Rachel Dunnagan has always been as dedicated to the education of others as she is to her own education.
Teaching comes natural to the math and classics senior.
Her love of education began with creating pretend assignments for her younger sister when they played school as children and continued with Dunnagan’s devotion to helping her classmates with their studies in high school.
Jason Cummins’ employer gave him a three-year, full-tuition college scholarship, sent him to flight school, paid him to attend one of the most prestigious MBA programs in the country, and asked him to teach economics at West Point. In May, the UK Class of 1993 alum returned to take up the leadership of the UK Army ROTC program; the same program from which he himself graduated 16 years ago.
Susan (Camenisch) Eriksson started her studies at UK as a music major, with a focus on piano. But when she took an honors section of geology during her junior year, she was hooked.
“After one exam, I went up to the TA and said, I love this, I love, this, I love this!” she recalls. “I was so excited. I said I wished I had found geology as a freshman.”
There is one 12 or 13-year-old female, with great dental work, that he can’t get out of his mind. This is a case that haunts him.
“I can’t ID her,” said Bill Bass, one of the world’s leading forensic anthropologists and alumnus of UK’s College of Arts and Sciences. “There are cold cases, but they are never really that cold. We are constantly talking about them and there are new techniques that are coming out all the time that may break the case.”
“My family has always valued education. Therefore, attending college was very important to me,” Yozwiak said. “In part, I decided to attend the University of Kentucky because of the experiences my older friends were having there. Visiting them in their dorms when I was a senior in high school first exposed me to the variety of social opportunities available to students at UK, and talking with them about their experiences in the classroom revealed to me the rigor of their education. Attending the University of Kentucky also allowed me to not only stay close to my family, but also afforded me the opportunity to acquire an exceptional education on the beautiful Lexington campus.”
There is nothing pretentious or “prude” about UK Alumni Julie Sweet and Tom Riley. This husband and wife team – now history professors at Baylor University in Waco, Texas – say their formative years as Ph.D. candidates in the University of Kentucky’s Department of History, were crucial to their future success.
“Our professors were genuinely nice people who went out of their way to help us,” Riley said. “I wasn’t the best writer, but Dr. Eller understood that.” Riley, a retired naval officer from West Virginia, focused his dissertation on his home state during World War II, combining both his childhood and military experiences to write it. Serving as a teaching assistant under Dr. Ireland, Riley named this professor as a dynamic pedagogical mentor from his graduate experience.
For over 100 years, the College of Arts & Sciences has been fertile ground for aspiring political leaders, from former Kentucky governors Edward T. Breathitt and Martha Layne Collins to current U.S. Representative Louise Slaughter, and even Lexington’s own mayor Jim Newberry.
In 1978, as a senior political science major, Newberry might not have known that he would lead Lexington, but seeing that he served as Student Government President and received a diverse Arts & Sciences education, he was certainly well-prepared for just such an endeavor.
Andrew Bozio first got hooked on British literature as a junior at Louisville’s St. Xavier High School. He knew then and there he’d found his calling.
Having just finished his first year of studies in the English PhD program at the University of Michigan, Bozio credits his undergraduate experiences at UK with helping establish a foundation for his intended career in early modern literature.
