Jane (Greene) Hildebrand ’74 worked both parts of campus at Luther, as a coach in the Regents Center for 27 years and, for the past five years, as assistant dean for student life, up the hill in Dahl Centennial Union. She retired from Luther in June, and one early summer day, in her office overlooking the playing fields, she visited about her Luther career.

Hildebrand laid the foundation for her career by majoring in health and physical education (teaching) at Luther. In 1973, she and Steve Hildebrand ’73 married, and he joined the United States Air Force. They lived in California, Kansas, and Nebraska—Jane teaching high school and coaching multiple sports—before returning to Decorah in 1982, when Steve left the air force. Property along the Upper Iowa River that they’d planned to retire on became the home where they’d raise their three children, Josh ’02, Jake ’02, and Jim ’06.

Their first year back, Hildebrand was an assistant coach for field hockey, track and field, and women’s basketball. She became head coach for women’s basketball in 1985, also teaching physical education and eventually taking on the roles of senior women’s administrator and associate athletic director.

Hildebrand led her teams to seven Iowa Intercollegiate Athletic Conference championships while posting an IIAC record of 293-155. She was named Iowa Conference Coach of the Year five times. Her teams made nine appearances in the NCAA III National Tournament, advancing to the round of 16 twice and the round of eight twice. In 1992, she led the Norse to the Final Four and returned home with a third-place finish. When she left coaching, Hildebrand was the longest-tenured coach in the IIAC and in the history of Luther women’s basketball, with a career record of 438-260.

Some things remain unchanged since Hildebrand got involved with Luther athletics. The floorboards and bleachers of the basketball courts are the same ones she played on as a student, and many of her early influencers, such as Betty Hoff ’60, Paul Solberg ’61, and Kent Finanger ’54—who, like her, coached multiple sports, taught, and did advising—are still her friends and supporters. “They have been critical role models and mentors for me, and continue to be,” she says.

But she’s also seen big changes, in part because of larger athletics budgets in recent decades. When she was a student, she says, “Our basketball team would ride in the coaches’ cars to get to away games. We would stay overnight in our families’ homes. I remember my mother putting up our team in the basement and making breakfast for us before we went to play Iowa Wesleyan [near her hometown of Columbus Junction, Iowa]. Freshman year, we didn’t have uniforms, so we wore our own shorts and shirts and wore little pinnies over the top.”

Asked about some of her best Luther memories, Hildebrand says: “The first thing that pops into my mind is just having meaningful conversations with students, whether it’s a cup of coffee and a roll at Sunnyside or a chat in my office about how they played in the game.” Most of all, she’s glad she was able to be there for students, for the happy times and for the sad, such as telling a student that a grandparent had passed away.

Hildebrand says she has enjoyed working with this age group because the students are going through a transitional period in their lives—children growing into adults. It’s been a pleasure to see students “becoming themselves,” she says.
It’s a pleasure too when she gets to talk with alumni returning to campus, and she says she remembers everyone—even by their voices. In the Student Life Office, she sat around a corner from the main entrance, but when former students came into the office, she says, “You heard voices and you thought, Oh my gosh, that’s a voice from the past—I know who that is!”

Hildebrand says she’s looking forward to having a little more time for her immediate family and for visiting grandchildren in Iowa City and Saudi Arabia. She appreciates the support she’s received over the years from across the Luther community and from other Decorah residents—many of them strong fans of the women’s basketball program—and the sense of family she has felt at Luther. But she says it’s the day-to-day talks and engagement with students she’ll miss the most.

The Martin Luther statue on campus is looking good after an extensive “rubdown” last spring. Years of corrosion have been scrubbed off and his warm brown patina restored.

Conservators from Midwest Art Conservation Center did the work, overseen by Kate Elliott, Luther associate professor of art history and curator of the Fine Arts Collection. They began the process, which took about a week, by washing the statue and removing corrosion. Two layers of patina were then applied, followed by coatings of wax—first hot then cold. Afterward, cracks in the the statue’s base were repaired.

The statue was a gift from the Norwegian Lutheran Synod ministers’ wives in 1911 to celebrate the college’s 50th anniversary. It is a third-generation sculpture, cast from a replica of Ernest Friedrich Riestschel’s original sculpture of Martin Luther in Worms, Germany.

Plans are also in the works to add new lighting and limestone landscaping. Landscape designer Jens Jensen, who created a campus design for the college’s 50th anniversary, also designed the base of the statue and chose its location. In a letter to President C.K. Preus (class of 1873) in June 1911, Jensen wrote: “A statue ought to have a background of green to be ideally situated . . . it seems to me that the Luther statue should be placed on the campus with a good background of foliage.”

The statue still does have a backdrop of foliage, and once again it projects a burnished glow amid the green.

Namuun Tsend-Ayush ’17 was among the first-place winners in the American Protégé International Concerto Competition last spring (college students/professional musician category). So on Dec. 18, two days after fall semester ends, she’ll perform the first movement of Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in the winners’ recital at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall in New York.

She used the American Protégé competition as a way to focus her practicing and improve her playing. “Having a goal like that, to practice for a competition, it definitely motivates you more, and you want to do better,” she says. “When you have a goal in mind, you want to push yourself more.”

Tsend-Ayush has been refining her playing through contests—and the practice, practice, practice they require—since 2004, when she first competed in her native Mongolia, winning second place, at age nine. She entered the American Protégé contest by submitting a video of her playing, but she’s competed in person for the multiple contests in Mongolia, the Czech Republic, and Italy that have provided her motivation through the years. Walking onto the Carnegie stage will be a familiar experience in some ways.

Of course, the violinist has performed multiple times at Luther as well—solo, in small groups, and with the symphony and chamber orchestras. As concertmaster of both ensembles, Tsend-Ayush also tunes the musicians and leads first violin section practices. She’ll be polishing each note of the Bach sonata movement for her New York debut in December, but Tsend-Ayush has perhaps a bigger challenge before then. She won the Hemp Family Prize for Orchestral Performance earlier this year and will give a recital this fall, learning a full concert’s worth of new music.

Tsend-Ayush’s violin teacher at Luther, visiting assistant professor of music Igor Kalnin, has no doubt about her abilities and also credits her initiative. Meeting for lessons only once a week, Kalnin says, “There’s no time to talk about all the details of a piece. Students have to take the initiative and have a certain mindset” that drives them to refine their playing. Tsend-Ayush has that mindset, he says, and strives to improve the quality of her playing and the details of her technique on her own.

But when it comes time to take the stage, Tsend-Ayush isn’t necessarily thinking about the particulars of technique that she’s rehearsed for hours in the practice room. In fact, she says she sometimes doesn’t remember much after a performance—whether she played a certain rhythm just so or hit a tricky note. She’s concentrating on expressing the music at this point: “I think that in music, the emotions that you are portraying or sharing with people are the most important. . . . It’s not about perfection but about the general performance.”

Tsend-Ayush, a Davis United World College Scholar, took up the violin as a first-grader in a music school in Ulan Bator, Mongolia’s capital city. She made her way to Luther via the United World College Adriatic. Jon Lund, of Luther’s Center for Global Learning and International Admissions, first talked with her about Luther, and then she met Luther associate professors of music Spencer Martin and Andrew Whitfield. They codirect the International Music Festival of the Adriatic, and Tsend-Ayush heard them speak about Luther when they visited the UWC to give a master class. Friends of hers had also spread the word about Luther, and because the college is similar in size to UWC Adriatic and is known for its music program, Tsend-Ayush thought she could be comfortable in Decorah.

She has been. Her favorite memory so far is from the first time she participated in Christmas at Luther. She sang in the Aurora choir and performed with Symphony Orchestra. At one point, while she was singing in the aisles of the Center for Faith and Life, she noticed people in the audience tearing up as they smiled. “It was such an emotional moment, and I thought [performing in Christmas at Luther] was a beautiful thing to do, and I’d like to keep doing it as long as I could.”

Tsend-Ayush will graduate from Luther next spring. She’ll have completed the music major and be just shy of a double major in accounting. Her parents enjoy listening to classical music but are not musicians themselves, and Tsend-Ayush’s accountant mother encouraged her daughter to learn accounting too. She may yet finish that degree. She’s hedging her bets a little, sure, but she also really likes accounting.

First, though, she’ll follow her passion for music and begin graduate studies in violin performance. She’ll be entering the professional music world at a time when there are a lot of good violinists, Kalnin says, but he is confident that Tsend-Ayush has a good future in music. “She will do well,” he says.

The 31st annual Luther College Entrepreneurial Showcase was held Tuesday, April 26, in Dahl Centennial Union. Since 1986, the goal of the Entrepreneurial Showcase has been to provide an annual forum for students, faculty, alumni, and friends of Luther who are interested in and support entrepreneurship.

The event began with a networking session in which student entrepreneurs displayed their ideas and ventures. Dennis Birkestrand ’64, cofounder of Factory Direct Appliance, gave the keynote address.

The Daryl and Audrey Erdman Prizes for Entrepreneurship were awarded to Fabian Pop Pop ’17, Bjorn Myhre ’16, and Madilyn Heinke ’19. To be selected for an Erdman Prize, students who create, develop, and manage a successful enterprise during their years at Luther present their venture to a panel of judges made up of local entrepreneurs.

Fabian Pop Pop received the grand prize of $5,000 for his social enterprise and poultry business, Aweb’. Pop Pop, a Davis United World College (UWC) Scholar, attended the UWC in Norway before coming to Luther. He was born and raised in northern Guatemala, and the main purpose of Aweb’ is to aid women in rural Guatemala who are unemployed and living in poverty. The business provides employment for women who have never held jobs or received a salary, and it helps them support their families by providing a reliable source of income.

After determining through research that a business that employs women would be likely to help uplift the entire community, Pop Pop searched for a product that would be in high demand and easy and relatively quick to generate. He found that raising and selling chickens, with a production cycle of seven to nine weeks, would provide more than 140 percent return on initial investment in that region. It would also build on skills the women already had.

Pop Pop wrote a business plan in 2014 and in 2015 was invited to make a pitch for funding to the Resolution Project in Miami, Fla. He made it through several rounds of presentations and questioning from the judges to become one of 14 winners among 191 competing teams from all over the world. With $6,000 in seed money and a fellowship that hooked him up with two business mentors, he started Aweb’.

Late that summer, he got training about safe food handling and animal welfare, recruited and trained the 20 women who would work in the business, and organized workshops for women on topics such as resource management, entrepreneurship and self-empowerment, and current challenges for women from rural areas.

“People think that if you want to change people’s lives you have to come up with great ideas, but if you can use the skills people have already you can improve their lives,” Pop Pop says. Providing training in areas such as financial and resource management so the women can run the business themselves is better than giving gifts of food and school books, he says. Jobs allow them to buy their own necessities.

Aweb’ markets chicken to restaurants and small grocery stories, where there is large demand. “Most of them were also pleased to learn about our social commitment toward creating long-lasting opportunities for women in the region,” Pop Pop wrote in his Erdman application.

Pop Pop says more than 95 percent of profits go to the women who work for Aweb’. He plans to invest a portion of the prize money back into his business so he can continue to expand its reach.

Bjorn Myhre, who received a $2,500 prize, collaborated with Evan Sowder ’15 to create Sacred Media, a media production company that promotes environmental stewardship and aims to inspire people to visit national parks. Myhre specializes in multimedia productions that showcase outdoor adventure, and he has held a handful of internships that honed his media production skills.

Madilyn Heinke was the second recipient of a $2,500 prize. She started her business, M-N-M Sweets and Treats, by selling smoothies, hand-packed ice cream, and a variety of other treats with her sisters, McKendra and Mercede. Their mother bought them a trolley car to use as an ice cream stand, hoping they would earn money for college while also learning the value of hard work.

When Dennis ’64 and Suzanne Birkestrand gave $1.5 million to Luther to endow the Birkestrand Economics and Management Chair in spring 2016, it was a big deal, and we wanted to know more about the effect their gift would have. How, exactly, do endowed chairs and professorships work at Luther? And how do they affect the education that students get?

To learn, we went to the experts—faculty who hold or have recently held endowed positions.

First of all, these funds, given by individuals or groups, provide recognition. They recognize the value of an academic subject, the faculty member who is named to the chair or professorship, and the person or persons for whom the endowment is named—a past professor or the donors themselves. Classics professor Philip Freeman says, “Fundamentally, it’s a recognition by the college that a particular subject is important enough to be permanent.”

Alumni have used endowments to honor professors whom they especially respected. For instance, since 2007 Freeman has held the Orlando W. Qualley Chair of Classical Languages, created by a group of former students to honor “Pip” Qualley, who served at Luther for 60 years as a professor, administrator, and coach. “I meet students of Qualley—mostly retired people now—and they tell such stories of this man. They have a great fondness for him, and that’s why they endowed the chair,” Freeman says.

Endowments help pay the salary of the person who holds the position, which frees up college funds for other purposes. And as Robert Christman, the Kermit O. and Jane E. Hanson Professor of History 2013–16, points out, they also enhance the academic excellence of the institution by bringing distinction to whoever holds them, acknowledging that person’s achievement.

Endowments also bring what’s called programming money, which the faculty often put toward research expenses. Christman says this added ability to conduct research “further allows individuals who already have a profile in their discipline to continue to be leaders in their field.” In addition to the obvious benefits of having academic leaders teaching in Luther’s classrooms, professors who are well-connected and widely known scholars write graduate school letters of recommendation that carry weight.

Ultimately, students benefit in many ways from the additional resources that endowments make possible. Endowed faculty often use funds to allow students and other faculty to attend scholarly conferences and obtain specific skills training, purchase classroom resources, bring speakers to campus, and more. Endowment funds also make it possible for professors to partner with students in conducting research. Kirk Larsen, the Russell R. Rulon Endowed Chair in Biology 2013–16, says, “I extensively involve students in my research and do very little research without a student next to me.”

Recent use of endowment funds

Larsen bought three honeybee hives and placed them in Roslien Woodlands for use with his entomology students. The hives are a learning tool at a time when honeybees are encountering environmental trouble, and they give students hands-on experience. Students learn how to maintain the hives, for instance, and extract honey from them.

To further his development as a professor, Larsen attended an insect macro-photography workshop in Belize. “Because I teach about insects and they’re so small, I need to have photographs in the classroom so students can visualize what I’m talking about,” Larsen says. This summer, when some of his research students were doing a butterfly survey, he was able to photography butterflies in the field that they can use in their presentations.

Another training trip took Larsen to Mexico to the overwintering sites of monarch butterflies, which he lectured on when he got back. He is involved with the Iowa Monarch Conservation Consortium, and his students are doing a project on plants that are nectar sources for monarchs. “Some of the information I learned from that trip . . . has really influenced my work with students this summer,” he says.

Christman’s endowment-funded research is providing a unique primary-source experience for his students. “As a result of my research, I have translated 500-year-old historical documents into English and assigned them in my classes. Students are always excited to realize that no one else in the English-speaking world has access to these sources,” he says. He is also working on a case study of the first two people executed for their beliefs during the Protestant Reformation, which he has designed for students: “The entire project is designed as an attractive and thought-provoking introduction to the Reformation, one that will spark the students’ imagination and inspire a desire to learn more.”

Collaboration is at the heart of how Steve Holland, the Bert M. and Mildred O. Dahl Chair in Economics and Business 2011–16, has tried to use his funds. “Economics is a core social science, and having a pot of money like this allows us to integrate with the larger community better than we might otherwise. It allows us to promote economic thinking in lots of different contexts,” he says. Holland has put his endowment funds together with money from other departments to bring in speakers in marketing, ethics and public life, environmental studies, and more. This summer he hired a student researcher for a project focusing on what makes a community healthy. Ultimately, the results will be shared with the broader Decorah and Winneshiek communities.

Lise Kildegaard turned the spotlight on art in small packages as the Dennis M. Jones Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities 2013–16. “My special project is to work on things that are short shorts,” Kildegaard told Chips in fall 2015. “I am interested in literary flash fiction, micro fiction, short lyrics, poems, and art works that are small and quickly seen.” Through an array of projects, students learned to make prints, create art to illustrate short literature, design and create videos that express poems, produce and act in a play of 57 short scenes, and more.

Freeman’s research on ancient manuscripts at the national library of Ireland in Dublin each summer fuels his teaching each fall in the course The World of St. Patrick. “I’m always bringing in my own research, my own work, photographs of manuscripts,” he says. “It feeds directly into my teaching.” This summer he also used some of the funds to scout a future January Term trip to Ireland with students.

Perceptions of risk and well-being among youth in Ukraine was the focus of research by Maryna Bazylevych during her Nena Amundson ’56 Distinguished Professorship 2014–16. She involved a student in all steps of the research process, she says, “from the design part of it to fieldwork experience and analysis of data and writing a report to presenting it at the conference.” Bazlevych’s student assistant, Brittany Anderson ’16, accompanied her to Ukraine, helped conduct focus groups with Bazylevych, and conducted some interviews and ethnographic encounters on her own. Back at Luther, Bazylevych trained two other students, who received academic administrative assistantships from the Dean’s Office, to transcribe the conversations.

In spring 2016, as Bazylevych and Anderson were boarding a plane to go present their research findings at a Society for Applied Anthropology meeting, Anderson got an email saying she’d been accepted into the anthropology program at Iowa State University with a full tuition waiver and a generous stipend. Needless to say, both were thrilled!

Recognizing Luther’s influence

“We believe in Luther College, in the quality of its academic programs, and in supporting the talented faculty who dedicate their lives to empowering undergraduates to achieve. May this endowed chair be a lasting remembrance of the profound impact Luther College has had on our lives.”          —Dennis Birkestrand ’64

In creating the endowed chair in economics and business, Dennis ’64 and Suzanne Birkestrand say they hope to encourage and recognize the importance of free market–friendly perspectives on economic theory, private enterprise, and good business practices in classroom discussions.

Dennis spent 22 years in marketing and sales with the Maytag Corporation. In 1988, he and Suzanne started a distribution business for the Jenn-Air brand of appliances, headquartered in Kansas City. They then founded Factory Direct Appliance in 1993 and for 21 years offered a range of appliances to homebuilders and remodelers. They sold the business in 2014.

Appointments to the Birkestrand chair will be for three years and may be renewed at the discretion of the academic dean and president of the college. The first chair, announced at Opening Convocation on Sept. 1, is Tim Schweizer ’80.

To learn more about endowed chairs and professorships at Luther, visitluther.edu/academics/dean/faculty/endowed-chairsandluther.edu/giving/gift-types.

Pema Lama,  Jenna Johnson, Laura Proescholdt, Fred Scaife,  Blaise Schaeffer, Catherine Lewis,  Sheldon Smith,  Jesse Hitz Graff

Asking “why” leads Pema Lama from isolation to global education

Pema Lama left home at seven years old. “All I knew back then was that the only way to escape getting married at 12 was to become a nun,” she says. Lama grew up in the mountain region of Nepal, in a farming village with no electricity or running water, where food was scarce, literacy was rare, and arranged and kidnapped marriages were common. Her mother gave birth to 13 children, eight of whom died. Between herself and her older sister, seven died in a row.

When Lama, the 12th child, was six years old, her eldest brother visited the village after 15 years of living as a reincarnated monk. “I’d never seen him, only heard of him, and then he came for three months,” she recalls. “I was really surprised that all the villagers were coming to visit him and bringing fruits and all these delicious things that us kids would have to steal sometimes, like walnuts. He was so clean, and everything looked so new, and people were so happy to be around him. And I was like, why are people not treating me the same?” And so began Lama’s lifetime of questioning.

She continues, “If I asked, Can I eat rice tonight? my parents would start giving me this long lecture about how rice is so hard to get, while he, without asking, would get all these special things that we would wait for. And I was like, is it just because he’s a guy? I was asking all these questions, like why is my rice so limited? And I thought at that time, If I just follow the rules, I will never be satisfied.”

For a year after her brother’s visit, Lama badgered her parents constantly to let her join a nunnery. “Buddhism was the only thing I could imagine at the time to escape from the life I knew I would live if didn’t choose a different path,” she says. Finally, her parents relented and sent her down the mountain, to Kathmandu.

“I made that almost two-week journey without family members, just a friend of my father’s whom I had met two or three times. I was so happy I don’t even remember crying. I was like, Finally, I get what I wanted!” she smiles.

The duo walked eight or nine hours a day down a steep mountain trail, and when they arrived in Kathmandu, Lama saw her first bicycle, first bus. “At that time, the only place I knew was the mountain,” she says.

The founder of the nunnery, Thrangu Rinpoche, took one look at Lama and said, “Uh-uh—it’s a lifetime commitment, and you’re too young to make that choice now.” But he offered her an alternative: attend his Shree Mangal Dvip (SMD) School instead.

At the SMD School, Lama learned in Tibetan, Nepali, and English (she speaks these languages as well as Hindi and her native dialect of Tibetan). She took classes from nuns, monks, and a cadre of visiting global volunteers. After graduating, she became one of the six or seven students asked to stay on for a year of service and, if things went well, earn a chance to attend high school abroad.

During her year of service, Lama took on the formidable task of teaching sex ed—a taboo subject in Buddhism—to area nunneries, monasteries, and schools. Lama had volunteered in the SMD health clinic for years, so she was used to dealing straightforwardly with bodies—but that doesn’t mean teaching sex ed was easy.

“The first few days no one spoke,” she says. “The other teachers and I were like, This is called this—but it’s not us talking, it’s the book! But by the end of the week, everyone was shouting and having fun. That was eye-opening,” she reflects, “and I started questioning: Why do I just follow whatever my religion says without even questioning whether it’s right or wrong?”

After her year of service, Lama was selected to attend a United World Colleges school in Norway, where she had her first encounter with philosophy. She walked into the classroom 20 minutes late on the first day of class, and the professor asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m Pema. I’m from Nepal,” she answered.

“No, who are you? What makes you who you are?”

“And I was stuck,” Lama recalls. “Since then, I’ve been reflecting: Who am I? What makes me me? When I react to certain things, what makes me react that way? What has formed me to do that thing? That class really blew me up.”

It’s no surprise that when Lama came to Luther, she majored in philosophy. “You decide things every day, and it’s important to know where your decision-making is coming from and where your ideas come from and why you have those ideas,” she says. “Philosophy makes me see through things, see myself and understand myself, but by understanding myself, I get to understand others.”

Lama starts a master’s program in Buddhist studies at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., this fall. “Every time I look back,” she says, “somehow my thoughts are guided by Buddhist ideals, but I still don’t know much about it. I want to see why I have those ideas, why I stand by what Buddha says.”

She’s also interested in learning more about gender in Buddhism. “It hurts me how some Buddhists say you have to be born as a man to become enlightened,” she says. “Why do men become the reincarnated one and women don’t? Where do I stand, and why do I follow that?”

Lama would like to return to Nepal someday and raise these questions with girls and women there. “If you don’t talk about it, you will never learn beyond it,” she says. “That’s one of my goals, to go back and tell people: Take initiative. Explore why you have certain values. Where are they coming from?”

—Kate Frentzel

Jenna Johnson learns to love research—and the little worm that makes it possible

Jenna Johnson can’t stop singing the praises of the tiny, transparent, E. coli–loving roundworms known officially as Caenorhabditis elegans.

“It’s an ideal model organism for doing research in developmental biology and neurology,” she says. “C. elegans has a very short life span, a lot of progeny, and a surprisingly similar genome to humans. They’re fascinating organisms.”

Johnson, a biology and history double major, was introduced to the microscopic worms while conducting research on the toxic gas hydrogen sulfide through the Amgen Scholars Program at the University of Washington in Seattle the summer after her sophomore year. It was a life-changing experience for the Stillwater, Minn., native and Phi Beta Kappa member, who also found time while at Luther to volunteer as a Spanish interpreter for the Decorah Free Clinic and a care companion with St. Croix Hospice. “I had no clue that I wanted to do research, but, after spending that summer at UW, I felt really drawn to it,” she says. “I learned how to troubleshoot problems—because most of the time what you do in the research lab doesn’t work—and how to fail gracefully. I also experienced the joy of success in the lab, and that’s a pretty cool feeling.”

Johnson continued doing research with C. elegans when she returned to Luther, joining the lab of Stephanie Fretham ’05, Luther assistant professor of biology, in fall 2014. There she used the microscopic organism to examine the connection between iron and disrupted protein homeostasis in Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. Johnson presented her work—which was supported by an R.J. McElroy Grant—at the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) last April. “I never expected to love the research process so much, but knowing that I am contributing to the body of scientific knowledge—and that at any moment in time I may be the only person in the world that knows this one particular thing—is very much a driving force for me,” says Johnson, who also spent the summer after her junior year conducting research, that time on protein and DNA interactions at the University of Iowa.

This summer Johnson moved to the East Coast, where she will spend the next year (or two) conducting research at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Md., as the recipient of a highly competitive Post-baccaulaureate Cancer Research Training Award. It’s the next step toward her ultimate goal—earning a joint M.D./Ph.D. degree and working as an academic physician at a large university. “During the summer I spent at the University of Iowa, I shadowed doctors who had the joint degree and realized that this is the career I wanted,” she says. “I love the idea that my experience as a doctor will inform my research, and I’m willing to put in the time—eight or nine more years of school—to make that happen.”

—Sara Friedl-Putnam

Laura Proescholdt connects issues of environment and social change

Nearly 10 years later, Laura Proescholdt recalls the exact moment she decided to pursue environmental studies.

“I was in seventh grade and had just finished watching the documentary An Inconvenient Truth,” she says. “It may sound cliché, but I felt compelled then and there to learn all I could about climate change, because I saw it as the defining issue my generation would have to tackle.”

Proescholdt did just that at Luther. In addition to earning induction into the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society for excelling in her studies, she served as an academic research assistant for the college’s Environmental Studies Department. (A talented writer, Proescholdt wrote for Chips and the Luther Sustainability Office as well.)

Her studies culminated in a yearlong senior honors research project on the Anthropocene, a term coined in 2000 to denote the period when human activities started to affect Earth’s geology and ecosystem significantly. “I examined why making the Anthropocene official matters to the scientific community and to academia more broadly and how it creates a dynamic space for rethinking relationships among science, politics, and activism,” says Proescholdt, who presented her research at the 2016 National Conferences on Undergraduate Research. “My main takeaway was that the Anthropocene is a fascinating tool to reimagine the human relationship with Earth.”

Her natural curiosity also led the Cumberland, Wis., native—sister of Anne Proescholdt ’12— far beyond Decorah. She spent January of her junior year in Hong Kong and Shanghai, China, studying street photography and the summer of her sophomore year working as an expressive arts intern with Northwest Passage, a Wisconsin-based organization that helps troubled teens through the arts and nature-based therapy. “That experience opened my eyes to the importance of nature as a healing force, because the time the teens spent outside connecting with nature was very healing for them,” she says. “It also inspired me to use my major less to address climate change or biodiversity directly but to work on solving systemic social problems, because I believe environmental problems have to be addressed in those efforts.”

Proescholdt put her words to action this summer when she began a yearlong Lutheran Volunteer Corps stint with the Minnesota Housing Partnership, a Twin Cities–based organization that works to build sustainable communities. “I’ve spent a lot of time learning about issues,” she says enthusiastically. “Now I’m ready to use that knowledge to make positive change.”

—Sara Friedl-Putnam

Fred Scaife documents the transformative power of music

Saturday mornings would have been an ideal time for Fred Scaife to catch up on sleep after a virtually non-stop weekday schedule.

But the Rushford, Minn., native decided to pursue a very different kind of rejuvenation, rising early every Saturday from October through December 2015 to engage elderly residents of the Gundersen Harmony Care Center in song.

“The main goal of the Voices in Harmony Memory Choir was to inspire seniors through music and instill a love of lifelong learning,” says Scaife, a music education major and former Nordic Choir president who now serves as the middle and high school choral director for Wapsie Valley Schools in Fairbank, Iowa. “It was inspiring to see the joy that music can bring to so many, including some who may not have much else in their lives.”

Randi Spencer-Berg ’87—longtime music lover and Harmony-based physician—got it all started when she asked Luther faculty member Jill Wilson if she knew any music education students who might be interested in working with a group of seniors, some with memory loss.

Scaife jumped at the chance. “Nursing homes and assisted living communities were familiar environments for me because, growing up, I visited them with my dad when he was doing pastoral work,” he says. “I knew I would enjoy being around—and learning from—the seniors at the care center in Harmony.”

The feeling was mutual. More than two dozen residents joined Scaife (and sometimes other music education students) each week for hour-long sessions during which they would sing familiar folk songs such as “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” and play jingle bells, chimes, and other simple percussion instruments.

The sessions also inspired Scaife’s senior research project, conducted with Sarah Bowman ’16, which investigated the transformative power of music among the elderly. “We filmed the sessions and then analyzed the film for behavioral changes in the participants from the beginning to the end of the program,” he says.

Their conclusion: The more engaged the residents were in the music, the more responsive and lively they became over the course of the program.

“It was amazing to see that transformation, to see how music positively impacts both the body and the mind, no matter one’s age,” Scaife says. “To be there and to witness that reminded me that a career in music education was, without a doubt, my calling.”

—Sara Friedl-Putnam

Blaise Schaeffer turns ideas into action, from helping a food pantry to an IBM project

Blaise Schaeffer learned early in life that Decorah is home to many people in need.

“I grew up across the street from the food pantry operated by First Lutheran Church so I saw how many people came there for help,” he says. “I’m very fortunate that I’ve never had to worry about where my next meal is coming from, but there are lots of people in and around Decorah who face hunger every day.”

That realization inspired him to create Dining Dollars for Decorah as his service project for the Launching Luther Leaders program. To turn his idea into reality, Schaeffer—son of Scot Schaeffer, Luther vice president for enrollment management—sought out the expertise of Wayne Tudor, dining services general manager. The two devised a plan to encourage Luther students to donate any excess dining dollars in their accounts to buy food that the pantry desperately needed. “We raised nearly $3,000, which bought two six-foot-tall pallets of rice, beans, oats, and pasta,” says Schaeffer, a computer science major and four-year member (goalie) of the Norse soccer team. “It was mind-blowing to realize that one simple idea could make such a big difference for so many people.”

That can-do attitude translated to success well beyond Luther (and Decorah) as well. Following his junior year, Schaeffer was one of five college students—including Michael Moore ’16—chosen by the Rochester (Minn.) office of IBM to develop an administrators’ console for its Watson Oncology Advisor program. “The console will help hospital administrators better understand how physicians are using the program in their clinics,” he says. Schaeffer spearheaded the project’s “back end” development, writing the source code needed for delivery of data to its “front end.” The project  took top honors in IBM’s national summer intern competition in August 2015. “We were confident in the work we had done, but there were a lot of other cool projects—including image-recognition projects created by graduate students—in the running,” he says. “We were a bit shocked to win the award.”

Not surprisingly, IBM extended Schaeffer a formal job offer to work as a software engineer on its Watson Health Project following graduation. He began his job—at the company’s Raleigh, N.C., site—in August after returning from a 3,900-mile summer cycling adventure that took him across the United States, from Anacortes, Wash., to Bar Harbor, Maine. “It’s a pretty nerdy thing to say, but I love computer programming,” he says with a smile. “I’ve had an interest in technology for as long as I can remember, and I love the challenge of designing algorithms to solve real-world problems.”

—Sara Friedl-Putnam 

Catherine Lewis explores how dance alumni use movement in their careers

Catherine Lewis has explored a few careers, but it’s her dance practice that’s shaping how she’d like to help people. 

“I’ve always known I wanted to be a helper or a healer or some profession in that realm,” says the amiable Minnesotan. “But I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out: if my fit’s not in nursing, where is it?”

As a first-year student, Lewis was drawn to nursing because it offered a guaranteed career, but her embodied experience—what she learned in her dance and yoga practices—left her, she says, “searching for ways to communicate what I practice and feel in my body.”

Lewis changed her major from nursing to psychology and dance, where she felt at home with professor Jane Hawley ’87 and the Movement Fundamentals (MF) curriculum, which teaches somatic practices rather than specific styles of dance. Still interested in health work, however, she spent the summer of 2015 interning in Minnesota at Northfield Hospital & Clinics, where she got to job shadow in every field, including occupational therapy.

“A lot of what they were doing felt similar to one of the paired principles of MF, which is range and efficiency,” Lewis says. “One patient broke both arms, and she had to learn to use her nondominant hand and regain mobility in her shoulder. The occupational therapist’s job was to give her tools to live comfortably until her range changed again. That creativity is compelling to me.”

Still, Lewis felt disheartened by the idea that the work was reactive rather than preventive. “You’re waiting until someone has a reason to come see you, and I think if we trained people to use their bodies more effectively in the first place, then a lot of rehabilitation work wouldn’t be needed,” she says. “And unfortunately, only a small percentage of the population can afford to receive occupational therapy, and that’s a problem for me too.”

Unclear about how she could use her embodiment practices in a future career, Lewis devised an ambitious project. She applied for and received a grant from Luther’s Career Center, funded by an anonymous donor, to invite back to campus six graduates of the MF program who use the concepts in their professional lives. The graduates, who range from a chiropractor to a freelance dancer to a cook, shared their stories with the Luther community last semester.

“The MF curriculum is producing really important individuals. It’s producing professional dancers, but also people who are going into health or healing,” she says. “I saw each of the alumni using the MF curriculum in a way that’s meaningful for them; they transfer what they’ve learned and help people live in their bodies physically, or use the body in a counseling practice. It was really comforting and affirming to see that.”

Lewis started an occupational therapy master’s program at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee this fall.

—Kate Frentzel

For Sheldon Smith, sports serve to connect with kids, define his path in life

Sheldon Smith lights up when he talks about wrestling. “What made me really get engaged in it was that I’m a fan of close-combat movies, and the moves and the flow, getting in the groove—I see it almost as a set of dance moves,” he says. He took up the sport in high school in Sunrise, Fla., and was recruited to Luther’s wrestling team after a friend sent in a tape of his matches.

One thing that Smith loves about the sport is the chance to hold himself accountable and improve on his mistakes, and that’s a lesson he carried into his academic life when he decided to join the TRIO program during J-term his first year at Luther. “I struggled with a couple of things, and my mindset wasn’t really ready for that college-level learning,” he says. “They were offering help, and they gave me the academic tools I needed for class. It really made me hold myself more accountable.”

Smith is the first person in his family to attend college, and it’s important to him to set an example for his siblings, in particular his younger sister. “She asks a lot of questions about college, and it’s cool to see she’s at least thinking about it at 15,” he says.

After deciding on a social work major his freshman year, Smith did two externships at the federal courthouse in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, once shadowing a court marshal and once a probation officer. But he approaches his future career much like a wrestler sizing up an opponent: with great care and deliberation.

During his summers at Luther, Smith worked as a counselor at Luther’s wrestling camps for middle and high school students. “The first year, I didn’t know what to expect or if kids would like me, but it turned out really well,” he says. “I had a good time, they had a good time, and after thinking some more, I decided that I wanted to work with kids, maybe troubled youth.”

So for his in-field practicum his senior year, Smith decided to work with Girls in the Game, a nonprofit that empowers girls in Chicago to lead healthy, positive, confident lives.

Smith worked with an afterschool program on Chicago’s South Side, coordinating sports and other activities and leading conversations about health and leadership. The experience reinforced that he’d like to work with kids in middle or early high school. “That age group strikes me because they’re beginning to think on their own,” he says. “I see the changes that they make while being involved in the program. It’s an awesome experience just observing some of those changes, and that’s where I can be most beneficial. That’s where I can make the most happen. That’s where I can help.”
Smith plans to spend a year gaining experience in a youth-oriented program before starting a master’s program in social work.

—Kate Frentzel

Jesse Hitz Graff credits family with helping to develop his strengths

Jesse Hitz Graff grew up with seven siblings across three households, and he gives credit to his family for setting him on the path to Luther and beyond.

“You feel loved when you come home,” he says. “All the siblings mob you at the door. I’d much rather have three houses where I’m accepted than one where I’m not. My family’s built me into the person I am.”

It’s easy to see how Hitz Graff’s family dynamics have influenced his Luther career. For one thing, it was his older brother, Isaac ’14, an Ultimate Frisbee player, who brought Jesse to Luther. “St. Olaf and Carleton didn’t have Isaac, and they didn’t have Isaac on an Ultimate team,” he jokes. He describes getting involved with Luther’s Ultimate B-team, Pound, which he captained for two years, as “the best decision I made at Luther. My first home here was Pound.”

It was because he missed his younger siblings that Hitz Graff became a buddy in Luther’s PALS program, where he acted as a role model for an area student. “You take a lot of what you do in college for granted, you get tired often, so it’s cool to have the young, vibrant enthusiasm and the wonder of a child in your life,” he says.

You could say, too, that family dynamics helped Hitz Graff excel in math and science. “The only medals I have from childhood are three math competition medals. Especially when you have a household of eight siblings, you try to find the things that make you unique,” he says.

Last summer, Hitz Graff worked in the lab of Erin Flater ’01, associate professor of physics, to study the durability and longevity of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices, which are found in everything from cell phones to airbags. He focused on how silicon oxide wears on aluminum oxide, two common MEMS materials, to try to determine whether laws that govern the wear of surfaces of large objects also apply at the microscale (he concluded that they do not). Hitz Graff presented his research at the Midstates Consortium for Math and Science in Chicago last fall.

This fall, he begins a Ph.D. program in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota. Growing up, his dad would have “lamp hours,” when the family would turn off overhead lights, so environmentalism was already in Hitz Graff’s mind when he took Luther’s J-term class Green Germany and Norway in 2015. Most of the renewable-energy experts the class learned from were working in electrical engineering, and that sealed the deal. “I don’t see myself as a volunteer or nonprofit worker,” he says, “but I can use whatever tools I get as an engineer to improve renewable energy and give back that way.”

—Kate Frentzel

Photos by Will Heller '16 and Madeline Miller '19

Luther’s Washington Semester—a study-away program with a four-day-a-week internship at its core—offers many students their first real taste of working in government. Through interning with members of Congress, the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, the U.S. Department of Education, the Senate Agriculture Committee, and scores of other agencies, students get to try on a political career—and sometimes it fits. Over the past few decades, the Washington Semester has turned out graduates working at the local, state, and federal levels, as assistant attorney generals, as policy analysts and researchers, as location scouts for presidential candidates, and even as the secretary of the Senate.

The Washington Semester, which Luther offers in collaboration with 12 other Lutheran colleges, isn’t limited to politics; students can intern in communications, the arts, history and museum studies, economics and business, environmental studies, and more. But just ahead of the 2016 presidential election, it seemed a good time to check in with graduates of the program who are working in politics, policy, or public service to see what they could tell us about working in the political system that—love it or hate it—we call our own.

Heather Adams ’91

Assistant attorney general, Iowa Office of the Attorney General
Interned in the D.C. Office of the Corporation Counsel (now the D.C. Office of the Attorney General)

What are your job responsibilities?
I am the lead counsel for the Iowa Department of Public Health, a state agency employing 375 people with a budget of over $250 million. I advise on all areas of public health law—from immunizations to disease outbreaks to environmental health to maternal and child health issues—and I represent the department in administrative, district court, and appellate matters.

What was your most memorable day on the job?
The day the Iowa Supreme Court issued the Varnum decision, which ruled that denying same sex couples the right to marry in Iowa was unconstitutional, and the weeks following the issuance of that decision. I advised the department and county recorders on implementing Varnum to ensure marriage applications and certificates complied with the landmark decision.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received?
A former boss once told me that the least interesting thing I worked on that day was more interesting than the most interesting thing I would work on in a private law practice. Not to disparage private practice attorneys, who do excellent work and can of course have intriguing cases, but my advice for people hoping to work in government, politics, or policy would be to let that desire to effectuate change and help others be the driving force in your decision making, even if you won’t always have the paycheck those in the private sector might bring home. As the quote from [law professor] Minor Myers says: Go into the world and do well; but more importantly, go into the world and do good.

What happens behind the scenes that would surprise people who don’t work in politics?
What I see behind the scenes in Iowa is that people from both political parties really can work together to do good things for Iowans. The national dialogue is rife with incivility and dissension, but I work every day with people from both parties who share an interest in making Iowa a healthier and more just state and who strive to make it so.

Josh Straka ’97

District director for Minnesota Congresswoman Betty McCollum
Interned as a production assistant on Washington Week in Review

What are your current job responsibilities?
Day-to-day I manage Congresswoman McCollum’s Minnesota office operations, including casework and outreach staff, and serve as a liaison between the public and federal agencies. Additionally, I develop policy objectives, strategies and operating plans, and direct activities of the office in support of the congresswoman and her constituents.

Describe one or two accomplishments that make you proud.
The completion of the Union Depot renovation and the opening of the Green Line Light Rail in the Twin Cities are by no means my accomplishments, but I’m incredibly proud of the small role I played while working for Congresswoman McCollum. Thousands of workers were put to work to complete these projects during the depths of the recession. Now that they are open for business, tens of thousands of people depend on them every day to get to work, school, and medical appointments, not to mention Vikings, Twins, and St. Paul Saints games!

Do you have any advice for people hoping to work in politics?
Listen before you speak and remember whom you work for.

What would you change about the U.S. political system?
I’d definitely dial back the vitriol in Washington and politics across the country. There’s too much vilification and exploitation of division in national politics, which is also bleeding into state houses. Debate is vital and healthy for our country, but rage, fury, and hateful rhetoric is not debate. It forces voices out of the process. We need to remember what brings us together as Americans.

Julie Adams ’99

Secretary of the Senate
Interned at the Children’s Defense Fund

What are your job responsibilities?
I am the chief legislative, financial, and administrative officer of the United States Senate. As an elected officer, I supervise an extensive array of offices (26 departments with nearly 250 employees) to expedite the day-to-day operations of the Senate.

What was your most memorable day on the job?
Certainly the day I was sworn in (January 6, 2015) by the president pro tempore, Senator Orrin Hatch, in the Senate chamber will forever be etched in my mind.

What’s the most frustrating aspect of your job?
It is not so much frustrating as it is just the reality that my schedule is not my own—whenever the Senate is in session, I am here. And when the Senate is not in session, I’m catching up on everything on my desk I couldn’t get to when the Senate was in session.

Do you have any advice for people hoping to work in politics?
Be open to opportunities. I never dreamed I would have any of the jobs I’ve had in the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. If I had planned my career in politics I know I would not be in the position I am today.

What happens behind the scenes that would surprise people who don’t work in politics?
Folks really do get along despite their political differences. Washington is not nearly as divisive as some make it out to be.

Mark Bailey ’00

Senior assistant attorney general, Colorado Office of the Attorney General
Interned with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia

What are your job responsibilities?
I work in the Consumer Fraud Unit, where I lead investigations and conduct civil law enforcement actions against people and companies that violate the Colorado Consumer Protection Act.

What has surprised you about working in politics?
I suspected that I would find this work rewarding. I am surprised by how strongly I feel that way.

What was your most memorable day on the job?
Probably my first trial. On our side, we had two lawyers at counsel table. Defendants had at least four, and up to six or seven lawyers, at counsel table at any given time. Having previously worked at a law firm, I learned quickly that government lawyers sometimes have to get by with less.

What’s the most frustrating aspect of your job?
The fact that our jurisdiction is generally limited to Colorado. Thus, if we shut down a scam here, we are limited in our ability to keep the bad guys from setting up shop in another state.

Describe one or two accomplishments that make you proud.
I’m most proud of the work I’ve done to shut down telemarketers who trick consumers—often elderly or otherwise at risk—into exorbitant “contracts” for magazine subscriptions. These “contracts” were often valued at more than $1,000, and it was normal for consumers to be bombarded by several different companies and tricked into multiple “contracts.”
. . . I’ve shut down about 50 such companies (most of which were owned by the same seven or eight individuals) in my time here and secured millions of dollars in judgments.

What would you change about the U.S. political system?
Every voter would set aside a few hours a month to learn about the issues, and part of this time would be dedicated to respectfully listening to the arguments of people they disagree with.

I love my job when . . .
I stand up in court and say, “Mark Bailey, on behalf of the state of Colorado.”

Mitch Schaben ’10

Policy and budget analyst for the Office of the Senate President, Illinois Senate Democratic Caucus
Interned in Senator Tom Harkin’s legislative office and with the Senate Agriculture Committee

What are your job responsibilities?
The policy silo I work in is higher education. My primary responsibility is to write a detailed summary for every piece of legislation introduced that is categorized as impacting higher education . . . essentially, I write CliffsNotes for our caucus membership.

Describe one or two accomplishments that make you proud.
Two years ago, I worked on a proposal that would make it easier for students taking AP classes to gain college credit for the scores they received on the AP exam. The state’s public universities opposed the bill, and education interest groups supported the bill. I spent months engaging in a back-and-forth struggle with the two sides. Four redrafts and five amendments later, we had a bill that neither was happy with, so I knew we landed on a compromise.

What would you change about the U.S. political system?
​Public financing of campaigns. Money is access, which is why your average citizen never gets to meet or speak with their elected officials. ​

What happens behind the scenes that would surprise people who don’t work in politics?
​​The amount of back and forth that goes on behind the scenes with legislative proposals. Countless hours are spent by lawmakers, stakeholders, and staff making small tweaks to the language of a bill before it’s soup.

If I didn’t work in politics . . .
​I would open a dive shop in Mexico and name it Norse Diving. ​

Magie Darling ’12

Senior research assistant, Center for Health Policy
Interned with the Department of Education

What are your job responsibilities?
I conduct literature reviews of relevant health care financing and health economics research, interview key health care stakeholders for background information and case studies, and write academic papers and blog posts. Our team also convenes private round tables and public events aimed at discussing the implementation of many of the policies about which we research and write.

What was your most memorable day on the job?
One of my most memorable days on the job was when I had the honor of presenting the PLEN Mentor Award to Senator Amy Klobuchar for her example of strong, collaborative leadership in public policy and for supporting future generations of women policymakers.

What would you change about the U.S. political system?
I’d require people of all different political stripes to socialize and interact more. Today, it’s simply too easy only to hear affirmations of our previously held beliefs, and interacting with real-life humans on the other side may challenge us to reconsider.

What happens behind the scenes that would surprise people who don’t work in politics?
I think most people would be surprised—and, I hope, comforted—by the extent to which many policy proposals are circulated, vetted, considered, and reconsidered among a variety of stakeholders before being made public.

Ali Toal ’13

Legislative assistant for Colorado Senator Cory Gardner
Interned for Ohio Congressman Jim Renacci

What are your job responsibilities?
I serve as a liaison for the senator to constituents, organizations, and federal and state agencies in the policy areas in my portfolio including health care policy, social security disability insurance, education policy, veteran health, global health, foster care, and adoption. I actively work with committee staff, Senate colleagues, and various stakeholder groups to craft and progress legislation. I author floor speeches, vote recommendations, talking points, questions for the record, letters to federal agencies, and policy memorandums.

What was your most memorable day on the job?
The most memorable day on the job was probably the day I received a hand-written card from Senator Elizabeth Warren thanking me for my work on an amendment to the Every Student Succeeds Act we passed earlier this year. I couldn’t believe that she took the time to write that hand-written letter, and it meant a lot to me. I still need to get it framed.
Other notable days were being able to see the prime minister of Israel speak to a joint session of Congress on the Iran deal, getting to see Pope Francis when he came to Washington D.C., and watching the prime minister of India, Narenda Modi, speak to a joint session of Congress.

What would you change about the U.S. political system?
Criminal justice reform and mental health reform.

What happens behind the scenes that would surprise people who don’t work in politics?
It’s not as serious and formal as most people would think. It’s a lot less House of Cards and a lot more Veep. We do have quite a bit of fun in our office and joke around.

Rich Vickers ’14

Political advance staff for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign
Interned for Iowa Senator Tom Harkin

What are your job responsibilities?
Political advance is basically any time a candidate goes somewhere for a trip, whether it’s a campaign stop or a speech, a team of three to four people go ahead of them scope out the location and facilitate the event.

July 4 was my first trip in New Hampshire, and then I spent four months in Iowa. I was in charge of the event at the Hotel Winneshiek. I was what’s called a site lead. Basically, site leads go in and scope out different speaking options and compile a report of what might be benefits to certain locations. Then they work with the production crew and the vendors to figure out how the room’s going to be set up, where the stage is going to go, what kind of lighting and audio will be used, where the people will fit in. And then when the candidate is on site, the site leads provide context for her, where the stage is, what’s next after the speech, where the interview room is, things like that.

I was in Iowa for three or four months. At the end of January, when the caucus was over, I came back to D.C. and had 24 hours in D.C., and then they sent me to Las Vegas for another caucus. I was there for two or three weeks, and from there I traveled around primary states: North Carolina, then Pennsylvania, Ohio, San Francisco, Oregon, New Jersey, Kentucky, Wisconsin, New York, Florida—basically anywhere there was a primary.

What’s the most frustrating aspect of your job?
Often you have a lot of competing interests with how you set up events, and it can be tough to make sure that you get every person into the building, that your media is happy, because you might have 100 cameras at an event, and you have to make sure that not only does the stage look good but the local politicians at an event are taken care of and have time. There are a lot of politics within politics. There’s a microcosm of politics.

What would you change about the U.S. political system?
Money in politics. It’s unfortunately a product of the times, and I think it’s clear to everyone that something needs to be done to limit the staggering amount of money required to win an election.

If I didn’t work in politics . . .
I would get a lot more sleep!

Sam Ward ’15

Member outreach and D.C. finance assistant, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)
Interned for Iowa Congressman Bruce Braley

What are your job responsibilities?
My daily tasks involve working with members of Congress and their staff to facilitate their needs, fundraising for democratic campaigns around the country, and building and staffing D.C.-based events. In this role, I work for Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and chairman of the DCCC, Congressman Ben Ray Luján.

What has surprised you about working in politics?
I think the most surprising thing is the people and how normal (albeit incredibly hardworking) they are. I think my affinity toward politics throughout my life glorified members and their staff, but as I’ve worked with them they’ve been humanized. As a random example, a senior Democratic member has an obsession for the entire McDonald’s food menu, and we actually send him milkshakes to his office whenever we need to send him a thank-you note. Knowing they are real people makes me hopeful for my career in politics.

What would you change about the U.S. political system?
Campaign finance reform.

I love my job *most* [Ward’s addition] when . . .
I've had an iced coffee and an easy commute.

2000–2009 / 2010–2016

2000

Ben Johnson is a financial consultant for Stonebridge Group at Thrivent Financial in Bloomington, Minn.

Nicole (Ryerson) Lemke is the first-time homebuyer program manager for the Appleton (Wis.) Housing Authority.

2001

Grant Applehans is a senior pastor at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Wyoming, Minn.

Rachael Hall of Laveen, Ariz., is director of operations at Crater Group.

Sue (Buckheister) Hanson was promoted to distinguished lecturer in the Department of Health and Medicine at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wis. She is also the course coordinator for all undergraduate anatomy and physiology courses.

Melody Jordahl-Iafrato is assistant professor of family and community medicine in the clinical scholar track and program director of family and community medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Emily (Bradbury) Knutson is a stay-at-home mom in Minot, S.D.

Sara (Radke) O’Connor is band director at Woodbury (Minn.) Middle School. The Woodbury Middle School band program was awarded a $2,000 St. Croix Valley Foundation Music Education Grant that provided the opportunity for students to work with composer-in-residence Erik Sherburne ’01. Through the grant, the Woodbury Middle School band program commissioned Sherburne to compose two pieces of music, one for the jazz band and one for the eighth-grade band. “The collaboration was a great experience for students because they got to meet and work with an actual composer who used their ideas in the new pieces,” O’Connor says. “They then saw and heard their ideas come alive through music in the new compositions.” O’Connor and Sherburne played in Concert Band and Symphony Orchestra together while at Luther.

Feliz Tovar is a financial services representative at MassMutual in Chesterfield, Mo.

2002

Monica (Mansholt) Benolkin is orchestra director at Rockford (Ill.) Lutheran School.

Brad Blackman of Wauwatosa, Wis., is a senior global supplier operations manager at Logitech Inc.

Sara (Rink) Buis is intake specialist at Centralized Intake for the Iowa Department of Human Services in Newton.

Jenn (Smith) and Peter Hoesing ’03 live in Sioux Falls, S.D. Jenn is the executive director of the Stockyards Ag Experience at Stockyards Plaza Inc. Peter is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Grinnell College.

Lindsay Read Feinberg is a human services research analyst at Mathematica Policy Research in Chicago.

Ron Robinson is chief clinical director of Premier Wellness Chiropractic in Crystal Lake, Ill.

Aimee Sandy is a financial manager at Community Action Partnership of Ramsey and Washington Counties in St. Paul, Minn.

Carrie (Schafhauser) Wittenberg is a Philips lighting specialist for Werner Electric in Cottage Grove, Minn.

2003

Jessica Aguilar is senior executive director of Women’s, Children’s, Cancer, and the Edith Sanford Breast Center Initiative at Sanford Health in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Nisse Christopherson is an account director at Unite Private Networks in Clive, Iowa.

Karen (Meyer) Goble is vice president operations manager at American AgCredit in Greeley, Colo.

Emily (Wenzel) Gutierrez works in strategic sourcing at Boston Scientific in St. Paul, Minn.

Bronson Power is an operations administrator in the Surgical Services Department of Mayo Clinic Health System in Mankato, Minn.

Colleen Schmitt of Iowa City, Iowa, is an ELL coordinator and instructor at Kirkwood Community College.

Kurt Seamans teaches physical education at Knik Elementary School in Wasilla, Alaska.

Josh Shank of Austin, Texas, received a doctor of musical arts degree from the University of Texas.

Jason Trost is a senior facilitator at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage in West Des Moines, Iowa. He is also a certified safety judge with the U.S. All Star Federation for Cheer and Dance Teams and judges national competitive events around the country.

2004

Brenda (Rengstorf) Bauch is a nursing professor at Oklahoma City (Okla.) University.

Sara (Goudschaal) and Terry Blessing ’05 live in Lamoni, Iowa. Sara is an instructor in music at Graceland University, and she received the Graceland University Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching for the 2015–16 academic year. Terry is a revenue cycle consultant at Prism Healthcare Partners Inc.

Melissa Christopherson is a faculty associate in the Department of Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She was invited to the White House last spring for the announcement of the National Microbiome Initiative because of her work with undergraduates at the university.

Jen (Weier) Gipp is an optometrist with Gundersen Lutheran Clinic of Decorah. She earned a master of business administration degree in healthcare administration from Western Governors University.

Mandy Henderson is dean of students at Temple Grandin School in Boulder, Colo.

Katie Konrath of St. Paul, Minn., competed for the U.S. team at the 2016 Underwater Hockey World Championships in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The U.S. team was awarded sixth place.

Ryan Luhrs is assistant professor of music and director of choral activities at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, N.C.

Erick Weeg is director of investments at Ascent Private Capital in Minneapolis.

Zach Wigle is activities director at Solon (Iowa) High School.

2005

Keith Becker of Williamsburg, Iowa, is the manager of University of Iowa Employment Services.

Libby (Nussdorfer) Chmielewski teaches at Middleton Plains Area Schools in Cross Plains, Wis.

John Drilling is an electrical apprentice at Interstates Companies in Cresco, Iowa.

Nicole (Warnke) and Kevin Fultz live in Winona, Minn. Nicole is a clinical manager at Gundersen Health System in La Crosse, Wis. Kevin is a web developer at Fastenal.

Mike Gucwa is senior manager for field operations at Premium Retail Services in Ogden, Utah.

Kate Ingber is a recruiting specialist at Ucare in Minneapolis.

Katie (Knutson) Jacques earned a master of education degree from Hamline University. She teaches third-grade dual language for the Richfield (Minn.) Public Schools.

Ashley (Sauke) Kincaid is an executive staff assistant at People’s Energy Cooperative in Oronoco, Minn.

Elise (Bieri) Patzke is supervisor of cellular and molecular immunology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Becca Tumm of Minneapolis is project manager for U.S. programs (disaster response) at International Orthodox Christian Charities.

2006

Ryan Hulshizer is a financial adviser at Farm Bureau Financial Services in Northwood, Iowa.

Courtney Kupfer is programming and student affairs director at CenterPoint Massage and Shiatsu Therapy School and Clinic in Minneapolis.

Alex Lass is a controller at Service Payment Plan Inc. in Chicago.

Ashley (Meyer) Sires of Parkersburg, Iowa, is a special education consultant at AEA 267.

Veronica (Alzalde) Wells is associate professor, coordinator of library academic support services, and music librarian at University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif.

Amy (Dunkle) Zafarani earned a doctor of osteopathic medicine degree from Des Moines University and completed residency training at St. Joseph Mercy Oakland Hospital in Michigan. She has joined the staff as an obstetrician and gynecologist at ThedaCare Regional Medical Center-Appleton, Wis., and ThedaCare Regional Medical Center-Neenah, Wis.

2007

Jenny (Silseth) Binversie is an assurance senior manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Milwaukee.

Matthew Busche has retired from the pro-cycling peloton after a seven-year career. A winner of two U.S. titles (2011, 2015), Busche rode to second at the 2012 Larry H. Miller Tour of Utah and fifth at the 2014 USA Pro Challenge.

Sam Kemp Carlin and Paul Carlin ’12 live in Des Moines, Iowa. Sam earned a master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling from Walden University and is a national certified counselor. She is a family-based services counselor for Youth and Shelter Services Inc. and a member of Chi Sigma Iota. Paul is a claims adjuster with Nationwide Insurance.

Adam Frye is the head cross country and track and field coach at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash.

Matthew Hagen of Bedford, N.H., earned a master of psychology degree from Harvard University last May.

Emily Holley is director of communications and marketing for the Iowa Environmental Council in Des Moines.

Ben Knutson is senior manager at Ernst and Young in Minneapolis.

Emily (Brueggen) Lilly is a registered nurse at UCHealth Cancer Center in Fort Collins, Colo.

Sarah Schlee is a supervising resource coordinator at Youth Guidance in Chicago.

Melissa (Biermann) Schulz is a substitute teacher for the Waseca and Waterville/Elysian/Morristown (Minn.) school districts. She also maintains a private voice and piano studio in her home. She is a pianist and singer with the Waseca Chorale and a pianist for North Waseca Lutheran Church and Faith Lutheran Church, and she teaches a dance cardio exercise class twice a week.

Paul Stellmacher is assistant professor in the Department of Medicine in the Divisions of Hematology and Oncology and General Internal Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He specializes in hospice and palliative medicine as well as hospitalist medicine.

Staci Sudenga is assistant professor of medicine in the Epidemiology Division at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

Joe Svendsen earned a doctorate of musical arts in choral conducting from Texas Tech University. He is assistant professor of music and assistant director of choral studies at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.

Tom Swenson is an executive resolution analyst at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage in West Des Moines, Iowa.

Joe Timmer is band director at Faribault (Minn.) Senior High School.

Emily (Lillegard) and Soren Tryggestad ’05 live in Minneapolis. Emily teaches music at Arete Academy and provides in-home music therapy services. Soren is a lab supervisor for Cargill Inc.

Andrew Wannigman of Norman, Okla., was the third-place winner of the 2016 men in opera and operetta American Prize in Vocal Performance—Friedrich and Virginia Schorr Memorial Award.

Laura (Johnson) Young is lead registered nurse at the Spring Valley (Minn.) Olmsted Medical Center branch clinic.

2008

Alyssa Cheadle is assistant professor of psychology at Hope College in Holland, Mich.

Kacie (Clement) Garver is a medical, surgical, and pediatric registered nurse at Boone County (Iowa) Hospital.

Tyler Hendrickson of Iowa City, Iowa, was selected to present “Enabling Community: Creating Pianists with Great Ensemble Skills” at the 16th Biennial Conference of the Suzuki Association of the Americas.

Hannah (Huinker) Schroeher is a licensed independent social worker at Winneshiek Medical Center in Decorah.

Katelin Wangberg is a news producer at KIRO 7, Cox Media Group in Seattle.

Jared Wiklund is public relations manager for Pheasants Forever, an upland conservation group based in St. Paul, Minn.

2009

Hannah Armstrong Stanke teaches choir at Southwest High School in Minneapolis.

Melissa Berg is an elementary school counselor at Shanghai Community International School in China. 

Mischa Fleishman is a grants administrator for the Legal Assistance Foundation in Chicago.

David Keller earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the Denver School of Nursing. He is a nurse in the Cardiac-Thoracic ICU Department at Colorado University Hospital.

Meg KenKnight Burman is a public health nurse and nurse-family partner at Public Health Madison and Dane County in Madison, Wis.

Megan (Reutlinger) Lyon is a physical therapist at Winneshiek Medical Center in Decorah. She received certification in orthopedic clinical specialty.

Laura (Johnson) Mallers of San Francisco is an audit manager at Deloitte.

Kassandra (Malek) and Curtis Miller live in Savage, Minn. Kassandra is a stay-at-home mom. Curtis is a quality manager at PepsiCo in Burnsville, Minn.

Tom Miller-Bishoff is an occupational therapist at Communications Innovations in Fitchburg, Wis. He earned a master’s degree in occupational therapy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Matt Myers is conductor and musical director of Master Chorale of Flagstaff in Arizona.

Siri (Dove) Mytty of Basalt, Colo., is a reception manager at Snowmass Club.

Matt Orth is a level 3 engineer at SundogIT in DeKalb, Ill.

Cody Ryberg is a study-abroad adviser at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, N.C.

Andrea Schiefelbein is a graduate student in public health at the London (England) School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Andrew Stoneking is director of choral activities at North High School in Sioux City, Iowa.

Kate Thomson is a digital cloud librarian at Bibliotecha in Oakdale, Minn.

Jeff Weston is on the music faculty at the University of Pittsburgh.

Kathie Whitt is a foot and ankle specialist at Family Foot Healthcare PLC in Waterloo, Iowa.

2010

Kelsey (Mans) Crusinberry is youth director at Trinity Lutheran Church in Stillwater, Minn.

Sarah (Bousselot) Dopson earned a master’s degree in nursing from San Francisco State University and a family nurse practitioner certification. She is a nurse practitioner at VA Medical Center in Tomah, Wis.

Taylor Hammrich earned a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Denver. She teaches science, technology, engineering, and math for the Denver Public Schools.

Jocelyn (Winter) McDonnell earned a master’s degree in early childhood education from Grand Canyon University. She teaches in the Inver Grove Heights (Minn.) School District.

Aaron Stenhaug is accounting manager at Perforce Software Inc. in Minneapolis.

2011

Dustin Balsley is cofounder and COO of Performance Livestock Analytics. The company moved from Osage, Iowa, and has established itself at the Iowa State University Research Park in Ames as part of the Ag Startup Engine and ISU Startup Factory. The business helps livestock producers become more sustainable and profitable through a precision agricultural application. By combining cloud-based technology with on-farm information, the company’s software helps livestock producers efficiently measure and manage activities and inventories. Balsley and his business partner, Dane Kuper, were named one of the semifinalist teams in the American Farm Bureau’s 2017 Rural Entrepreneurship Challenge. They were also awarded the top prize of $25,000 in the 2016 Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Venture Competition and the $25,000 Proof of Commercial Relevance grant from the Iowa Economic Development Authority.

Ryan Bouslog is a physical therapist at the VA Medical Center in Minneapolis.

Alyse Carlson earned a medical doctorate from the University of Iowa. She is a pediatric resident at Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, Md.

Kate (Trigger) Duffert is a graduate student in the master of divinity program at the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. She was elected as a student representative to the board of trustees and the seminary council.

James Feinstein of Washington, D.C., is a presidential appointee in the Obama administration serving at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the U.S. government’s Development Finance Institution.

Rebekka (Willis) Harkins is camp director at the Greenway Foundation in Denver.

Courtney (Grutz) Konetski is a product-costing analyst at Cargill Inc. in Wayzata, Minn.

Kelsey Leppert is associate attorney at Grefe and Sidney PLC in Pella, Iowa.

Aidha Majdhy is sales coordinator at St. Regis Maldives Vommuli Resort.

Tyler McCubbin teaches 11th-grade history at Colegio Americana de Torreon in Torreon Coahuila, Mexico.

Sarah (Allyn) Mobley is a registered nurse at Allina in St. Paul, Minn.

Nicole (Olson) Payne is an English language and phonics teachers at Engage Minds Learning Center in Brunei Darussalam.

Winda (Rompas) Roets works at Thrivent Financial in Minneapolis.

Emily Sharp earned a nurse practitioner’s degree from Allen College. She is a nurse practitioner at Valley View Health Center in Chehalis, Wash.

Mari (Henderson) and Josh Sharpe live in Minneapolis. Mari is a senior marketer at Thomson Reuters Inc. Josh is a claims representative at Western National Insurance.

Vaughn Tackmann earned a graduate certificate in environmental education from Hamline University. He is assistant track and field coach at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa.

Tobin Thomas of Tacoma, Wash., is a behavioral researcher for the U.S. Army.

Alex Ulfers is an obstetrics and gynecology resident at St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in Far Rockaway, N.Y.

Julia Walk earned a Ph.D. degree in mathematical and computational sciences from the University of Iowa. She is assistant professor of mathematics at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn.

Allison Wathen is service coordinator for early intervention at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

Greg Woodin teaches at Westside High School in Omaha, Neb.

2012

Hannah (Bygd) Bearinger is senior innovation fellow at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Bailey Cahlander is the lead communications coordinator for public art and placemaking initiatives for the Hennepin Theatre Trust. Among other activities, she manages marketing and digital content for the Made Here initiative and the WeDo Cultural District. She also led the implementation of video production at the trust and designed a mosaic mural installed on Hennepin Theatre Trust’s new building in Minneapolis.

Seth Duin is senior external relations manager for College Possible in St. Paul, Minn. He also produces audio and video, records soundtracks, and edits video for short-form documentaries. He coproduced Saving Creativity, a short-length film documentary on the importance of arts programs in public schools. It won first place among student films at the Oneota Film Festival and was nominated for a 2013 Midwest Emmy Award. He also performs regularly with the Minneapolis band General B and the Wiz.

Melissa Erickson is a multiplatform producer at WBIR TV-10 in Knoxville, Tenn.

Brett Finch is a software engineer at Workiva in Ames, Iowa.

Daniel Flucke is pastor at St. Peter Lutheran Church in Greene, Iowa.

Molly (Ternus) Hackman earned a master’s degree in speech language pathology from the University of Iowa. She is a speech language pathologist at Heartland AEA in Johnston, Iowa.

Aaron Hoffland is a DevOps programmer at IBM Corporation in Rochester, Minn.

William Hoffman is operations analyst at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Elias Johnson is an academic adviser at DREAM Technical Academy in Willmar, Minn.

Dione Miller was ordained to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in the ELCA last May and is associate pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church in Waupaca, Wis. She is also a graduate student, concentrating on global Christianity and mission studies, in the master of divinity program at the Lutheran School of Theology–Chicago.

Meghan Pedersen is a research analyst at Delta Air Lines in Minneapolis.

Amy Sandager is a goldsmith at Zoe Chicco Fine Jewelry in Los Angeles.

Amy Wilson is a registered nurse in the neonatal ICU of Children’s Hospital of Georgia in Augusta.

Jake Wittman is an adviser at DREAM Technical Academy in Waldorf, Minn.

Cassie (Molski) Wolfgram is a preschool aftercare teacher at Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in Iowa City, Iowa.

2013

Devan Benjamin teaches fourth grade at Willard Elementary School in Des Moines, Iowa.

Stephanie Branchaud and three friends who met as summer guides at Wilderness Canoe Base (WCB) completed a summer-long canoe trip in support of WCB, a camp in the Boundary Waters. Stephanie was first introduced to WCB while at Luther when taking Winter Biology, a January Term course. Their canoe trip, which the women dubbed “Journey 4 Renewal,” began at WCB on Seagull Lake in the Boundary Waters and finished 1,239 miles (and 66 days) later at York Factory at Hudson Bay in Manitoba. Upon their return the women found that they had raised $40,000, nearly reaching their $50,000 goal, which will be matched by a generous donor. More information and photos from the trip can be found at journey4renewal.org. 

Clara Byom of Albuquerque, N.M., earned two master’s degrees from the University of New Mexico, one in clarinet performance and the other in musicology. She performs klezmer, English country, contra dance, Scottish dance, and classical music on clarinet, bass clarinet, piano, and accordion. She is a founding member of Di Kavene Kapelye, Rusty Tap, and Duo Mozzafiato and cofounder/codirector of the New Mexico Contemporary Ensemble. She also performs frequently with the Rebbe’s Orkestra, the Thrifters, and New Music New Mexico.

Stephen Dahle is the choir director at New Richmond (Wis.) Middle School and assistant marching band director at Hudson (Wis.) High School.

Benjamin Feldkamp is a paramedic at Allina Hospitals and Clinics in Minneapolis.

Amanda (Wiger) Leisinger earned a master’s degree in teaching and learning from St. Mary’s University. She teaches kindergarten for the Rochester (Minn.) Public Schools.

Mario Martinucci is consulting analyst at Cerner Corportation in Kansas City, Mo.

Quinn Meyer is a school psychologist at Intermediate District 287 in Plymouth, Minn.

Kelsey Moler is a child and family therapist at SummitStone Health Partners in Loveland, Colo.

David Pedrick is program manager for Earthcraft Communities in Atlanta.

Regina Preston is a financial assistant for the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Katie Schwartz of Stillwater, Minn., is a bank examiner for the Minnesota Department of Commerce.

Emily Streeper is a brand specialist at Amazon in Seattle.

Erin Underdahl of Bloomington, Minn., is a registered nurse at the University of Minnesota Medical Center.

Ashley Wright is a marketing and patron services manager at Civic Music Association in Des Moines, Iowa.

Jessie Zenchak is a graduate research assistant at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant.

Elise (Allen) and Tyler Zinnecker ’12 live in Lee’s Summit, Mo. Elise is a senior accountant at Ernst and Young. Tyler earned a master’s degree from Des Moines University and is a podiatrist at Truman Medical Center.

2014

Jessa Anderson-Reitz is a financial coach and referral administrator for Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity in St. Paul, Minn.

David Baxter is choir director at Newton (Iowa) High School.

Erik Bay of Salt Lake City, Utah, is a volunteer for the ELCA.

Dan Blattner of Oakdale, Minn., is a corporate auditor at 3M.

Katie Gaudian earned a master’s degree in health administration from the University of Iowa. She is an administrative fellow at Hospital Sisters Health System in Springfield, Ill.

Stephanie Lake is office manager for Behavior Care Specialists in Mitchell, S.D.

Jessica Larson earned a master’s degree in therapeutic recreation from the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse and passed the national exam to become a certified therapeutic recreation specialist. She is the program director at Joy Ranch in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Taylor (Johnson) Ledvina is wellness coordinator at Mathy Construction Company in Onalaska, Wis.

Brita Moore of Rochester, Minn., is a reporter for Rochester Post-Bulletin’s weekly farm publication, Agri News.

Chris Norton presented “Inspiring Others to Overcome Adversity” last October at the Cedar Valley Iowa Realty Auction House in Decorah.

Lillianna Petsch-Horvath is the registrar at Milwaukee Ballet School and Academy.

Christina Scharmer is a teaching assistant for health psychology at the University at Albany in N.Y.

Marissa Schuh of Adrian, Mich., is a vegetable educator in agriculture and agribusiness for Michigan State University Extension.

2015

Tiya Abdalla is a drug diversion case manager at Operation de Novo in Minneapolis.

Ryan Barrett is staff auditor at Media Audits International in Greenwood Village, Colo.

Christine (O’Brien) Deignan is an admissions counselor in Luther’s Des Moines Regional Office.

Jessica Dorsey is a development specialist at Presence Health in Chicago.

Sarah Fox is shift manager at Sencha Tea Bar in Minneapolis.

Andrew Herder teaches math at Joseph A. Craig High School in Janesville, Wis.

Kaley Herman is a research coordinator at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Duluth.

Michona Johns is academic navigator of Minnesota Opportunity Corps in Minneapolis.

Nils Johnson is a legal intern for the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender in Centennial.

Mitchell Kennedy teaches middle school special education at Decatur (Mich.) Public Schools.

Ryley Kramka teaches physical education for the Minneapolis Public Schools.

Hannah Parker is a milieu treatment counselor at Orchard Place in Des Moines, Iowa.

Victoria Peters is a teaching assistant in music history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts.

Laura Peterson teaches fifth grade at Altoona (Iowa) Elementary School.

Blaire Shaffer is a communications assistant for the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks in Chicago.

Steven Sorenson is an interface engineer for Epic Systems Inc. in Verona, Wis.

2016

Krista Anderson is a cardiothoracic surgical/transplant registered nurse at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Grant Barnes is a software engineer at IBM in Rochester, Minn.

Ben Beaupre is choir director at Independent School District 15 in St. Francis, Minn.

Ryan Bennett is an IT engineer at Optiver in Chicago.

Jordan Blank is a reading tutor with the Minnesota Reading Corps in St. Paul, Minn.

Taryn Bolea teaches math at Northeast Metro 916 Schools in Little Canada, Minn.

Shelby (Oelschlager) Bowman is a registered nurse at UnityPoint Health in Waterloo, Iowa.

McKenzie Brace is a medical/surgical unit registered nurse at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis.

Katie Brandt is manager of social media for Target Corporation in Brooklyn Park, Minn.

Takudzwa Chawota is a project coordinator for IBM in Minneapolis.

Bailey Devine is demand forecast analyst for Best Buy in Richfield, Minn.

Cecilia Douma is a scientific applications associate at Integrated DNA Technologies Inc.

Emily Dufford is food justice organizer at Cross Lutheran Church in Milwaukee.

Lisel Edberg Caldwell is an auditor at Ernst and Young in Minneapolis.

Hannah Fredrickson is a caseworker at Lutheran Services in Iowa in Ames.

Tayler Jenks is assistant women's basketball coach and hall director at Luther.

Anna Johnson is a visitor experience associate and event liaison at the Rochester (Minn.) Art Center.

Carter Johnson was selected to participate in the ELCA's Young Adults in Global Mission Program in summer 2017. Carter will be in Jerusalem/West Bank assisting with English classes in an early elementary setting.

Madi Johnson is a grant writer and resume writer for Ministry of Caring Inc. in Wilmington, Del.

Bamwesiga Kabete is an accounts payable specialist at General Cable in Highland Heights, Ky.

Paige Lobdell is a producer at WMTV-NBC 15 in Madison, Wis.

Bongani Maseko is a sales coordinator at Fastenal in Winona, Minn.

Hannah Mick is the afterschool program coordinator for the School District of La Crosse (Wis.).

Blake Moen is director for the South Winneshiek Recreation Department in Calmar, Iowa.

Katelynn Pankratz teaches Spanish at Fairbault (Minn.) Senior High School.

Isabela Rosales is an activity aide in Decorah.

Blaise Schaeffer is a Watson Health software and development engineer at IBM Corporation in Durham, N.C. After graduation, he spent 10 weeks biking across the U.S.

Tricia Serres of Platteville, Wis., was awarded a 2016 NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship, a one-time, nonrenewable educational grant of $7,500 for high-achieving student athletes.

Raleigh Sims is a fellow in the Trinity Fellows Program in Charlottesville, Va.

Clare Slagel of Dubuque, Iowa, received the 2016 NCAA Women of the Year Award, honoring her excellence in academics, athletics, service, and leadership.

Saydi Stewart teaches K-4 music in the Medford (Wis.) Area Public School District.

Laura (Boran) Storlie is head boys swimming coach at Decorah High School.

Maggie Sulentic is an actor in the National Theatre for Children in Minneapolis.

Casey Tecklenburg teaches vocal music for the Hudson (Iowa) Community School District.

Lenny Ulloa Silva teaches Spanish at Lakes International Language Academy in Forest Lake, Minn.

Shayla (De Jong) Van Hal is an organist and pianist at Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Overland Park, Kan.

Ryan Vijums is a quality analysis lab technician at Dakota Growers Pasta Company in Minneapolis.

Janele (Holt) Waterman is a university advancement services assistant at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn.

Andrew Welch is an accountant at Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Anne Wermedal is consulting analyst at Cerner Corporation in Kansas City, Mo.

Rachel Wiebke is a clinical lab technologist for Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

1959 / 1960–1969 / 1970–1979 / 1980–1989 / 1990–1999

1959

Milt Kramer of Manchester, Iowa, was inducted into the Iowa League of Cities Hall of Fame at the group’s annual meeting in Des Moines. Kramer is the state’s longest serving mayor, with 43 years of service to the city of Manchester. Kramer’s original impetus for seeking public office in 1970 was to improve his teaching skills. “I was a social studies teacher, and everyone thought it would be a good fit,” he explains. “I figured it could help me teach my class.” A popular council member, he was encouraged to run for mayor in 1974. He won, was sworn into office Sept. 16, 1974, and has held the position ever since. In 13 elections, he has run unopposed 10 times.

Wally Smeby of Mason City, Iowa, is adviser for the Jan Again Foundation, an organization named in honor of his late wife, which supports mental health education and outreach. The foundation awarded grants totaling $68,000 to six organizations in north Iowa in 2016.

1960

Janet (Block) and Jack Jarmes ’61 live in Muskego, Wis. They are retired and run a civic education program called Project Citizen. Jack is the Wisconsin state coordinator. He also took first place in the 100-meter dash in the 75- to 79-year-old age group at the USA Track and Field Meet at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wis.

1963

Sandra (Sellers) Hanson of Brooklyn, N.Y., was named the 2016 recipient of the 25th Francis Andrew March Award by the Association of Departments of English.

1964

Emily (Homstad) and Joe Bodensteiner of Rhinelander, Wis., donated their family home in Decorah to the Winneshiek County Historical Society. The Greek Revival home at 509 W. Broadway was built in 1860 by Joe’s great-grandparents, and the only occupants have been four generations of the family and Luther faculty renters. The Historical Society is beginning plans for restoration.

1966

Dave Rovang of Forest Lake, Minn., has retired as a U.S. Air Force and Northwest pilot.

1970

Lorraine (Carter) Borowski is director of the Decorah (Iowa) Public Library. In recognition of her service to the association and for her work at the Decorah Library, she was named the Iowa Library Association’s Member of the Year at the organization’s statewide conference held in Dubuque. She has been at the library for more than 25 years, starting at the circulation desk and working her way up to director.

1971

Mark Reinertson retired from UnityPoint Clinic Pediatrics after 40 years of service as a pediatrician in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

1972

Joyce (Sponheim) and Duane Baun ’71 of Detroit Lakes, Minn., are retired.

1973

Tim Christ is pastor at Joy Lutheran Church in Richmond, Texas, and serves as the dean of the South Texas Mission District of the North American Lutheran Church.

Brent Christianson is retired after 21 years as the executive director of Lutheran Campus Ministry in Madison, Wis. His poem “Reading Bly in the Waiting Room” was published in the Oct. 18 Journal of the American Medical Association, and his book My Beloved, My Friend: The Song of Songs for Couples will be released by Judson Press in January 2017.

Greg Dahlberg was elected to the board of directors for Leidos Holdings Inc. in Reston, Va.

Loren Esse works in pharmacy delivery for HyVee Drugstore in Des Moines, Iowa.

1974

Peg (Hall) Beatty was recognized by the Iowa Chapter of American Board and Trial Advocates for her significant contribution to the Iowa Mock Trial Program and her vital role in teaching Iowa’s youth about the American justice system and the Seventh Amendment of the Constitution. Beatty was one of the first inductees into the Educator Coach Hall of Fame at the 2016 Iowa Mock Trial State Tournament. She is a retired teacher and volunteers as the Decorah Middle School Mock Trial Coach.

Beverly Norfleet-Tumbleson and Harla Tumbleson ’70 live in Seattle. Beverly is a licensed psychologist, and Harla is the owner of Full Moon Farms and dean of Yonder Mountain Institute of Metaphysics.

1975

Laurel (Schletty) Hoff retired as Anoka (Minn.) County’s community health and environmental services director following a 38-year career in nursing and public health. She was awarded the Jim Parker Leadership Award from the Minnesota Department of Health and State Human Health Services Committee. The award, formerly called the Community Health Services Leadership Award, was established to recognize individuals who have made a significant contribution to community health services at the state and local levels through their commitment and leadership. According to a state health department press release, Hoff was chosen for the award “for her commitment to public health and leadership in improving public health in Minnesota. She is a strong advocate and distinguished leader in the field of public health and is highly regarded by her colleagues as a true public health leader, mentor, and friend.”

Sue (Berger) Oltrogge is manager of administrative services for Deloitte in Minneapolis.

1976

Ed Kennedy is a SVP/CFO at Peoples Bank of Commerce in Cambridge, Minn.

Rene O’Donnell-Hanlon is a seasonal park guide at Chickasaw National Recreation Area in Sulphur, Okla.

Nancy (Hansen) and David Runningen live in Caledonia, Minn. Nancy is a district assessment coordinator. David is an elementary physical education director at Houston Public Schools.

Ann (Olson) Wendling of Landrum, S.C., is a self-employed public health consultant and medical director.

1977

Connie Houdek is a licensed spiritual practitioner and coordinator of youth and family at Bodhi Spiritual Center in Chicago.

Steve Pitzenberger of Lansdale, Pa., is retired.

Robyn (Lundquist) Sloan is retired from teaching high school biology. She instructs driver’s education part time for St. Vrain Valley Schools in Longmont, Colo.

Lisa (Ask) Whannel of Estes Park, Colo., is retired.

1978

Barbara (Noe) Koch of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is retired from Mercy Medical Center. She continues to be a volunteer musician at Faith Lutheran Church in Marion, Iowa, and in the community.

1979

Brian Andreas of Decorah had a book-signing event for two of his recent books, Bring Your Life Back to Life and Something like Magic, at the Luther College Book Shop in December.

Hans Brattskar of Geneva, Switzerland, is ambassador and permanent representative of the Norwegian Mission to the United Nations Office and Other International Organizations.

Bonnie (Olson) Johnston is a medical technologist at Kittitas Valley Healthcare in Ellensburg, Wash.

1980

Debi (Effertz) Burns teaches music at Perry Township Schools in Indianapolis.

Arne Sorenson, president and chief executive officer of Marriott International, was named 2016 Washington Business Journal CEO of the Year. According to the Washington Business Journal, the award recognizes high performing CEOs who have demonstrated vital leadership and business savvy to guide their organizations to success. The Business Journal said Sorenson was selected for his strong record of innovation at Marriott, commitment to diversity and inclusion in the workplace, and contributions to the Greater Washington, D.C., community. He is a member of the Luther Board of Regents.

1981

Laird Edman is professor of psychology at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa. He collaborated with Julie Yonker from Calvin College, James Creswell of Booth University College, and Justin Barret of Fuller Theological Seminary on a study of more than 2,500 participants. His article “Primed Analytic Thought and Religiosity: The Importance of Individual Characteristics” was published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, a top journal in the area of psychology and religion, produced by the American Psychological Association.

Robert Paul is a realtor at Re/Max Results in Eden Prairie, Minn.

Ellen Rockne was co-organizer of Flood-Kin, a fundraiser for Decorah flood victims.

Curt Tryggestad was named the 2017 Minnesota Superintendent of the Year by the Minnesota Association of School Administrators. He is superintendent at Eden Prairie (Minn.) Schools.

1982

Thom Davis is assistant professor of education at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

Michael Dougherty is the vice president of quality personal systems at HP Inc. in Houston.

Scott Gomer is director of marketing communications at WIDA in Madison, Wis.

Geoffrey Lauer of Iowa City, Iowa, is director of the Brain Injury Alliance of Iowa. He accepted the Iowa Association for Justice’s 2016 Public Service Award on behalf of the organization.

1983

Earl Sides of Rock Rapids, Iowa, is a driver for Regional Transit Authority/RIDES. He began directing the church choir at Rock Rapids United Methodist Church in September 2016.

1984

Erik Abrahamson is a personal injury attorney at Abrahamson and Uiterwyk in Clearwater, Fla.

Mike Bergan of Decorah was elected to the Iowa House of Representatives for District 55.

Elaine Geiger is lead developer at Johnson County Information Technology in North Liberty, Iowa.

Jeffrey O’Brien of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is an architect at Ament Design.

1985

Trish (Esping) Koussis is program manager in the Office of Computational Science in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in College Park, Md.

Lynne Rothrock of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is an adjunct professor in applied voice at Coe College and an instructor for Theatre Cedar Rapids, where she teaches various levels of adult classes in cabaret singing, teaches a Cabaret for Teens camp, and directs two fully produced cabaret shows in the TCR season. She also performs as a member of Divapalooza and has produced Lynne Rothrock’s Christmas Cabaret in Cedar Rapids for 14 years.

Mark Schmidt is senior manager of process and development engineering at ON Semiconductor in South Portland, Me.

1986

Bill Kass is senior health inspector for the City of Minneapolis Health Department.

Martha (Stormo) McGrory is a pediatric nurse practitioner of craniofacial/plastic surgery at Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare in St. Paul, Minn.

Jane (Dalen) Miller of Decorah was inducted into the St. James (Minn.) High School Athletic Hall of Fame. She is an accountant at Luther.

1987

Kris (Wolander) Trecker of Plano, Texas, is educational vice president and human resources officer at Integer Holdings Corporation.

1988

Lisa (Wolfs) Farley of Monticello, Iowa, received the Governor’s Volunteer Award from Iowa governor Terry Branstad for her 20 years of mentoring at Helping Services for Northeast Iowa.

Jamie (Boyer) Gurholt is donor and volunteer engagement coordinator at Beloit (Wis.) College.

Greg Larson of Brownsville, Texas, is a varsity football/softball coach at Brownsville Hanna High School.

1989

David DenHartog is chief learning officer for Athlos Academies in Boise, Idaho.

Edward Grima Baldacchino is an intellectual property attaché at Permanent Mission of Malta to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.

Paul Reimann is sales and customer service supervisor at J&P Cycles in Anamosa, Iowa.

1990

Kate Egerton is a writing coach at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

1991

Jenny (Spickerman) Christiason is a pediatric nursing clinical adjunct instructor at Allen College of Nursing in Waterloo, Iowa.

Kirsten (Melby) Corrigan is regional manager of practice transformation at Midwest AIDS Training and Education Center at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Deanna (Lindell) Drum of Anaheim, Calif., is an HR business partner at Healthcare Success.

Katherine (Vertanen) Garity is coordinator of outpatient mental health services at Northwestern Medicine in St. Charles, Ill.

Carrie (Nelson) and Aaron Romine live in Centennial, Colo. Carrie is a controller at Tralee Capital Partners. Aaron is regional director for the U.S. Department of Education.

Tim Schmidt is finance director of the food division of QualiTech in Chaska, Minn.

Clark Shah-Nelson is assistant dean of instructional design and technology at the University of Maryland School of Social Work in Baltimore.

1992

Cindy Marlow McClenagan is vice president for academic affairs at Wayland Baptist University in Plainview, Texas.

Shari (Julson) Seidl is senior global client liaison at the Nelson Company in Green Bay, Wis.

Ann Sorenson is professor of communication at the University of Northwestern–St. Paul in Minnesota.

1993

Anjie Shutts of Des Moines, Iowa, is vice chair of the Iowa Access to Justice Commission and partner at Whitfield and Eddy, PLC.

1994

Kari (Dokken) Lyle is managing director at Deloitte in Minneapolis.

Peter Strube is assistant professor at Rosalind Franklin University in North Chicago, Ill.

1995

Nate Lindall is senior business development representative at Velocity Technology Solutions in Minneapolis.

Bo Nannestad is a global supply chain director at Resolux ApS in Orbaek, Denmark.

1996

Laurie Anderson is vice president of investments at Stifel, Nicolaus and Company in Madison, Wis.

Eric Merten is a fish biologist for the U.S. Forest Service in Cle Elum, Wash.

Heather (Schacht) and Scot Reisinger live in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Heather is associate professor with tenure at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. She is also associate director for research at the Center for Comprehensive Access and Delivery Research and Evaluation with the Iowa City VA Health Care System. Scot earned a doctoral degree in higher education and student affairs at the University of Iowa and was recently named dean of adult programs at Mount Mercy University.

Brett Robison is assistant professor of music at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wis. He is director of Concert Choir and 9th Street Singers.

Denise Seabold is a telehealth associate at the University of Iowa College of Nursing in Iowa City.

Joe Segilia is general counsel at Terra Tech Corporation in Newport Beach, Calif.

Sam Teigen is operations and finance manager for the Greenwall Foundation in New York City. He ran the 2016 TCS New York City Marathon in 2:40:52 and placed 98th among males and 111th overall.

1997

Valerie (Yelton) Baul of Shawnee, Kan., is a mediator and educator at Best Case Scenario LLC.

Brian Billings is vice president and client operations director of Mercer in Urbandale, Iowa.

Amy Boncher is an associate warden for the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Beaumont, Texas.

Gretchen (Goltz) Conway of Peosta, Iowa, is a sector coordinator at Keystone Area Education Agency.

Dave Coyle is an extension associate in forest health at Southern Regional Extension Forestry in Athens, Ga.

Boyd Layton is a physician assistant at St. Alphonsus Medical Group Orthopedics Clinic in Nampa, Idaho. He received a master’s degree in physician assistant studies from the College of Idaho and Idaho State University in 2016.

Lea (Donhowe) Lovelace of Decorah is an adjunct faculty member in the Art Department at Luther and was named the 2016–17 Outstanding Higher Education Art Educator by the Art Educators of Iowa.

Nicole Plymesser Nelson is an artist and teaches art at Jacobson Elementary in Belmond, Iowa.

Greg Strunk is a pastor at Rosemount (Minn.) United Methodist Church.

Becky (Hinrichs) Vianden is director of the Academic Advising Center and career services at the University of Wisconsin in La Crosse.

1998

Beth Bjorlo is director of marketing operations at Ingersoll Rand in Davidson, N.C.

Amy (Hammel) Clark is community engagement leader for Thrivent Financial in Schaumburg, Ill.

Jana Evelsizer Olson is associate attorney at Anderson, Wilmarth, Van Der Maaten, Belay, Fretheim, Gipp and Zahasky in Decorah. She also owns Olson Tax Consulting LLC.

Aaron Sheehan is a visiting voice teacher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

1999

Stephanie Larson of Rochelle, Ill., is a self-employed writer and teacher and provides spiritual advice in a counseling setting. She plans to publish her first book, Discover Your Master Chakra, in February 2017. Stephanie is also an Airbnb superhost, and her house is the location of three films in progress by Columbia College and Northwestern University students.

Dawn (Egbert) Munce is director of management services at Realife Management Services in Apple Valley, Minn.

Castine (Toote) Rhoades Williams of Orangeburg, S.C., is senior optimization executive at CampusWorks Inc. in Bradenton, Fla.

Lori (Hagen) Schoenhard is software development manager at Proficient Learning in Wilmington, N.C.

Aaron Swenson is division manager of privacy for John Deere Financial in Madison, Wis. He earned certification as a certified regulatory compliance manager last June.

Reid Wilson ’10 makes it sound simple. He and wife Kelsey (Anderson) Wilson ’11 had a rescue dog with a broken leg who would want to go hunting again. They also had friends who used to hunt before becoming disabled. Why not put the two together and make everyone happy?

Thus Reid and Kelsey, along with Kelsey (Balk) ’11 and Jordan Grimm ’11, Austen Smith ’13, Chris Norton ’14, and Jeff Boeke ’80—with help from Michael Crocker ’14 and Carryn (Ensrude) ’99 and Mike Anderson ’99—founded Second Shot, a nonprofit organization that helps people with traumatic or debilitating injury or illness connect with the outdoors through hunting and fishing.

In early 2015, its first season, Second Shot led three outings. Last season it led four, and it’s aiming for another four this season. Its clients range from people with spinal cord injury to people with leukemia or multiple sclerosis. The Second Shot team, which is 100 percent volunteer, fundraises the costs associated with the outings, and they also raise money for client treatments and special causes.

Reid has a degree in physical therapy, and Kelsey Grimm will soon finish her physician assistant degree, so the group has a helpful medical background. In addition, Chris Norton, who suffered a spinal cord injury while an undergraduate and who founded the SCI CAN project to help others with neuromuscular deficiencies, offers advice about adaptive approaches the team might use to accommodate would-be hunters. But the Second Shot team maintains that the best approach is to let clients dictate the situation, because they know best how to move their bodies.

In outings that involve wheelchairs, the team makes an adaptive rig using a UTV (utility task vehicle). Often they will swing and aim a gun for a client, who will then pull the trigger him- or herself. In one case, when a client was unable to move his fingers, they built a prosthetic device that allowed him to pull the trigger after the shot was lined up.

Though the outings are long, and the Second Shot team routinely works 17 or 18 hours on a hunt day, the organization is never without willing volunteers (including Jerry Jaeger ’09 and Nathan Burger ’09). As Reid explains, “The hunting community is so tight and generous, and they want to be a part of this, because it’s so cool when you see someone in a wheelchair hunting. We always get a big audience, so we’ve met a lot of people that way. We have an email list, and we’ll say, ‘Hey, we’re going out on this date, we need three or four backup shooters, two or three camera people, three safety people, and a driver.’  We’ve never had a shortage of responses.”

Their sponsors, too, are generous, from property owners who share their land to business owners who lend trucks and camera equipment. John Balk ’83, Kelsey’s dad, even supplied the pheasant popper recipe that the team uses to cook a celebratory meal after a hunt.

The real reward of the day, according to Reid, comes before the pheasant poppers. He recalls a client in a wheelchair who could move his arms but not really his fingers. They waited a long time for a shot, but they finally got a pheasant. “We had the dogs bring it to him, and he got this really touching smile on his face,” Reid remembers. “These people have so many days where they have to be in care, and they’re so busy with appointments. Just to give them a day off, a break, is an amazing thing. All our volunteers remember that moment.”

Learn more about Second Shot at getsecondshot.com and visit their Facebook page at facebook.com/adaptiveoutdoors.

Twelve-year-old Matteo Musso has a lot to say, but until 18 months ago, he had little means to communicate his thoughts, insights, and ideas. Matteo is autistic and, in his case, has difficulty communicating through speech. But now, his thoughts are spilling out of him in the form of poetry, blog posts, book chapters, and question-and-answer sessions with school classes and other groups. His mother, Annette (Niemann) Musso '86, credits a system called rapid prompting method (RPM).

Matteo points to letters on a stencil-like alphabet board held by his mother, and she becomes his voice, reading out the thoughtful, often humorous, sentences that he spells. When the Mussos, who live in Livermore, Calif., learned about RPM and Matteo began training in the system, it was slow going, Annette says. But Matteo and his mom have progressed to the point where it's fairly easy for them to conduct Q&A sessions, and this is all-important to Matteo. His mission is to talk with as many people as possible about what it's like to be autistic.

Annette and Matteo were at Luther last fall for Homecoming, and for the second year, they spoke to Luther education students. Jill Leet-Otley, assistant professor of education, thought it was a great opportunity for her general education and special education students. One thing these students focus on is how to make all students feel like they're part of the classroom community. Matteo's messages fit perfectly.

His mission is to help create understanding between autistics and normally abled society, to build empathy. He challenged Leet-Otley's students not to talk for the rest of the day, to see what it is like to have his form of autism. How would they feel if, because they didn't speak, others assumed they were less intelligent than they truly were? Matteo urged these future teachers to assume intelligence when meeting autistic children in their classes. "Society must see through the package to the gift itself," Matteo says.

Leet-Otley says having Annette in class with Matteo was especially beneficial for her students. Annette told the students what it was like for her when Matteo began communicating through RPM, how she realized that some of her own assumptions about her son were wrong. For instance, she thought he could do math at only a rudimentary level when, in fact, he was quite advanced. "I was so ashamed," she said in class. Hearing that, Matteo smiled and patted his mom on the back, "I forgive you," he said.

"I think it's great to see that dynamic," Leet-Otley says. "As teachers, you have to remember that parents know their child best. So I'm always reminding students that you may have these ideas about a student, but when you go into a conference, always start by asking the parents, what are your hopes and dreams for your child, what can you share about your child that I may not know or see? . . . That's why I think it's a nice combination of having Matteo and Annette in our classroom."

The Mussos' first visit made a strong impression on Leet-Otley's students. "It kept coming up when we had time to reflect and in evaluations, the power of him being there instead of just learning about autism through a textbook or an article or video clip," she says.

Sophomore Madeline Miller says: "Hearing Matteo debunk common misconceptions about individuals with exceptional gifts and unique communication styles was more meaningful than reading from a textbook or discussing hypothetical situations. I enjoyed Matteo's poetry and was thankful he shared his beautiful talent with me and my peers. Matteo's visit was a meaningful reminder for future educators to be just as intentional to seek out the unique strengths of our students as well as the unique challenges."

Bellowing Waters

Inspired by a hike to Murray Canyon in Palm Springs, Calif. 

Bellowed the waterfall to the stream,
Understand that we are one and the same.
Different forms we take
But of the same energy made.
Now you flow as gently as a newborn baby
   sleeps,
Down to the valley to nourish life itself.
Will you have the power to kiss all those in
   need?
I am here for you in strength and plenty
If you will only call on me for help.
I am the source of your abundance,
And the way to end the thirst of the world.

—Matteo Musso

Get in touch

Annette (Niemann) Musso '86 has a nonprofit, Creative Autism Solutions Team, which envisions "a world in which autistics are understood and where they and their talents are appreciated as special contributors to society." She can be reached at annettemusso2@gmail.com. Matteo Musso's blog is pedalingwithteo.com. As of last September, he says, he has spoken in person and via Skype to about 1,400 people about what it is like to be autistic.

Akosua Frimpong ’03, who majored in English, has been teaching at Royal Primary Academy in Jakarta, Indonesia, since September 2015. In October 2016, she wrote a first-person article about her experience that was published on the online site of the Atlantic magazine as part of a series on blacks living abroad in the Middle East, South America, and Southeast Asia. The contributors to the series wrote about what the black experience looked like outside of America. This series was inspired by Ta’Nehisi Coates’s experience when he lived in Paris.

In the introduction to Akosua’s piece, reprinted here, Chris Bodenner, a senior editor at the magazine, wrote: “This detailed account from an Indonesia-based reader, Akosua F., is especially distinct because she discusses what it’s like to be perceived as African versus African American—two identities she’s worn. She also talks about how she sometimes misconstrues what she thinks are racial slights from well-meaning strangers because so many other strangers have mocked her. But overall she maintains a positive outlook.”

The series can be found at lczine.com/Akos-Atlantic.

Imagine having to start a whole new life on the other side of the world. Well, that was me, when I had to leave the States—a place I had called home for the past 16 years—and head to Jakarta to continue my teaching career. While filled with some trepidation, as I left my family and friends, I saw this as an adventure, looking forward to what this new chapter of life would entail. I say looking forward to it because as someone who was born in Ghana, but lived, grew up, and attended school in three different countries (Botswana, South Africa, and the United States), I saw this as yet another international experience I could embrace. Little did I know what I would be getting into.

Once the novelty wore off, I became painfully aware of the way people reacted whenever I stepped outside of my apartment building, as I quickly learned how “being the center of attention” could have a negative connotation. The stares, finger pointing, laughing, and double looks (sometimes more) became something that I encountered day in and day out. As a black person, while I had encountered some negative interactions due to the color of my skin, nothing had been as intense as this experience.

Here in Indonesia, I have learned what it means to be both black and African (I say African because here, as in America, there’s not much differentiation). Colorism is most definitely in play here, as the darker your skin color, the more you are treated differently. There is a great preference for lighter/fairer-skinned people, with skin whitening/bleaching creams littered around stores, all in plain view. Lighter/fairer-skinned people are seen in commercials, on T.V., on billboards, etc.

However, one irony I have found is that even the darker-skinned Indonesians point, stare, and laugh. It’s not only confusing, but disappointing as well, because I would think that because we are both more or less in the same boat, we would be able to connect and even commiserate with each other. I suppose it’s that whole idea of the oppressed becoming the oppressor, in a bid to distance themselves, and hopefully, one day, find themselves being accepted as well. Thus, the idea is “while I may have it bad, at least I don’t have it as bad you do.” And so the cycle continues.

In addition to colorism, there is the stigma associated with the continent of Africa. My African background puts me at a further disadvantage than my African American counterparts, in that while they are black and may encounter the same reactions/treatment I do, there is often a change in attitude/demeanour once people find out they’re American. The American passport still has a lot of sway in many parts of the world.

About three weeks ago, I went out to eat with a friend, and it turned out that there was a live band playing. My friend and I found ourselves so taken in by their performance (boisterously singing aloud) that once they were done, they came over to say hello. They asked where we were from, and my friend stated America (meaning himself). They immediately became so enamoured with his answer, pointing out how pleased they were to have an American present, listening to their songs, that I made the choice not to say where I was from. I know that it wasn’t right, but at the same time, I did so because I didn’t want to see a change in their overall attitude.

I was enjoying their admiration, not to mention the anonymity—an anonymity that is often nonexistent due to the misconceptions many have about people from Africa. The perception of Africans, in most countries located in Southeast Asia, is that we are drug dealers or prostitutes, who are often “poor and uneducated.” The following passage from a recent AP [Associated Press] article I read regarding Africans living in India perfectly sums up the experiences of Africans due to misguided stereotypes: “But the worst kind of discrimination is reserved for the Africans. In a country obsessed with fair skin and skin lightening beauty treatments, their dark skin draws a mixture of fear and ridicule.”

I’ve seen some examples of this “mixture of fear and ridicule.” One of my students (originally from China) wrote me a note for Teacher’s Day telling me how initially she was scared of me, as she had never met/seen a black person before. To have people come up to my face, just so they can get a better look, takes its toll. And as one of your readers shared, all of this slowly chips away at you.

So, while having to deal with being in another country (getting used to the culture), I find myself trying to navigate through this as well. And unlike some, I struggle to see the silver lining in all this. Each time I venture out, I find myself on edge, constantly on the lookout for the stares, the laughing, etc., that I know will inevitably come. I get myself so worked up that sometimes when it doesn’t happen the way I thought it would, I find myself completely taken aback.

I also find myself questioning words and actions that others may construe as innocent. For example, while riding in a cab, the driver began chatting with me in his broken English, and I attempted to respond in my very limited Bahasa-Indonesia. When we found ourselves stuck in Jakarta’s never-ending traffic, he indicated that he wanted to take my picture. My guard immediately went up, and I vehemently refused his request, time and time again. At one point he asked why, and I explained to him (now having resorted to Google translate) my experiences.

He then stated that the reason why people stare is because “black is sexy.” I will admit, I laughed, as this was not a response I was expecting. However, as he continued to go on about it, I began to wonder, was he saying that because I was African? Was he associating black with being sexy because of the fallacy of “Africans being prostitutes”? Or was he merely subscribing to the delusional fantasy of the dark-skinned woman? You know, the whole “the darker the berry . . .”

As I sit here typing this, I keep telling myself that it was probably harmless fun, but there’s still a nagging part of me that thinks otherwise. This is me now; this continuous questioning, second guessing, has become second nature to me.

Before I end this with you thinking that being in Indonesia has been entirely “me against the world,” I must add that I do have friends here—a number of locals that I’ve connected with at my school. I share my experiences with them, and they have certainly helped me to see why people say Indonesians are so friendly. They have been true lifesavers, as they have given me positive experiences to help counter most of the negative ones. And while I am pleased that as a professional dark-skinned African, I have helped to increase other’s exposure to not only black people, but to Africans as well by challenging the stereotypes, a part of me worries that I am not really changing their perceptions all that much.

I say this because even for those who see me day in and day out, they continue to stare and sometimes laugh. This is definitely a different experience for me—an ongoing process that will hopefully prove to be benefit rather than a drawback during my last few months here.

Emily Lynch Victory ’06 is a rising star in the art world, but make no mistake: math is her first love. This is evident in her stunning large-scale paintings, each of which requires hours upon hours of meticulous work in her Delano, Minn., studio. Her high-impact pieces explore mathematical concepts from probability to number bases, and in the process, they offer an explosion of mind-bending pattern.

It’s all about the math

Victory is uniquely situated to explore the pairing of math and art. After majoring in math at Luther, she taught in the classroom for a couple of years, but it left her too little creative time. She returned to school and earned a fine arts degree from the University of Minnesota in 2012, after which she began work with a math textbook publisher while continuing a studio practice.

Victory’s position with Math Teachers Press has her teaching educators and administrators how the company’s curriculum works. “I love my job, because it’s hands-on math, which is what my life is about right now,” she says. “I get to meet math people and talk math concepts. And the textbooks, which are for students who really struggle, are about visualizing math, which feeds into my artwork perfectly.”

Victory admits she’s obsessed with numbers and patterns. That’s how she navigates life, taking note of dates that are prime or calculating half birthdays as a matter of course. Rather than as an artist, she sees herself as a problem-solver. Her practice, she says, is “mainly about the math, and then the art is how I do that math.” In her sketchbooks, she doesn’t doodle as often as she solves equations or lists numbers that go on for pages.

Math’s personal side

Grids, columns, squares, circles, and rectangles feature prominently in Victory’s work, especially in repetition, and in this way her paintings make a person think about mass and quantity. Sometimes they call to mind high-rise apartment buildings in Hong Kong, those monoliths of identical windows and balconies, so expansive that they resemble sheets of wrapping paper more than places where people actually live. And that gets you thinking about anonymity.

A closer look at her work, however, and you notice the ragged edges of the rectangles, where the paint has strayed, or the square that’s been rendered a bit lopsided. The lines that aren’t quite parallel. The individual brushstrokes. And these details are the opposite of anonymity—they’re distinctly handmade and highly individual marks that, just like a towel slung over the railing of a Hong Kong balcony, suggest life behind the clinical façade.

This take on her work delights Victory: “I want there to be surprises up close. That is exactly what I was trying to do. To most people, math is like a machine—it’s so technical, with numbers and symbols—but it’s really not if you’re just trying to learn the concepts. Math can be drawings, and it can be very personal, how you understand it.”

Choice of materials is another way that Victory tries to make math approachable. While her paintings’ high gloss and techy look lend them an expensive feel, her tools of the trade are acrylic paint and a Sharpie. Sometimes she paints on pegboard or a painter’s drop cloth, the kind you can buy for a few bucks at any hardware store. One of her paintings uses tabs of drywall tape.

“Usually math is kind of high-end or exclusive,” she says, “but these materials are not, and I love that. My upbringing is more rural Minnesota, and these are the things I’m used to. I just feel more comfortable with these materials, plus I love the contrast of these high-end concepts, which are regarded as difficult or elite, on these kinds of rough and tough backgrounds.”

Math meets art meets music

Through her art, Victory examines everything from sectorials to rotational symmetry, but some of her recent work has had her collaborating with Zach Zubow ’06, assistant professor and director of music at Queens University of Charlotte in Charlotte, N.C.

Prior to her partnership with Zubow, Victory had translated some of her paintings into short piano pieces, interpreting marks on the canvas as notes and spaces. But she knew that music had more to offer her work, so she reached out to her former classmate, who had already been using numeric structures in his compositions.

Zubow and Victory devised a series of three paintings and musical pieces that used three different mathematical bases: base 3, base 8, and base 16. In one song, the notes were in base 3, the dynamics in base 8, and the rhythm in base 16. They switched those three elements for the next piece, and they switched them again for the third. “In each piece, the music matches the math that’s happening in the painting,” Victory says. “You could potentially follow the music within the artwork.”

Zubow and Victory’s pieces were exhibited and performed on piano at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis last January. The duo also won a $5,000 grant for their work.

They partnered again last fall, after Victory secured another $5,000 grant and a spot at the eighth annual ArtPrize international art competition in Grand Rapids, Mich. Again, they devised a series of three pieces, but this time they used number systems that were site-specific, including the zip code for Grand Rapids and the dimensions of their exhibition space. And because a live performance wasn’t feasible, they embedded speakers—which were triggered by motion detectors to play when someone approached—into Victory’s paintings themselves. This setup required Zubow to learn several new skill sets. “Essentially, I had to teach myself the mathematical processes, programming languages, networking, hardware components, and a bit of electrical engineering to incorporate car stereo speakers in order to successfully pull off this project,” he says.

But the logistical headache was worth it, according to Victory. “It was the coolest. It made perfect sense. It was almost as if the math itself was talking.”

Victory will return to Luther in the spring semester to conduct studio visits and talk with students in the Art Department. In addition to her studio practice, her work with Math Teachers Press, and mothering two young boys, she founded River Street Paint House in Delano, Minn., last January.

Learn more about the community-centered creative space at facebook.com/RiverStreetPaintHouse.

See more of Victory’s artwork and listen to her collaboration with Zubow at mnartists.org/emvictory.

Watch an award-winning PBS short film about Victory at pbs.org/filmfestival/2016/artist-day-jobs-emily-lynch-victory-paintermath-trainer/.  

In September Luther hosted its fourth writers festival. Authors who spoke on the craft of writing were of the literary caliber for which one rolls out the red carpet.

New York Times bestselling historical narrative author Erik Larson. National Book Award nominee, author, poet, and essayist Charles Baxter. Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winning novelist Jane Hamilton. Acclaimed author Bret Anthony Johnston, who teaches creative writing at Harvard. In addition, there were a number of excellent published poets and writers of various genres. All had congregated to expose the parts of their brains that aspiring writers find so precious: those tender mechanisms that make this writing machine work.

As an alumna of Luther's English program, as a freelance magazine journalist, and as a generalist writer and lover of books, I was transfixed by the keynote speeches, the panel discussions, the breakout sessions—which all took place over the course of 24 hours. Here are my top seven festival takeaways.

1. Writers block? Look no further than the historic archives for inspiration.

According to Erik Larson, “Every day [in the past] is like a detective story.” And you can be Sherlock’s Watson—translating history’s details with a storyteller’s touch, bringing old ghosts and events to life again.

2. Write from a place of generosity.

Especially when it comes to writing about your family. Know that the truth is always more interesting than anything you could fabricate, but it’s so hard to tackle when writing from personal experience.

3. Strive to avoid adjectives.

After you write something, go back and delete all the adjectives. See if you miss them. You might like the sparseness.

4. Writing is about doing a little more than you thought you could.

Don’t quit after a few miles; this is a marathon.

5. Research publishers well.

Ready to start pitching your book to publishers? Great! But make sure you do your homework and know what genre and style of books that publisher prints. Be sure your book fits there.

6. Sorry, but good writing just takes time.

Expect writing to be a long, slow process. That’s the price of admission. Pay up.

7. Insulate yourself against the idea that writing is an indulgence.

In the conference’s closing remarks, Bret Anthony Johnston pointed out that “the world will throw all kinds of things at you that will make it easy to give up writing. But remember that you’re giving up indulgences in order to be a writer.”

Nancy K. Barry, professor of English and current Jones Professor in the Humanities, delivered this sermon during chapel in the Center for Faith and Life just five days after Luther student Bjorn Norderhaug went missing, and four days after his body was recovered from the Upper Iowa River. The Decorah area had also recently endured deluges of rain that caused flooding in many homes and businesses and on parts of the Luther campus.

On Monday in chapel we heard the story from a later book of Exodus, about the decision by Moses to lead the sons of Jacob out of Egypt in a “roundabout way.” Today’s scripture comes from Exodus Book 2, and takes us back in time to the story of Moses’s birth and abandonment by the river’s edge:

“Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him for three months. When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.

“The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. ‘This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,’ she said. Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, ‘Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?’ Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, ‘Yes.’ So the girl went and called the child’s mother. Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, ‘Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages.’ So the woman took the child and nursed it. When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and she took him as her son. She named him Moses,* ‘because,’ she said, ‘I drew him out* of the water.’”  

It is not uncommon for the life of a great leader or prophet to begin with paradox. Moses was born at the time when the Egyptians enslaved the Hebrews. The Pharaoh was obsessed with his fear that the Hebrews would eventually overwhelm the Egyptian population, so he decided to order the murder of every male Hebrew infant. The mother of Moses conceived of a plan to save her son by abandoning him. She let the baby go by placing him in a vessel and setting him down among the reeds of the river to see if some stranger, someone more safe than his own mother, would rescue the child.

He was rescued, and not just by anyone, but by the Pharaoh’s own daughter. You have to give it to ancients—they may not have had cell phones, but they understood the power of irony. Moses, rescued and brought up by the same people who had instigated the reason he was deserted by his family in the first place.

This narrative of the lost-and-found Moses echoes another classical narrative about an infant abandoned by his parents. Oedipus, left on a mountaintop so that the terrible fate predicted for his life (that he would grow up to murder his father and marry his mother) might be forestalled. The Greeks too knew irony and loved to bite down hard upon it in their tragedies. At every turn in Oedipus’s life, whenever people hear the prophecy and resolve to prevent it, all they do is put themselves one step closer to the very thing they are trying to avoid. On Friday, when we rededicate the statue of Oedipus that graces the sidewalk along this building, you will notice he is—centuries later—still blind. In her 20th-century American novel Beloved, Toni Morrison describes a more violent version of this story. The mother, Sethe, doesn’t imagine she can spare her child from the cruel fate of slavery, so she kills the infant herself, only to find that the speechless, bodiless infant “Beloved” haunts her, as if to say, “You will not murder me; you cannot murder me.”

Pastor Mike [Blair] asked me to preach on this passage because I have often deep resonance in sacred texts about water, and since our series is called ”Chapel on the Move,” he wanted to hear whatever I had to say about a prophet who is abandoned in a basket by the river, and then rescued, in a very roundabout way. As it all turns out, Moses is given back to his own mother to suckle and raise, and then, because the Pharaoh’s daughter also wants the child, is actually raised in the very house that wanted him killed. Somewhere in the universe, some sacred voice is saying to the Pharaoh, just like it said to Oedipus: “Gotcha! You in your ancient and modern world, you may think you are way bigger than the universe, but no matter what efforts you take to make the universe bend to your will, there is another hand at work. Yahweh’s hand. God’s plan. Beloved’s tenacious will.”

This was the sermon I was writing on Sunday morning, trying to piece together something coherent to say about the uncanny discovery of one of our greatest prophets. Great man, almost killed, grows up to live in the household of the very people who wanted him doomed. Leads his nation out of slavery, encounters the very essence of the divine, and then is given by that same diety the sacred laws—the covenant—the commandments—by which they proclaim themselves to be a people of God. Good news for the people of God. You will be rescued and the children will be saved.

But then, at my writing desk, came the terrible news on Sunday afternoon—the worst possible news—and everything inside of me got pulled into a different kind of river, the one where the child is not saved, and the water brings not life, but incalculable loss.   

I recognized the chill that went through my body. I call it the “mid-current chill,” because when I was a child and learned to swim in the Delaware River, we would make a game of swimming across its narrow breadth near our cabin. But because our swimming route was 100 yards downstream from a small set of rapids, there was always a place, right in the center of the river, where the temperature of the water dropped 10 degrees in a second. The first time I felt that chill, it moved from my toes through my lungs and up into my throat so fast, I was frozen by it. So I turned and thought, “I’ll just go back.” But then realized I was dead center in the middle of something there was no fooling around with, and the only safe move was to keep going.

We all, during these past five days, have felt that jolt in a different way. A young man who could not be rescued from the water. Where is the prophecy in that? How could it happen that water—the thing that fills up as much as 65 percent of our bodies, and 71 percent of the earth’s surface—how can it happen that this most basic element could become, in the space of one short month, our nemesis? How did it happen that this life-giving water that is supposed to represent the rivers of Babylon, the fountain of our baptism, or maybe even the streams of Innisfree is now, all through August and September, bringing us nothing but grief? Whole basements washed away in minutes. Water that will not relent, spurting upward from crevices beneath our houses. Yesterday I went out very early into the damp fog and had to wipe droplets of watery spit from my arms, and could only yell out loud this frantic prayer: “Dear God, could you give us a break? Even when it’s not raining, it’s raining!”

In this story from the Hebrew Bible, water brings no harm to the child. God is in Moses, resting in the shallow basket; God is in his mother, who comes up with a desperate but intuitive plan to keep her son alive; God is in the Pharaoh’s daughter, who is drawn to the infant and wants the child so much she is willing to pay another woman, a Hebrew woman, to be his nursemaid. All of this, so Moses can grow up to become Moses—a prophet recognized by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as a man who saw God, heard the word of God, and survived to tell the tale of how others might build a covenant with one God.

Was Bjorn somehow not part of the tribe of Moses? Was his infant head not bathed in the waters of baptism, with all the elders promising to do all they could to keep him safe? Did the waters of grace not enter his soul and connect him to that everlasting stream that—so the scripture tells us—has neither beginning nor end? Of course not, we clamor, of course not. So why did the river not keep him safe?

That question, on most days, is the real river we cross. We want to believe there is divinity shaping our strokes. We believe that because one of the alternatives is the vision of Oedipus, a blind old man who learns too late that the gods, as omnipotent as they are small-minded, will get us in the end and prove us fools wandering the earth, wishing in vain that we are the ones in charge—the Pharaohs, the Kings, the smart ones who can solve every riddle on earth.

All of us, I think, are caught dead center in that question, that puzzle. We look back to the safe shores of faith narratives and the wisdom of prophets and think, surely someone has an answer for this puzzle. Bjorn may not have been Moses, but he was a young man—still his mother and father’s child—why, why was he not rescued? That was how I felt on Sunday night, caught like a swimmer in the place where the temperature drops 10 degrees in half a second, and our feet cannot touch bottom and all we can do is just keep breathing and kicking and moving our arms like fools and hoping against hope: the water will not kill me today, please God, let me not drown in this sorrow.

So I did the thing all writers do: I just kept writing. Itself, a lot like swimming. And because the words were doing their best to rescue me, very late last night, I realized: all of us are drowning in the same water that keeps us afloat. The water saves us and kills us, every breath we take.

By then, it was well past 1 a.m., and after I wrote that sentence, I stared at the computer for a long time, just repeating the line, saying it like a mantra, until finally I laughed out loud and said, “That doesn’t make any sense. Who do you think you are, some lunatic 21st-century Moses?” And then, I did what every postmodern person in the digital age does when she doesn’t know what to do—I clicked on a random email sent to me by a monstrous corporation trying to sell me something. It just so happened, this email was from TIAA-CREF, the mini stock market all the adults in this room are trusting in to make our retirement safe. The email came at me with five brightly colored boxes, promising me like some prophet that all I had to do was click on the right one to feel “safe” in my retirement years. Just the voice of Moses, promising me some covenant, click after click after click.

Do you know the only thing that is clicking here? Our hearts. Each one of us, and no one can know when or how or why they will stop when they do. To live in this world means we drown in the same water that keeps us alive—that is what it means to be human. We are made of nothing but water, and to be alive—to be deeply, drowningly alive—is to know that the water can swallow us up. I say this today not to fill us with despair or nihilism. We are not witless and we are not alone. That was the one steadfast rule my family never relented on when we swam in the river: never, ever, ever step foot in it alone. Whether you were eight, or 18, or 80—the river was a place for other people to be with you. That is not the answer to the riddle, but it can help us stay afloat in its mystery:

Fetch me water from the east. Fetch me water from the west. Fetch me water from the houses of our prophets. Fetch us water while we live. Fetch us water when we die. (Adapted from ”Water from the Houses of Our Fathers” by Pete Morgan.)

The camaraderie was especially high on the Luther men’s soccer team last fall, and if the family culture of the team seemed particularly strong, you could credit the unusual number of brothers on the team. Including two of the coaches, there were five pairs of siblings on the team along with two more players whose brothers played for Luther in recent years.

Head coach Chris Garcia-Prats, whose brother James Garcia-Prats ’14 is an assistant coach and former player of his, says, “I think it’s really unique that so many younger siblings have followed their older brothers. I think that happens more at Luther than at most places.”

First-year student Wes McNeese started thinking about enrolling at Luther about a year after his older brother Kyle ’17 came to Luther. “It was based on instinct,” he says. “I liked it better than the other schools, liked my adviser, teammates, and the campus.”

That was cool with Kyle. The McNeese brothers had played together for a year in high school too, but they say that playing with five sets of brothers is a very different experience. They felt like they had “a little something extra,” Kyle says. Watching video of the game with his brother, he adds, was one of the best parts of celebrating a win. And they had a lot of wins, making it all the way to the second round of the NCAA Division III national tournament.

For the head coach the benefits have stretched over many years. He has had not just four, but seven or eight years years to get to know his players’ families. “It’s been neat,” Garcia-Prats says. And being part of their sons’ development as players and as young men, he says, “is something that I’m super proud of.”

He has recruited each brother on his own merits as a player and sees the individuality in each of them, Garcia-Prats says. Coaching them is a challenge, but also fun. “Starting out the season, you know the team culture is already going to be in a good place.”

Physics major Caleb Anderson ’17 spent January 2016 interning at Asylum Research in Santa Barbara, Calif. He learned how the company makes atomic-force microscopes and gained familiarity with the field and its equipment. He also made valuable connections with employees that could help him in his life after Luther.

Internships help Luther students apply the knowledge and skills they’ve studied in the classroom while gaining practical experience in their field of interest. Students who can show they know how to integrate their classroom learning with the work world also gain an edge when it comes to looking for work. Spending a few weeks or months in a workplace lets students polish their communication skills, try out tasks, and further explore whether a field would be a good fit for them. Dan Marlow ’88, assistant director of Luther’s Career Center, says, “Employers and graduate schools increasingly expect that students have internships and other relevant applied-learning experience on their resumes. It is vital that we support students in these endeavors.”

Not all students can cover the costs associated with an internship, such as travel and a place to live. And the number of students seeking funds to support an internship is increasing. That’s why recent gifts from James ’86 and Kathy (Winter) Thomsen ’85 and Bill ’95 and Kirsten (Stumme) Bohmer ’94 allocated to students through the Luther Career Center’s Internship Funding Program have been so important. Their gifts made it financially possible for 21 students to secure an internship through the center during January Term or the summer of 2015–16.

A common factor in these particular internships is that they involve Luther alumni. As they make the experiences possible for students, these gifts also give more alumni and friends of Luther a way to be part of Luther’s education process. Luther graduates and friends often volunteer to host internships, welcoming students into their workplaces and showing them the ropes. Others provide students a place to live during their internships.

Anderson says that without the stipend he would not have been able to complete his internship in Santa Barbara. Lucas Kane ’18 says the funding allowed him to intern with Michael Krull ’87 at Resilient Corporation, which helps companies manage digital disruptions. Kane was able to use some of the code he wrote in class on an application he worked on for the Washington, D.C., business.

Wade Johnson ’87 matched international studies major Rozlyn Paradis ’18 with Vine and Branches, a nonprofit secondhand shop and ministry in Richfield, Minn. She helped refugee families supply their households and outfitted job applicants with interview clothes. In working at Vine and Branches, Paradis says she learned how to “interact with people regardless of age, ethnicity, cultural tenets, physical or mental capabilities, or language barriers.”

Management major Evan Seegmiller ’17 interned at Evergreen Bank in Oak Brook, Ill., with three Luther graduates: Jenny Voss ’07, Jill Wachholz ’89, and Kayla Hermann ’15. During January Term 2016, he rotated through several departments to get the big-picture perspective, he says. While in the marketing department, “I helped strategize ways to bring in a new generation of customers,” he says.

 In 2015–16, alumni offered 68 J-term and 27 summer internships. The total number of for-credit internships reported, including those funded by Thomsen and Bohmer and those that students obtained without financial assistance through Luther, was 207. The internship program is continuing this year, and the intent is to keep it growing.

How you can participate

To learn how you can contribute to Luther in a variety of ways—funding, volunteering, mentoring, and more:

• Visit luther.edu/giving
• Email Career Center Director Brenda Ranum at ranubr01@luther.edu
• Join LinkedIn’s Luther College Career Network

Distinguished Service Awards / Music Awards / Athletic Awards

Distinguished Service Awards

Dr. Rolf Brekken ’91

A leading cancer biology researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Brekken has been a principal investigator at the Hammon Center for Therapeutic Oncology Research since 2002.

FROM HIS AWARD CITATION
Brekken’s research seeks to deepen our understanding of the changes that occur during tumor growth, then use that knowledge to develop effective drugs that specifically target unique aspects of those cancer cells. One major focus of Rolf’s lab is the molecular mechanisms of cancer angiogenesis—the physiological process by which new blood vessels form to “feed” the tumor cells. Rolf’s team has been exploring the use of antibodies as anti-cancer drugs, to target tumor-specific signals to block angiogenesis, thereby crippling the tumor without doing significant damage to normal cells. Another focal point of his work is the mechanisms by which cells signal their own destruction, and how tumor cells distort those signals, seeking yet another set of targets for novel antibody development. Two drugs from Rolf’s research have already entered clinical trials, one of which is in phase III—the latest and final level of testing. Additional candidates for targeted drug use are under study. . . . Rolf has had 10 Ph.D. students, nineteen postdoctoral fellows, and numerous undergraduate researchers in his lab, and he has served on dozens of dissertation committees. He speaks warmly of the satisfaction he feels when lab members bring forward their own ideas and discoveries, progress into their careers, and pay forward to others his contribution to them. A few years ago I visited Rolf’s lab at UT-Southwestern, and the camaraderie and creativity of that space was immediately evident.

—Marian Kaehler, professor of biology

Caroline Worra ’91

A world-class opera singer, Worra is also chair of the Music Department of the Stanwich School, a private co-ed school in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she teaches prekindergarten through 12th-grade music.

FROM HER AWARD CITATION
Caroline Worra has been hailed by Opera News Magazine as “one of the finest singing actresses around.” She has sung over 75 roles in opera and is listed as a performing artist with very prestigious opera companies. Perhaps equally impressive is that nearly 30 of these opera roles were in world, American, and regional premieres. This effort often requires energetic initiative, much more skilled musicianship, and certainly greater artistic creativity in order to perform something that has never been performed before. . . . Many of us who knew Caroline as a student here instantly recognized her high-caliber skills as a collaborative pianist. She, of course, was a fine singer, but she made her musical reputation at Luther because of the large amount of time she spent on the piano bench. She accompanied numerous recitals and ensembles at the keyboard. It was clear that she had a musical maturity and an extraordinary gift as an accompanist. One of her teachers, Jessica Paul, described her as a brilliant pianist, supremely gifted, musically intuitive, a fearless performer, and graciously diplomatic. Weston Noble spoke of her natural leadership, her infectious smile, and the high respect of her fellow students, especially while she was president of Nordic Choir. All of these talents, musical and otherwise, proved to serve her well as she began a career in vocal performance.

—David Judisch, professor emeritus of music

Pete Espinosa ’81

Espinosa has held senior executive leadership positions with IBM, Vignette, Guidewire Software, One Inc., and CSC (Computer Science Corporation).

FROM HIS AWARD CITATION
After a Homecoming visit to Decorah a few years ago, Pete and his wife Kari (Tollefson) Espinosa ’84 began to seriously consider retirement in Decorah. Though the Espinosas had been considering Cape Cod, Decorah won out due to the combination of so many great things to do, proximity to Edina, where they live, plus great schools. Family connections to Luther were an important part of this calculus. Pete’s brother Paul ’68 (deceased) and sisters Pamela (Espinosa) McFarland ’70 and Ann Espinosa ’80 are also Luther graduates. But Pete’s investment in Decorah goes beyond Luther and the home they have built here. In 2014 Pete purchased and renovated Bottle Tree laundromat on College Drive. And while owning a laundromat doesn’t always rise to the top of the list of real estate investments, it serves a highly vulnerable population in a very important way. In Pete’s words: “If you want to see the face of poverty, own a laundromat.” And while he’s not sure the purchase of the property will ever be profitable, he believes, in his words, “My return on investment is feeling like I’m part of doing something good for Decorah.” Then last year, Pete opened Pulpit Rock Brewery, which has helped Decorah become even more of a craft beer destination. Pete has found unique ways to continue to connect to the community through Pulpit Rock as well. Last Thanksgiving, he hosted the men’s basketball team for Thanksgiving lunch, and then did the same later that day for Luther international students who were not able to get home to see their families over the holiday break. . . . Pete is the kind of person that makes you think “I could do more.”

—Eric Runestad, vice president for finance and administration

Steven Schaver ’76

Schaver’s long career with EchoStar Corporation, parent company of Dish Network, began in 1984, and he has held the office of president of EchoStar International since 2001, living in Madrid.

FROM HIS AWARD CITATION

In his first two years at Luther, Steve was an all-star student of Spanish, but his semester in Spain became the transformative experience of his college education. Only a year before Steve applied to study away, a scholarship fund for students of Spanish going abroad was established by alumna Patricia Gunderson ’70. Steve was the first recipient of this scholarship, a fund that continues to support January Term study abroad in Spain and Latin America. . . . In 2001 Steve established an endowed scholarship fund with three aims: to support students of Spanish undertaking study abroad to build their language skills; to provide financial aid for low-income and first-generation Latino students at Luther; and to develop the Spanish program on campus and internationally. Each year in the spring my colleagues and I gather to discuss scholarship applications from Spanish majors who intend to study abroad in the coming year, and we take great delight in telling the qualified applicants that a portion, often a substantial portion, of the expense will be covered by an award from the Schaver endowment. This fund not only makes life-changing experiences possible, it makes our academic program richer and more rigorous. Without scholarship funds, it would be far more difficult to require every Spanish major to study abroad for a semester, and we are proud that this requirement continues to be a cornerstone of the Luther Spanish program. In 2003 Steve accepted an appointment to the Luther Board of Regents, a role that he played for three consecutive terms, the maximum allowed, helping the college chart its future.

—David Thompson, associate professor of Spanish

Debra Wilson ’71 and Peggy Brenden ’76

Wilson and Brenden both pursued careers in law, each eventually serving in the judiciary. Wilson served 29 years on the bench as an appellate judge with the Workers’ Compensation Court of Appeals, and Brenden served 30 years as a judge with Minnesota’s Office of Administrative Hearings.

FROM THEIR AWARD CITATION

There is a kind of symmetry and elegance to the personal and professional lives of Debra Wilson ’71 and Peggy Brenden ’76. That parallel symmetry and elegance have been marked by substantial achievement in sport, law, volunteer service, and social activism. Two examples help highlight the early beginnings of their shared story. As a high school senior, Peg was a plaintiff in a successful lawsuit allowing her to play on her high school tennis team, which, by state association rules, was limited to males, though there was no girls’ team. About the same time at Luther, Deb was finding ways to make her voice heard as a student-athlete leader regarding equal funding and opportunity for female athletes.

Their individual streams were beginning to merge. 

Another element pushing them toward their eventual symmetric merging was their shared enjoyment regarding the artful game of tennis. As players and coaches, they understood the joy that such a game generates regardless of ability, and today that passion remains even though one has moved toward the miniature court of pickle ball while the other remains active on the normal court.

Though five years separated their respective Luther graduations, these beginning elements of shared interests and experiences kept drawing them together, leading to establishing their committed relationship to one another in 1977. Doing so, their parallel paths persisted as Peg earned her jurisprudence degree from the University of Minnesota Law School in 1979 with Deb soon following, earning hers in 1981 from William Mitchell College of Law. . . . For both, their exceptional courtroom careers were marked by clearly articulated decisions reached through balanced insight, perceptive listening, and thoughtful engagement with the arguments presented.

Though retired from the judiciary, they remain clearly engaged with the court of social advocacy. Intertwined with a variety of volunteer work, civic organizations, and their church, all of which have benefited from their diverse talents, Deb and Peg continue to address issues surrounding gender equity and sexual orientation. The notion of elegance surfaces since both model through patience, firmness, grace, and openness a healthy and lively interaction with all whom they encounter. In 2013 they also celebrated the legal status of their relationship with a marriage ceremony fittingly enough held in the Minnesota Supreme Court chambers.

—Robert Larson, professor emeritus of theatre

Weston Noble Award

The Weston Noble Award is given to a person who has made an outstanding contribution to the choral arts.

Edith Copley ’76

Director of choral activities, Northern Arizona University

FROM HER CITATION

Copley’s resume and list of accomplishments are impressive. Most notably, she’s been named as a Centennial Teacher of the Year from Northern Arizona University, she’s a recipient of Arizona Music Educator of the Year, received a Distinguished Service Award from Luther College in 2004, was honored with the Arizona ACDA Outstanding Choral Director Award, and in 2012 was awarded the Regents’ Professor honor by Northern Arizona University, where she was the first and only music faculty member ever to receive this rank.

Personally, I’m honored to present this award, as Dr. Copley was also one of my teachers. I will forever remember the first rehearsal that I sang under Dr. Copley’s direction. To say that I was awestruck at the efficiency of her rehearsal and her conducting gesture would be an understatement. Her ability to create musical nuance through her gesture on the very first day of a rehearsal on a piece is a memory that I proudly share with my students each and every semester of conducting I teach.

—Andrew Last ’97, assistant professor of music

Presser Scholarship

The Theodore Presser Foundation provides a generous scholarship for an extraordinary senior music major each year.

Pablo Gómez Estévez ’17

FROM HIS CITATION

Pablo’s dream was to study music in Belgium, where his father lives. However, by providence, he found out about Luther College and that—to quote him—”the music faculty behaves as though this school is a conservatory, but within the boundaries of the liberal arts.”

Pablo has a keen intelligence, interested in music, theatre, dance, philosophy, always pursuing the meaning and significance of his activities, searching for what could lead to self-realization. His inquiring attitude demonstrates a true intellectual character, combined with social grace and his well-known gregarious nature. He is noted for his academic and artistic achievements. Pablo’s compositions have been performed at Luther College, Berklee School of Music, Boston Conservatory, and in the Dominican Republic. He has successful collaborations with Luther’s Dance Department and College Ministries, serves as tutor of music theory, works as a tour guide in Admissions and a facilitator at the Spanish Table. He was a finalist in the Distinction in Collaborative Keyboard Scholarship Competition.

Pablo received a summer research grant to write and compose the music for Lulito, an illustrated and musicalized children’s book. He presented this project at the research symposium this past May.

He was a member of Norsemen, Cathedral Choir, and the Jazz Band. He is currently the pianist with the Jazz Orchestra. Pablo studies piano with John Strauss and composition with Brooke Joyce.

Pablo is an example of dedication to excellence, a distinguished musician and scholar.

—Juan Tony Guzmán ’90, professor of music

Carlo A. Sperati Award

In the spirit of Carlo A. Sperati, conductor of the Luther Concert Band from 1905 to 1943, Luther annually honors a graduate who has had a distinguished career as a music educator.

Ronald Fox

Luther professor emeritus of music

FROM HIS CITATION
Ronald Fox’s career at Luther began in 1981. He was interviewed during that summer and was also interviewed for a similar position at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. He accepted the position at Luther and never looked back. . . .

Fox maintained a very relaxed attitude in his studio. Until tinnitus became a problem for him, he often played with the students. To quote one of Ron’s students from Baylor University, “Ron had a free, resonant tone and possessed a fun-loving personality. He knew I was in trouble and invested in me in significant and meaningful ways. He often played for and with me during my lessons. There is no judgment, just opportunity, healthy repetition, and time in his studio.”

Ron’s students always played to their potential without fear of failure, always willing to take chances. His students had ample opportunities to hear him play. In 1986 he was the tour soloist with the Luther College Band, in 1987, tour soloist with the Luther College Symphony Orchestra, and then again in 1990, tour soloist with the Concert Band. His off-campus performances are too numerous to mention. In 2008 the year of his retirement, two of his students created a Ron Fox Trumpet Scholarship, which was first awarded in 2011.

—Fred Nyline, professor emeritus of music, and Joan deAlbuquerque, associate professor of music and director of bands

Hemp Family Prize

The Richard C. and Joann M. Hemp Family Prize for Orchestral Performance is awarded to a Symphony Orchestra senior for exceptional performance, talent, musicianship, and leadership.

Namuun Tsend-Ayush ’17

FROM HER CITATION

In 2011 Namuun was one of a handful of Mongolian students invited to enroll at the United World College in Duino, Italy, where she studied for two years. During her time at United World College, she studied with members of the Trio di Trieste. Namuun is now a senior at Luther College majoring in violin performance. Her violin professor is Dr. Igor Kalnin, visiting assistant professor of music at the college.

For the third consecutive year at Luther, Namuun has been selected as winner of the Torgerson Concertmaster Chair; she has served since fall 2014 as concertmaster of the Luther College Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra. Among her many musical achievements as a Luther undergraduate, Namuun was one of the winners of the 2015 Luther College Concerto Competition. She also earned a first-place award in the American Protégé Concerto Competition.

In addition to music, Namuun studies accounting. During her free time, she enjoys dancing and participating in many sports, such as ping pong, soccer, and volleyball.

In December 2016 Namuun performed in New York City at Carnegie Hall under the auspices of the American Protégé competition.

—Daniel Baldwin, professor of music

Athletics Meritorious Service Award

Vernon Spilde

Retiree from Luther’s Facilities Department

FROM HIS CITATION

On February 1, 1992, Vern retired after 35 years. During his time at Luther, Vern would go to the baseball and softball diamonds in the spring after he was done with his work and practices were concluded for the day. He would drag the fields, pick up garbage, and clean the dugouts. He knew that if it rained during the night, the fields would be a mess and it would be difficult to get them ready and safe for the student athletes the next day. He did all of this outside of his regular duties for the college. In retirement, he continued to volunteer his time for six more years, taking care of both fields, and never took a dime for the hours that he toiled.

Vern and his wife, Kay, were loyal Norse fans and were at almost every home event together until her death in 2014. Vern still finds time to get to Luther sporting events and is an annual contributor to the Norse Athletic Association. . . .

During the spring of 1992, Brian Solberg ’88 was coaching softball with Betty Hoff ’60 on a cool spring afternoon, and his wedding ring fell off his hand while he was coaching. Noticing it was gone, he alerted everyone to keep their eyes open. Vern, while dragging the diamond between games, suddenly stopped the tractor around the shortstop position, got out, walked across the entire diamond almost to the first base line, kicked in the dirt, and pulled out Brian’s ring. Vern had noticed a glimmer from the stone at a distance, stopped, and walked directly to it.

—Renae Hartl, director of intercollegiate athletics and head softball coach 

Athletics Hall of Fame

Mike Lopez ’06

Accountant for Manitou American, living in Cedarberg, Wis.

FROM HIS CITATION

As a senior, Mike was dominant in wrestling from beginning to end. He went undefeated against Division III opponents, winning the IIAC Tournament and being named Outstanding Wrestler of the IIAC. He also placed at the UNO Open and the UNI Open and won the IIAC Conference tournament. At the NCAA Championships, he wrestled a tough wrestler from Augsburg in the finals who had transferred into Augsburg midyear. In a hard-fought match, Mike persevered in double OT to win an NCAA title and finish his career with a record of 118-40. He also led Luther to a fourth-place finish at the NCAA Tournament that year.

Mike loved his experience at Luther and in Decorah. His favorite parts of that experience include his time spent with teammates and the time he spent running the many great trails in the Decorah area. You see, Mike ran almost every day of his career at Luther. Rain, snow, or sun, he would go outside and run. It played an important role in his ascension to being an NCAA champion. Mike also loved the great hunting and fishing opportunities he had in Decorah, and he still comes back to the area to take advantage of those whenever he can.

—David Mitchell, head wrestling coach

Ben Barclay ’01

English teacher, St. Charles (Minn.) High School

FROM HIS CITATION

On the mat, Ben was a four-year starter, and he helped us take a team that in 1997 had two national qualifiers and no All-Americans to one in 2001 that had five national qualifiers and four All-Americans and finished fourth in the country. In addition, I think Ben’s engaging personality and appearance in a singlet single-handedly doubled the number of fans that came to watch us at home duals! Ben qualified for the NCAA Championships three times, earned two All-American honors and two Scholar All-American honors. He developed himself to the point where he was right in the hunt to win an NCAA title as a senior. During his strong senior season, Ben placed third at the UNI Open, beating a number of Division I wrestlers in the process. He also won the rugged IIAC Championships, avenging his only non-Division I loss of the regular season in the finals of the IIAC Tournament. Ben finished his career with a record of 122-46, which is third all-time in Luther wrestling history for wins.

—David Mitchell, head wrestling coach

Shaun Meinecke ’01

Assistant track coach, University of Wyoming–Laramie

FROM HIS CITATION

Shaun’s high school career as a four-sport athlete prepared him well for his future in the decathlon—the 10-event, two-day competition that includes sprints, hurdles, jumps, throws, and the 1,500-meter run. Starting his sophomore year at Luther, he decided it was time to expand his events. Perhaps foreshadowing his future as a track and field coach, Shaun became a great student of the sport as he became proficient at the 110-meter high hurdles, high jump, long jump, shot put, discus, javelin, pole vault, and triple jump—eight events at which he had no previous experience!

To improve his overall development, Shaun also ran three seasons of cross country for the Norse. He produced top-ten performances on our all-time track and field lists for six different events indoors and four different events outdoors. Add the honors of all-conference in the triple jump, conference champion in the 400-meter hurdles, earning All-American status as a member of the NCAA indoor national champion distance medley relay team, and a sixth-place finish at the NCAA outdoor championships in the decathlon to earn All-America in that event too. A Hall of Fame resume!

—Jeff Wettach ’79, head track and field coach

Brett Stender ’01

Eden Prairie, Minn.

FROM HIS CITATION

Being a multisport athlete in college is very challenging. Brett not only met that challenge, but excelled. Brett was a four-year letter-winner in both football and wrestling. In football, Brett started his first two years at defensive tackle and his last two at offensive tackle, where he was a two-time all-conference player. On the wrestling mat, Brett earned two All-American honors at heavyweight, placing third at the NCAA Championships as a junior and fourth in the nation as a senior, amassing a career record of 90-26. Brett played a huge role in helping bring Luther wrestling back into national prominence. His fourth-place finish at the NCAA Championships in 2001 helped lead Luther to a fourth-place team finish, giving us our first team trophy in program history. . . .

I think we all thoroughly enjoyed Brett’s great sense of humor and good nature. Some of my best memories as a coach involve Brett Stender and his great sense of humor. One time during his sophomore year, he came off the mat after beating a very tough opponent in a very intense match, and I met him matside. I looked up to him, patted him on the back, and said, “Brett, that was awesome! Way to go! Whatever you did to get yourself motivated to wrestle that way, do it every time.” Breathing heavy from the match and with no hesitation, Brett immediately responded, “It was easy, Coach. I just pictured your head on that guy’s body!”

—David Mitchell, head wrestling coach

Siri Thompson ’01

Director of manufacturing engineering for Boston Scientific Corporation, living in Bloomington, Ind.

FROM HER CITATION

Siri hit the ground running upon her arrival for cross country training camp at Luther. In addition, she pursued her academic interests in physics, mathematics, and art; she joined the Varsity Band; and as soon as the cross country season ended, it was prep time for track and field. Siri followed this hectic schedule four years, and each year she just kept getting better and better, as a cross country and track runner.

I will highlight some of Siri’s many academic, athletic, and professional achievements. Cross country: two-time all-conference, two-time all-region, two-time academic all-conference, member of three conference champion teams, member of two NCAA top-15 teams. Track and field: two-time all-conference (top three individuals) in the 1,500-meter run; one-time all-conference in the 800-meter run; NCAA qualifier in the outdoor 1,500-meter run, placing 11th in the nation; lead-off runner for the 2001 NCAA champion distance medley relay team, earning All-American recognition.

—Jeff Wettach ’79, head track and field coach

Craig Crandall ’86

Self-employed with his own tax preparation service, living in Champlin, Minn.

FROM HIS CITATION

During his running career at Luther, Craig earned all-conference honors five times in track and two times in cross country. . . . His times in the 3,000-, 5,000-, and 1,500-meter runs still rank him third, fifth, and seventh respectively on Luther’s all-time lists. Craig’s name also appears on the top-10 lists for four different Luther relays.

He was the track team’s most valuable freshman in 1983, and, as a senior, Craig was recognized for his leadership when he was chosen to serve as captain of both the cross country and track teams. During Craig’s tenure at Luther, his teams won four Iowa conference championships in track and three in cross country. Craig ran on Norse cross country teams that placed fifth in the nation in 1984 and won the NCAA Division III national title in 1985.

—Kirk Neubauer ’76, senior associate director of admissions

Denise (Wills) Thoen ’86

Homemaker, living in Bloomington, Minn.

FROM HER CITATION

Denise played volleyball all four years while at Luther College, making a real impact as a first-year student. . . . In volleyball, Denise was an all-conference selection in her sophomore and senior seasons and was selected as the team MVP in both of those seasons. She was blessed with incredible physical athletic ability and coordination that we had rarely seen at Luther up until then. She was always ready to play and in control on the court. In addition to her natural physical prowess, she would never give up—she would always go for the ball, often times diving on defense to get a touch on the ball, and that determination was the key to her success. . . .

In softball, Denise was blessed to play for legendary coach Betty Hoff. I’d like to share some memories in Denise’s own words: “The 1985 team that placed fourth at the NCAA tournament thrived on phenomenal pitching by Darsi Doyle ’87 and almost perfect fielding by our defense. It was not unusual for Darsi to strike out a dozen opponents or more in each game of a double header. Errors were extremely few. If we lost it was because we didn’t produce enough runs. The individuals on this team set high personal expectations; we were a bunch of perfectionists. But I don’t recall any big egos. As teammates, we wanted to perform well for each other. So it’s no surprise that my strongest memories were not of my own individual plays, but of how my team responded emotionally in clutch moments.”

—Ellen Drewes-Stoen, assistant professor of health and physical education

Jim Scott ’61

Retired football coach, Aurora University, Aurora, Ill.

FROM HIS CITATION

Jim’s development as a player, teacher, and coach comes from a series of challenges that he managed over his distinguished Hall of Fame career. Jim moved from his small high school to one of the finest small college football programs in the nation and was coached by the legendary Edsel Schweizer. During his four years as a Norseman, Jim’s teams were 29-6-1 and won two conference championships.

At Luther he learned to lead from some outstanding mentors: Coach Schweizer; math professors Don Pilgrim, Herbert Rebasso, and Bob Jacobsen; Coach Kent Finanger ’54 and his close friend and confidant Dale Hoffman ’61, who, sadly, passed away the year following their graduation together. But the most important thing Jim took away from Luther was his best friend and partner for the last 54 years, Lorraine (Thompson) Scott ’63. For eight years Jim cut his teeth as a math teacher and coach at small schools where resources were limited, coaching staffs were small. Jim took the reigns at the much larger Sterling (Ill.) High School in 1969 [and his] teams went 96-49-2 with seven conference titles, five state playoff appearances.

With Lorraine’s insistence and support Jim then pursued the head football job at Aurora University in the western suburbs of Chicago. The Aurora University Spartans had dropped football after the 1952 season, and  Jim and Lorraine started it back up in 1985.  In year seven (1992), AU went undefeated in the regular season and was selected for the NCAA Division III national playoffs, the first Chicagoland D-III team to make the playoffs, all in just seven years. This is the fourth Hall of Fame induction for Jim Scott. He is in the Illinois High School Hall of Fame, the Sterling High School Hall of Fame, and the Aurora University Hall of Fame.

—Paul Hefty ’86, past football coach

Weston Noble ’43 died Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2016, in Decorah at the age of 94. He had joined Luther’s music faculty in 1948, serving as conductor of Concert Band from 1948 to 1973 and Nordic Choir from 1948 until his retirement in 2005. But Noble went beyond his role as an educator and conductor for the thousands of students he encountered at Luther. He was also an adviser, a mentor, a supporter, a role model, and, perhaps most of all, a friend. During his 57-year tenure at Luther, Noble became, for many, the face of this college—the man most closely identified with its storied music tradition, the man who, through his long and acclaimed leadership of Nordic Choir and his tireless devotion to the entire music community, put Luther College on the global vocal music map.

Luther president Paula Carlson said: “It’s hard to overstate Weston’s contributions to American choral music and to the rich tradition of music at Luther. He had a deep love for Luther College, and he leaves behind a legacy of musical excellence and service to the college that’s an inspiration to us all.”

At a gala concert held on campus in his honor in 1998 Noble remarked: “Luther College is the best, and only, place I can imagine being. I was led to this place by my father years ago, and I was kept here by God.”

Noble was born November 30, 1922—the second of seven children of Ruth (Lappin) and Merwin Noble—and raised on a 160-acre farm just west of Riceville, Iowa. There he spent days learning the “3Rs” at Pleasant Hill School, a quaint one-room schoolhouse, and early mornings helping his father milk cows on the family’s farm. His prodigious musical talent surfaced early (age five) after his mother inquired, seemingly out of the blue, if he was interested in learning how to play the piano.

“I remember my mother was trying to get me to take a nap,” Noble told MPR’s Lorna Benson ’90 in 2005. “She leaned over and said, ‘Weston, would you like to take piano lessons?’” The nap never came to pass—“I was too excited,” Noble would later recall—but the piano lessons did. The slightly built youth was quick to embrace the practice and repetition that mastery of any instrument demands, rising before dawn to complete his chores outside so he could hustle back inside to practice the piano before school began. (When his enthusiasm waned in junior high, he received a little push from his Aunt Ruby and Uncle Aldy Dunton, who, noticing his talent, paid him 10 cents for each hour he practiced.)

At Riceville High School, Noble expanded his musical repertoire—he sang in the choir and played clarinet in the band—while keeping his studies front and center. He graduated in 1939 as class valedictorian and a few months later packed his bags for the hour-long drive to Decorah, where he entered the Luther class of 1943 at just 16 years of age. He had planned to attend the University of Iowa, but his father was persuaded by a Luther admissions counselor that the college would be a better fit for the musical youth, according to Warmly Weston: A Luther College Life (Luther College Press, 1998) by Wilfred Bunge ’53, Luther professor emeritus of religion and classics. At Luther, Noble continued to take his studies seriously (ultimately graduating magna cum laude); played clarinet in Concert Band under the direction of Carlo Sperati, Luther class of 1888; and sang in the all-male chorus Schola Cantorum under the direction of Theodore Hoelty-Nickel.

It was Hoelty-Nickel who first spotted (and nurtured) Noble’s potential as a teacher and conductor. One day during Noble’s sophomore year, he approached his student with a simple request: Will you lead a rehearsal of the chorus in my absence? Noble never looked back. “I remember going back to my room and saying, ‘Well, that piano is done—there is nothing like waving my hands in front of a group of singers,’” he recalled during Benson’s 2005 interview.

Noble eventually earned the role of student conductor under another faculty member, Sigvart Hofland, as well as the attention of his classmates. “Our class of 1943 was small in numbers but high in quality,” recalled the late John Victor Halvorson ’43 in a letter published in Warmly Weston. “By the time Weston was a senior, we all knew the Lord had selected him for special responsibilities.”

But first Noble would have to answer a different call. In February 1943, the U.S. Army notified him that he had just two weeks to report for service at Camp Dodge in Des Moines, Iowa. (With the college’s help, Noble quickly completed his degree requirements and graduated early with a major in history.) After more than a year spent training stateside, he landed in Normandy, France, with the 750th Tank Battalion in September 1944. Frequent correspondence with family and friends kept his beloved Luther College, and his future plans, in his thoughts throughout the long and emotionally exhausting months he spent overseas. “When you come back to Luther, we shall talk things over and discuss what you ought to do in order to achieve success in your chosen field,” wrote one such friend, his former teacher Sigvart Hofland, in September 1945. “In music your future is promising.”

Noble apparently agreed. Upon discharge from the U.S. Army in early 1946, he returned home to Iowa and once again immersed himself in local music circles, teaching music lessons at Luther (up to 60 each week) and in Riceville, Iowa (his pupils included three of his younger siblings). That same year he also applied—and was accepted—to study music at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York. But the closer the move to the Big Apple came, the more Noble doubted it was the path he should take. Noble trusted his gut and stayed in northeast Iowa, where he scoured the help-wanted ads in the Des Moines Register for an entry-level teaching job.

As luck would have it, Lu Verne High School had a vacancy for a music and social studies teacher—and Noble fit the bill. He spent the next two years honing his teaching and conducting skills in the tiny Iowa town. By 1948, however, he was ready to move on, and the graduate program at the University of Michigan seemed like the logical next step. It was there, in the summer of 1948, that he received a fateful phone call from Orlando “Pip” Qualley ’18, Luther’s academic dean, that would change the course of his life. Sigvart Steen, director of Concert Band and founder of Nordic Cathedral Choir, had resigned abruptly to move with his wife, an opera singer, to New York, Qualley told him. Would Noble return to his alma mater to conduct band and choir for just a year while the college searched for a permanent replacement conductor?

It was a remarkable offer, especially given that Noble was just 25 years old, held no advanced degrees (yet), and possessed scant teaching experience. But Qualley knew teaching talent when he saw it, and that “temporary” appointment became permanent in 1950. Noble would go on to earn his master’s degree in music from the University of Michigan in 1951, conduct Concert Band for the next 25 years (1948–73), direct Nordic Choir for the next 57 (1948–2005), and lead the college’s annual (until 2004) performance of Handel’s Messiah for more than 50 years. He once called the oratorio—which united hundreds in the college community on stage each December—“Luther’s greatest tradition.”

“Weston was popular with students from the beginning,” wrote Bunge in Warmly Weston. “And from the beginning, he engaged student hearts toward high performance goals.” Former student Michael Hovland ’72 shed even more light on the well-liked instructor’s teaching style in a tribute published in Bunge’s book: “It was all psychology,” he wrote. “When starting to work on a new piece, Weston would almost always begin with the biggest, fullest ensemble sections—the sections that sounded great from first playing. He would never start with the beginning of a piece or the difficult passages.”

During his nearly six-decade tenure at Luther, Noble became, as Paul Torkelson, director of choral activities at the University of Nevada–Reno, put it to the Quad Cities Times in 2004, “the most respected choral conductor in the United States.” James Ripley, chair of the Carthage College Music Department, echoed those sentiments in 2007. “No one is more well respected and loved in the choral music world than Weston,” he said. “His legacy as a musician is almost beyond compare.”

In November 2015, Noble received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Iowa High School Music Association for his more than 50 years of service as a conductor and music educator. The award was also presented on behalf of the Iowa Music Educators Association, the Iowa Choral Directors Association, the Iowa Bandmasters Association, and the Iowa String Teachers Association.

What exactly was it that set this man apart from other choral conductors of his time? There were myriad “firsts”—Noble conducted Nordic Choir for its first European Tour (1967), its first performance at Lincoln Center in New York (1969), its first appearance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (1976), and its first performance at the national convention of the American Choral Directors in Salt Lake City (1984). He founded and served as first director of the Dorian Music Festival at Luther, which, since 1950, has expanded from a one-day band festival to festivals for choral, instrumental, and orchestral members as well as summer music camps.

Also in constant demand to, in the words of one former colleague, “teach here and lecture there,” Noble became the first (and only) director to lead all-state choruses and bands in all 50 states. He was the first person to be named Outstanding Music Educator of the United States by the National Federation of State High School Associations (1989), the first recipient of the North Central Division of the American Choral Directors Association’s Weston H. Noble Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Choral Art (1994), and the first non-Mormon to receive the Distinguished Service Award from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (2006). Other notable awards, though not “firsts,” include receiving the St. Olav’s Medal from King Harald V of Norway and the Robert Lawson Shaw Award from the American Choral Directors Association.

Noble also held honorary degrees from five institutions of higher learning—Augustana College (S.D.), St. Olaf College, Westminster Choir College of Rider University, Carthage College, and Wartburg College. He was even the first Luther faculty member to get some ink in the newspaper USA Today for his campus cleanup efforts, frequently conducted at dawn during leisurely strolls across campus that called to mind his signature slow walks to the conductor’s podium. “When you have a beautiful campus, you want to keep it that way,” Noble once said of those efforts. “Knowing that our beautiful campus is clean, even where you can’t see it, is the same as hearing my choir strive for perfection.”

“His choir.” That is unquestionably what the 72-voice Nordic Choir was during Noble’s 57 years behind the conductor’s stand—years during which he built the ensemble into one of the most respected and recognized touring college choral groups in the nation, thanks in large measure to the expertise he displayed to captivate, unite, and command the respect of its members. “From the moment Weston walked on stage, the singers were instantly engaged,” wrote Hovland in Warmly Weston. “His baton-free hands were everywhere compelling, cajoling, pointing.”

In 2002 Luther formally recognized the lasting impact Noble made on the college when it renamed Jenson Hall of Music, the building where he nurtured the talent of so many young students, Jenson-Noble Hall of Music in his honor. That same year, the college opened an expansion of the building, the 325-seat Weston H. Noble Recital Hall. And in 2004 it established the Weston Noble Choral Award, which recognizes distinguished achievement in the field of voice and opera.

Noble officially “retired” from Luther the following year, but retirement didn’t mean for him what it means for most octogenarians. His retirement years, in fact, proved every bit as active as the 83 years that preceded them as he continued to share his energy, enthusiasm, and conducting expertise with choirs, bands, and orchestras worldwide, whether composed of junior-high students or seasoned professionals. His career includes conducting 900 all-state bands, orchestras, choirs, and festivals across four continents.

He served as artist-in-residence at Carthage College, interim conductor of the Wartburg College Choir, and guest conductor of the Augustana (S.D.) College Choir. He also served as conductor of the Weston Noble Alumni Choir each summer from 2006 through 2015. In 2009 he conducted the International Schools Festival in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, and the following year he traveled to South Korea to conduct a performance of Handel’s Messiah for the Camarata Music Company. He returned to Korea in 2013 to conduct the Korea National Choir.

When not guest conducting or teaching, Noble was a frequent presence in Luther’s Development Office, where he continued his long tradition of making telephone calls and handwriting letters in support of his alma mater. Noble also worked with Admissions, recruiting students through thousands of phone calls and handwritten notes.

In an interview he gave at age 90 to KLDT-TV in Sioux Falls, S.D., Noble hinted that the spiritual inspiration he drew from directing is what kept him going year in and year out, decade after decade. “After a great rehearsal day, I stop and say, ‘Can you see why I can never stop? What could top this?’” he said. “Music is one of the greatest ways to feed our spirits.”

Luther will host a concert in honor of Weston Noble on Saturday, May 13, 2017, at 1 p.m. The concert will be live streamed at luther.edu/weston.

You have to start somewhere

One thing to know about Rachel Stoddard ’17 is that she’s driven. She graduated with an exercise physiology major in December in only five semesters. She plans to earn a master’s degree in prosthetics and orthotics and eventually a Ph.D. in rehabilitation science. In preparation, she’s completed two internships, the first at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where she observed work in traumatic brain injury, physical and occupational therapy, service-dog training, and prosthetics and orthotics. Her second internship was at Limb Lab, a boutique prosthetic and orthotic company cofounded by Brandon Sampson ’98.

For her senior project at Luther, Stoddard received a $500 grant from the college’s Scholars program to build a myoelectric elbow. She wanted to learn how muscle contractions can control a prosthesis through electrodes. So she papier-mâchéd a friend’s shoulder and used a servo motor for the elbow joint. The forearm was a water bottle, the hand a gardening glove stuffed with paper towel. The whole thing was painted beige to appear more lifelike. “It was a very rough prototype,” she admits. “I just wanted it to look like an elbow that functions.”

And function it did. When Stoddard flexed her bicep, the electrodes hooked up to it signaled her prototype to bend its elbow. For a 19-year-old working alone, it was no small feat. But Stoddard was about to discover what she could do with a team of specialists on her side.

You have to start somewhere, part II

When you walk into Limb Lab in Rochester, Minn., it’s hard to believe that the forebears of modern prosthetists were blacksmiths. These blacksmiths and armorers fashioned hinged iron limbs that could manage reins or hold a shield so that fighters could keep serving the crown. Likewise, it was war—the First World War—that brought about the mass production of artificial limbs, to supply all the soldiers who had lost theirs.

But you don’t see those roots in the high-tech Rochester Limb Lab. The prosthetics and orthotics that Limb Lab offers are not blunt instruments, nor are they mass-produced. Each is made to order, tailored to specific bodies, and designed to accomplish tasks important to the individuals who will use them.

Most Limb Lab clients are directed there by physicians, often from Mayo Clinic. The first thing Sampson and his team ask is what the person wants to accomplish. Limb Lab’s clientele are boaters, hikers, sportsmen, and sportswomen. They ride bikes, work on farms, and swim in open water. They walk and run and eat and cook and do laundry and parent and grandparent. And their new limbs or orthotic braces allow them to do these things more easily.

One recent patient, Zach Sievert of Deleon Springs, Fla., sustained a motorcycle accident that severed 90 percent of his arm. The injury required nerve and muscle transplants and left him with almost no use of his left arm, hand, or fingers. Limb Lab fitted him with a myoelectric orthotic device that fits over the arm. Three weeks after bringing it home, he could use it for only 20 or 30 minutes before getting fatigued, but was excited about its potential.

“I’m seeing progress with it already,” he reported. “Soon I’ll be able to grab things, pick up drinks, shut doors, turn off light switches, carry laundry baskets, fold clothes. It completely brought back the use of my left arm. I went from nothing—literally nothing, just a dead and limp arm—and now I’ll be able to get some use out of it. It gives you hope. Mentally, it really helps.” 

Limb Lab loves Luther

In distinctly Luther style, Sampson has hired not one but two Luther graduates, Andrew Nelson ’13 and Trent Kerrigan ’13, both in the residency period of Century College’s prosthetics and orthotics program in White Bear Lake, Minn. Nelson and Kerrigan checked out the prosthetics field at the suggestion of their Luther academic advisers, which is also how Sampson came to it.

Sampson had been seriously injured in a farm accident as a child. His hand required nine surgeries, and the experience started him thinking about a career in orthopedic surgery. At the same time, his physical therapist suggested he take up guitar to promote dexterity and healing, which led to a lifelong love of music. “I chose Luther because I could do both those things,” he explains. “I could start on a pre-med track, and I could still participate in music and sports. But as time went on, it became clear that there were those students who just have a passion for medicine, and it also became clear what that would look like in my life, where that’s kind of the thing you do.”

His adviser noticed Sampson’s diverse interests and said, “You remind me of this guy who makes artificial limbs, Doug Sand ’85.” So Sampson shadowed Sand at Prosthetic Laboratories of Rochester for two days. “And I absolutely fell in love with the work,” he says. “Because I could still help people. I could be creative and artistic, and I love building things and making stuff that never existed before, whether it’s an impeccable limb or a relationship or a song. It really fits this creative lifestyle.”

After earning a degree from Century College and working his way up in the field for 15 years, Sampson and his three business partners saw an opportunity, he says, “to create a fresh approach to what it means to wear a prosthesis and what it means to re-create yourself after a life-changing event like an amputation.”

So they created a space that feels like an art studio, with giant windows looking onto the workroom where the limbs are created and patients get fitted. “For years, this profession has been in the background, hidden in some dirty corner of a building, and no one knows where it is,” Sampson says. “And at the same time, there’s a staggering statistic: one out of every 200 people in the U.S. wears a prosthesis. So we decided to put it on display, to take the stigma away. We put prostheses on mannequins right out on Broadway, the busiest street in Rochester, and we removed the secrets. We want this to feel like an open, collaborative effort between people who need our services, their physicians, and our work team.”

In the three years it’s been in operation, Limb Lab has grown from one location to four, from four employees to 22. They’ve served 3,250 patients from 44 states and 8 countries.

A match made at Limb Lab

As a high schooler already interested in prothestics, Stoddard made the four-and-a-half-hour trek from her home in Tower, Minn., to tour the Rochester Limb Lab. When she received one of Luther’s summer research grants last spring, she knew she wanted to use it to 3-D print a myoelectric hand—one that didn’t rely on paper towels and gardening gloves. Meanwhile, Limb Lab had just bought its first 3-D printer. It was a perfect match.

Stoddard and her Limb Lab mentor, David Coleman, decided to purchase and print an Ada Hand kit from Open Bionics, an open-source bionic-hand company based in the UK.

But just because they had the print schematics doesn’t mean the project was easy. The design was new, and it had a lot of errors. They had to print the palm five times and the back plate four times before they got the printer settings right. In addition, Rachel worked with the programmer through dozens of emails to smooth out kinks in the coding. And the wiring had been designed for parts that were no longer available, so—after frying the circuit board three times—Stoddard and Coleman redesigned it.

Coleman is passionate about the pediatric side of prosthetics. He’s involved in e-NABLE, a worldwide movement to provide 3-D printed hands to children in need. So he and Stoddard decided to put a fun spin on their Ada Hand by making it an Ironman Ada Hand, with chunky red and gold plates and a palm that glows, the idea being that kids going to physical therapy could feel they were going to superhero training instead. While the Ironman model did not become part of the e-NABLE program, it became the baseline for future projects and research, and Limb Lab has sent 3-D printed hands to children in need from New York to Ghana to Nepal. In some cases, Coleman notes, it costs more to ship a hand than it does to make it.

In addition, Stoddard wrote 16 pages of recommendations for Open Bionics, so that other people could print the Ada Hand more easily. “This project really pushed me to see where my limits are in terms of creative thinking and determination. It was definitely worth all the hard work and frustration that went into making it,” she says. “Even though I knew it wasn’t going to be for patient use, the fact that the whole summer we’d been working toward this one goal and it worked? It was, hands down, the best feeling.”