From the Alumni Office:

Jennifer Hamlin Church, Associate VP for Advancement & Director of Alumni Relations

No Typical Alumni!

My first encounter with Siena Heights occurred 25 years ago when I answered a phone call for my husband, Tracy. The caller was a professor, my husband’s advisor, but he hadn’t seen Tracy for a while. I knew that Tracy had had other things on his mind: a wedding, a demanding job, kidney dialysis, a kidney transplant, and then a leg amputation. But this professor didn’t know any of that. He just knew Tracy was close to completing his B.A., and he didn’t want him to quit: “Tell him we hope he’ll come back,” he said. “We want him to finish that degree.”

I was dumbfounded. Who bothered to keep track of individual students and notice when they stopped out? What college took the time to call a part-time guy on the 27-year plan…and encourage him to keep going? Who did that?

Siena Heights did. Professor Bill Blackerby did.

Tracy’s graduation a few years later was another eye-opener. I had attended a traditional liberal arts college and worked at two others; there, a “typical” graduate was about 22 years old. But sitting in the Fieldhouse in 1993, I knew … knew in a new way … that no senior had worked harder to reach this day than my 45-year-old husband. And no family was any prouder of their graduate than we were. What an epiphany!

At that moment, I became a fan of non-traditional education.

From the Alumni Office:

Curtain Up! Light the Lights!

Great Theater at (and Beyond) the Heights

If you’ve been to Siena recently, you know the arts are alive and well. At this year’s Homecoming, you heard lots of music (marching band at halftime, Acapelicans at Alumni Awards, choir at Mass) and saw lots of art (John Wittersheim and Lois DeMots retrospectives in Studio Angelico, alumni art in McLaughlin, six alumni sculptures in the new Wittersheim Memorial Sculpture Park). And there’s a good chance you were humming “Day by Day” from the Theater Siena production of Godspell directed by theater program chair Doug Miller ’74. All of the arts are vital to the life and legacy of Siena Heights—enough so that Joni Warner ’83 now works officially connecting our campus with the Lenawee community through the arts.

Today, I’d like to spotlight Siena’s theater program.

For the past decade, one of our most popular alumni events (outside of Homecoming) has been the annual spring Dinner & Theater gathering. About 100 people come to campus—from as far as Detroit, Lansing, Battle Creek and many parts of Ohio—for dinner and the final production of the Theater Siena season. Some people come every year and it’s not uncommon to hear things like “Wow, I saw this once in Boston/New York/Toledo—but this was better!”

That sentiment was definitely buzzing around the Croswell Opera House in Adrian this past summer, when Siena’s Mark DiPietro ’83 directed a full-scale production of Les Miserables with a cast and crew almost half made up of Siena Heights alumni, students and faculty. “We had 300+ people audition,” said DiPietro, chair of SHU’s Fine and Performing Arts division. “They came out of the woodwork for the chance to be in the full, adult version of the show.”

From the Alumni Office:

Can We Talk?

Yes, in so many different ways!

For almost a year, the Alumni Board of Directors has been discussing networking as a way for alumni to connect with Siena Heights. Early conversation focused on how alumni might assist current students—offering mentoring or job shadowing opportunities, welcoming student interns, or simply sharing the wisdom of experience. In a pilot effort, a few alumni did some wisdom-sharing at Homecoming last year, discussing careers with students over Saturday morning coffee.

The talk since then has gone in many directions: How do we bring students and alumni together? What programs or activities might work? And, at our February Board meeting, this question: What are the benefits of connecting undergrads and graduates? Does it make a difference?

Katie Hatch ’07, vice president of the Alumni Board, recalled the impact of a now-nameless art alumna who spoke in a long ago class in Studio Angelico: “She was a woman who worked, had a husband and children, and did her own art, too,” Katie said (attending this Board meeting by Skype from her snowbound home near Akron). “I thought, ‘Wow. If she can teach, have a family, and also do art—I can, too.’ After that, I was ready to major in art. It was a pivotal moment.”

Read more . . .

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