entering my work in this open competition, I hope to raise awareness of the medium and inspire others who work with fiber to continue challenging the boundaries of art, craft and design.”

Zinn’s quilt is on display at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum, 303 Pearl St. NW.

MacMillan has been teaching ceramics and sculpture since coming to K from The University of Colorado-Boulder in 2016.

MacMillan became familiar with ArtPrize while living in New York City through art critic Jerry Saltz. When she returned to Michigan, where she attended high school and college, she took her K sculpture class to ArtPrize, and decided that she should enter this year. Her work is being displayed at the U.S. Post Office at 120 Monroe Center St. NW.

MacMillan’s father, a photography enthusiast, was among the first to inspire her to become an artist. “He helped me learn to frame the world outside through the viewfinder,” MacMillan said.

Firth MacMillan ArtPrize entry
Firth MacMillan’s sculptures, including the pieces presented at ArtPrize, are often three-dimensional representations derived from her photographs.

In fact, her sculptures – including the pieces presented at ArtPrize – are often three-dimensional representations derived from her photographs.

“In my work I reinterpret experiences of pointed yet everyday moments from life like the play of shadows from sunlight filtering through a canopy of trees,” MacMillan said on the ArtPrize Web page showing her work. “I take these ephemeral moments and translate them into three-dimensional form.”

First-round voting continues at ArtPrize through Sept. 30. Anyone attending ArtPrize can vote in the first round for their favorite artist or artwork to win a share of a half-million dollars in cash and prizes. Public attendees vote through their computers after they register onsite or through the mobile app while visiting the ArtPrize district. Mobile app users need to tap the “thumbs up” icon after entering an artist’s five-digit code. Computer voters tap the “thumbs up” icon at each artist’s profile. The five-digit codes are 64719, 64662 and 66515 for Cooper, Zinn and MacMillan respectively.

ArtPrize runs through Oct. 8. Learn more about the event.

 

New York Times, Architectural Digest Feature Alumna Julie Mehretu

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Artist Julie Mehretu
Artist and Kalamazoo College alumna Julie Mehretu is featured in the New York Times and Architectural Digest for her latest project.

A Kalamazoo College alumna is receiving attention from publications including Architectural Digest and the New York Times for her latest artwork, a commission for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Artist Julie Mehretu ’92, of New York City, has worked for the past 14 months at a deconsecrated Harlem church on two towering paintings measuring 27 feet by 32 feet that required a scissor lift to develop.

Since graduating from K with a degree in art and art history, Mehretu has become one of the leading contemporary artists in the United States. She has received international accolades for her work, with her honors including the American Art Award from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the prestigious MacArthur Fellow award.

Mehretu recently shared a testimonial of the liberal arts including her Kalamazoo College experience with the Council for Independent Colleges.

“The liberal arts experience gives you the opportunity to learn, to fail, to succeed, to really find out who you are,” she said. “When I reflect on how my artistic work has progressed, I think of those early years at Kalamazoo College. My artistic process takes both intense thought and impulse. Balancing this has taken time and evolved over the years. It happens in all kinds of different ways. I’m making all these decisions, determining one thing at a time, and not even so much determining as understanding. I think that’s what Kalamazoo College was for me: a place to begin to understand.”

The final products of her latest efforts will be on display at the San Francisco museum for more than three years beginning Sept. 2. Read more and take a sneak peek of the paintings at the New York Times and Architectural Digest websites. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art also has a news release at its website.

 

International Chemistry Magazine Publishes K Grad’s Research

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A 2017 Kalamazoo College graduate has been published in Angewandte Chemie, a German international chemistry magazine, for his senior individualized project (SIP) involving how prescription medications interact with the human body.

John Bailey presents his research published in an international chemistry magazine
John Bailey ’17 presents research related to his senior individualized project.

John Bailey, who was a chemistry major and math minor from Midland, Mich., performed research through a group at Michigan State University focusing on aromaticity. The term describes a ring-shaped molecule that exhibits more stability than other connective arrangements with the same atoms.

The research and resulting chemistry magazine article highlights how stability involving aromaticity could allow a greater range of choices in a pharmaceutical’s design, maximizing the drug’s effect in a targeted human system without harming other systems in a patient’s body.

The article, titled “High-Field NMR Spectroscopy Reveals Aromaticity-Modulated Hydrogen Bonding (AMHB) in Heterocycle,” has no immediate effect on how drugs are formulated or prescribed. Still, the results could one day have strong clinical implications for treatment courses such as chemotherapy. As a result, the research doesn’t stand to make Bailey famous, but a positive advancement in medicine one day will have been the result of many people like Bailey collaborating and building on each other’s work.

“It feels good to have work I’ve done out there that could be helpful to other humans,” he said.

Bailey is in Kalamazoo for at least an additional year, but would eventually like to attend graduate school and end up professionally as a leader in a research lab. He credits Chemistry Professor Jeffrey Bartz and Math Professor Eric Barth for giving him the guidance and encouragement he needed to succeed with his SIP.

“Hopefully, I will have enough knowledge I can be an effective member of my community professionally and nonprofessionally,” Bailey said. “I think K did a good job letting me understand how big a place the world is and how much I need to be humble. I want to keep working hard because no one is ever done growing.”