CU Voices

Personal stories from our alumni.

Discovering international law

Mary loves hiking near the ocen at home near Sydney, in New South Wales, Australia.

By Mary Ayad (PolSci’94) It has been said a journey of a thousand footsteps begins with one step. Starting out from CU-Boulder with a bachelor’s in political science, I have found myself halfway around the world after two master’s degrees, a brief United Nations mission and a nearly completed PhD in international commercial arbitration law in Australia. All this after
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We don’t remember days; we remember moments

By Kim Bristol Adams (Engl’91) It started with a phone call from an old friend.  Not even an old Forever Buff friend.  An old work friend who had moved to Oregon a decade ago, but we still keep in touch.  “My son,” he said (who, gulp, was not even born when we first met) “is looking at colleges and I
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At home in the city

By Stephanie Ann Harper (Engl’09) I work every day in downtown Denver. To get there from my home in the suburbs, I take the train, which lets me off on 16th Street, a grand pedestrian mall of red and gray granite lined with planted trees, shops and eateries, all against the backdrop of skyscrapers and renovated historic buildings. It’s a
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“Father knew best”

Janet in a rickshaw in Singapore

By Janet G. Go ( Geog’53) “Stutterbox,” my classmates at Hyattsville Elementary School, Maryland, called me. This hurt me then, but, in hindsight, it probably jump-started my career. By age 11, I was selling stories for a dollar each to the Washington (D.C.) Star, and I worked for the Hyattsville weekly newspaper, The Prince Georgean, until I was 16. It
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It’s not the critic that counts

The Marni gained inspiration from the Herd leader, Dawn Barone  (Hist,Psych

By Marni Spott Besides the amazing education I received from CU, if someone asked me to name the most important lesson I took away from college, it would be this: people can tell me I won’t succeed in certain aspects of life, and they can tell me to play it safe because I wouldn’t want to screw up. But that’s
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Emerson and Atticus, baby Buffs

Two new Buff babies join the herd and don CU togs.
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An improbable path to the Buffalo Bicycle Classic

The author, Clint Talbott (Jour

By Clint Talbott (Jour’85) Pounding rain and stinging hail pummeled my bare legs. Lightning bolts struck fast and close. I hugged the wet grass on the side of a ditch. My steel bicycle lay nearby, temporarily abandoned. I had not planned on this on my solo bicycle ride to the middle of Colorado. This was South Park, and I was
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CU Memories: Edward Stephen Havasy

HAVASY, Edward S. ESQ., “Doc,” died at his residence in Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, on May 23, 2011, two weeks after his eighty-sixth birthday of respiratory failure and metastatic bone cancer. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he was given the nickname “Doc” while in high school and it remained with him throughout his life.
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Opera soars with Holman

I’m Leigh Holman (DMAMus’03), director of the CU-Boulder opera program, and I remember the career path that eventually led me back to CU. It’s always difficult to leave a magical place like Boulder, but I was excited to find a very good academic job even before I received my degree. I was hired as chairperson of the voice area and
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CU memories: Robin Melinda Rasmussen (A&S’03)

Robin Melinda Rasmussen (A&S ’03), 30, of Napa, California, lead pastry cook with Solbar Restaurant at the Solage resort in Calistoga, California, died suddenly in an automobile accident near St. Helena, California, on April 27, 2011.
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What makes a conference to remember?

Here are comments from organizers and participants in the April 4-8, 2011 Conference on World Affairs. Jim Palmer, director: We have just completed our 63rd Conference on World Affairs.  What a privilege for our staff, students, and community volunteers to serve this tradition, but not be tradition-bound.  Each year we create a time capsule, a snapshot of our world and
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Macky and me

By Carlton Stoiber (A&S’64, Law’69) We know we owe the crown jewel of the Boulder campus – Macky Auditorium – to the generosity of Andrew J. Macky (1834-1907) who arrived in Boulder in 1859 during the Colorado gold rush. An early supporter of establishing the University of Colorado in Boulder, Macky became president of the First National Bank and Boulder’s
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Volunteering is this alum’s joy

When I graduated from CU last spring, I enjoyed the idea of being free from the academic world, at least for a while. During my junior and senior year much of my inspiration and encouragement had come outside the classroom in volunteer contexts and I was eager for more.
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My Boulder life reborn

By Deborah Fowlkes I grew up in Boulder in the shadow of the Flatirons. My free time was spent hiking, backpacking, skiing and rock climbing. One of my earliest memories is of being carried in a backpack on my mother’s back during a mountain hike, and the bottom seam split and spilled me in a startled heap onto the trail.
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Holiday greeting stirs memories

Thanks for the memories and the beauty of our campus and life there at one time and still.
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The tale of Colorado’s warship

By Norris Hermsmeyer (Acct’67) It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. “It” refers to finding a sailor who had served on the USS Colorado during World War II, who was also a student or alum of the University of Colorado. In the mid-1990s, while serving on the CU alumni board, occasionally writing stories for the Alumnus
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Of Yellowstone backcountry skiing and bison

Our sleek, sporty metal beast speeds on a deserted stretch of Hwy. 191, the asphalt a scar in the flat green valley, sculpted on one side by a rushing, metallic-gray river and on the other by jagged white mountains, heavy with late spring snow. It’s dusk-near-dark, and we’ve been driving nonstop for eight hours.
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Benefiting CU, benefiting ourselves

If anybody asks, my best advice is that regardless of where you live, if at all possible get involved or involved again with CU. Our lives are richer for it.
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I sure do have memories of Sewall Hall!

By Patricia Bianco (MThtr’65) I was a residence adviser for students living on the side of Sewall Hall in 1962-63. My little “apartment” was just off the huge living room. Sewall was an upper-class women’s residence hall. We called it Menopause Manor. The women and I obeyed most of the rules and had wonderful times together. Sewall had beautiful furniture.
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Rookie linguist learns more than Arapaho

Crawford helps as Finn reads an Arapaho dictionary.

By Finn Thye (Psych’01, MLing’09) A bottle rocket launched in my mind the night I first thought of going to learn Arapaho by living with an elder on the Wind River Reservation in central western Wyoming. I lay there thinking about how it would be to visit the old heart of our continent, experiencing a different side of the culture
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Unforgettable Boulder

What’s unforgettable about your CU-Boulder experience? Check out Chris Dea’s (Jour’09) entertaining music video, “Boulder the talented, creative and bold.” It will bring you back to your good ol’ CU days.
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New Alumni Association executive director arrives July 26

Deborah Fowlkes 2010

CU-Boulder announced that Deborah W. Fowlkes (pronounced “folks”) has been named executive director of the University of Colorado Alumni Association. Fowlkes, who will assume the post on July 26, currently serves as assistant vice president for alumni relations and executive director of the Temple University Alumni Association in Philadelphia.
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A student’s Antarctic journey

Jack next to the tent he slept in for four weeks at WAIS station. Lots of snow!

“Where to next?” my family and friends asked me after I returned home in April 2008 from a four-month stay among the cloud forests of Monteverde , Costa Rica. “I don’t know, maybe Antarctica is next on the list?” I would sarcastically answer.
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Response to ‘Open Space’

Downtown San Francisco, 2009 Photo by M. Douglas Wray

Regarding the open space article in the December 2009 Coloradan, I was an undergraduate physics student of professor Al Bartlett in 1982-83. I see he still wears his trademark bolo tie. I don’t recall being aware of his involvement with open space, but on a related issue, exponential population growth, his remarks on the topic carry with me to this day.
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Response to ‘Dialing for Dignitaries’

Howard Higman

A letter to the editor responding to the article in the March 2010 Coloradan about Howard Higman (Art’31, MSoc’42)
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As immigration rises, crime rates fall

Tim Wadsworth

During the 1990s, immigration reached record highs and crime rates fell more precipitously than at any time in U.S. history. And cities with the largest increases in immigration between 1990 and 2000 experienced the largest decreases in rates of homicide and robbery, CU-Boulder sociology researcher Tim Wadsworth has found.
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Hale still hearty

Hale-Irwin-029

Hale Irwin (Mktg’67) arrived in Colorado this week to play in the Senior PGA Championship in Parker, Colo. He played golf and football while at University of Colorado at Boulder in the 1960s, but golf has brought him all around the world in the years since.
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A Madagascar drilling adventure

The author, Tom Rutkowski (MCivEngr

“Hey Tom, you’re an engineer. Come over and talk to this lady. She wants to bring clean water to a village in Madagascar,” my friend Steph Cohen Stoddard (EnvCon’96) said as I ambled down the Pearl Street Mall.
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Grad fights child malnutrition in Nepal

Mark Arnoldy (Psych

In 2007 Mark Arnoldy (Psych’10) took a year off from school to travel to Nepal, where he taught in a school and piloted an education program. He learned that there are half-a million malnourished children in Nepal and also came across research describing how peanut butter was literally solving the problem of malnutrition around the world. So he developed a peanut butter-based product called NepalNUTrition that, now that he has graduated, he’ll return to Nepal to distribute.
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New basketball coach a native

Tad Boyle

Colorado native Tad Boyle, who most recently resurrected the basketball program at University of Northern Colorado, has been named the 18th head coach in CU men’s basketball history.
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Dream Chasers

Jim_Voss14GA

A Colorado-based aerospace company, Sierra Nevada Space Systems of Louisville, is collaborating with students and faculty in the department of aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the development of a new spacecraft called Dream Chaser, which will be used to carry astronauts to space.
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My next four-year education

Here

The year was 2006. I had just finished my marketing degree at the Leeds School of Business and was getting ready to set out into the “real world.” Like many of my friends, I was eager to live the dream and go somewhere completely new.
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Weiman nominated by Obama

Carl Wieman

President Barack Obama nominated CU-Boulder distinguished professor and Nobel Prize in Physics winner Carl Weiman as associate director for science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. A strong proponent of science education reform, Weiman won the Nobel in 2001 for his work in creating a new form of matter.
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A Buff life: Margaret Mary Ryan Milek

Margaret-Mary-Ryan-Milek

Margaret Mary Ryan – beloved wife, mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, cousin and to many of you, a friend for a lifetime.
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"Conference on Everything Conceivable"

From April 5 through 9 and for the 62nd time since 1948, distinguished guests from throughout the United States and the world will pay their own way to participate in a unique event film critic Roger Ebert calls the “Conference on Everything Conceivable.”
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Leaving “a unique trail of bugs behind us”

nf_swabh

Forensic scientists may soon have a valuable new item in their toolkits — a way to identify individuals using unique, telltale types of hand bacteria left behind on objects like keyboards and computer mice, says a new CU-Boulder study.
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Dear Friends

cumemory_navratil-01

Jim Navratil (Chem’70, MS’72, PhD’75) who shared in the Nobel Peace Prize the year the International Atomic Energy Commission won reports on a recent trip to Afghanistan.
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Pac-10 speculation continues

Photo by Casey Cass

In which assistant athletic director Dave Plati (Jour’82) comments in question-and-answer format on the widespread speculation that CU could switch athletic conferences from the Big 12 to the Pac-10. Your comments are welcome at the end of the jump. This is excerpted from his Plati-‘Tudes blog.
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An Egyptian odyssey

Ted on a camel near the Great Pyramids of Giza.

When I was 11 years old, I dreamed of some day becoming an explorer and wanted foremost to travel to Egypt. Well, worthwhile dreams can take a long time to come true. During my first year of retirement last April, my dream came true during a 17-day Roaming Buffs tour with 25 alumni from the universities of Colorado and Iowa.
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Mining the past

muriel_sibell_wolle_MA30

Like many first time visitors to Boulder, Muriel Sibell Wolle (MA ’30) was captivated by the community the moment she arrived on campus saying, “I looked at those mountains, and I thought to myself, I don’t know if they are going to like me or not, but I’m staying until they kick me out!”
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