News

Sometimes, as Ann McCulloch, ’93, has discovered, a new start can be found in the place you least expect. For the Ford Institute alumna, it was in one of the places she knew best and loved most. For the past year, she’s been the director of chapter and association relations for Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest collegiate honors program in the country and an organization near and dear to her heart.

On January 23 at the Michigan Music Conference in Grand Rapids, two Albion alumni conducted statewide high school honor choir concerts before a packed house of more than 2,000 in DeVos Performance Hall. Associate Professor Clayton Parr, ’80 (far left), and Wendee Wolf-Schlarf, ’83, who teaches in the Traverse City Public Schools, were selected by a statewide ballot of their vocal music teaching colleagues across the state of Michigan.

Both subtle and dramatic, change is coming to Albion College in the form of several new construction and renovation projects. In particular, the renovation of Munger Place into a new student “living-and-learning” community as well as reimagined and revamped outdoor athletic facilities to be collectively called the Davis Athletic Complex are planned to be ready by the time students return to campus for the fall semester.

Failure and success live on different sides of the same coin and Laurel Draudt, who on July 1 will become the new director of Albion College’s Carl A. Gerstacker Institute for Business and Management, believes it’s best to show students that in many cases, one side needs the other.

The recipient of a highly competitive Andrew W. Mellon Foundation internship in conservation, Mallory Fellows Bower, ’10, spent much of this past fall in Washington, D.C. at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture as it prepares to open its doors later this year.

Nicolle Zellner still remembers those perfect Wisconsin nights when, as a kid, she’d look up to the sky and into the endless darkness full of possibility and uncertainty, and wonder what else was up there.

On Friday afternoon, October 16, NASA Astronaut and Lt. Commander, U.S. Navy, Josh Cassada, ’95, will look out into a sea of young faces and wonder if and when, and perhaps most important, why not?

Geology professor Thom Wilch has been invited to help direct the course of Antarctic research funded by the National Science Foundation. This week Wilch began a one-year appointment in Arlington, Virginia, as NSF program director of Antarctic Earth Science in the Division of Polar Programs.

Former CareerBuilder exec, film producer, touring trombonist pursues volunteer role