Ward is a senior theatre and finance major from Cary who has taken on one of the least glamorous roles in theatre. She is an emerging theatre-safety expert, an authority on protecting casts and crews from the many dangers lurking backstage. She plays her part proudly.

“I will nag if I have to. It’s part of educating people about safety,” she said one recent morning in the Frick Center at Elmhurst, where she was taking a break from her summer duties as stage manager at Naperville’s Summer Place Theatre. “Even pros make mistakes. I see it all the time, people trying to do something silly, like use a saw without safety glasses. You have to tell them, ‘You really shouldn’t be doing this.’”

The theatre, it turns out, can be a dangerous place. Are those ropes really going to hold those props dangling from the rigging overhead? Whose idea was it to put that ladder on casters? And those pyrotechnics in Act II: Are they really necessary? Audiences are rarely aware of it, but inside every production a mini-drama is playing out, a suspense thriller that hinges on a single question: Can we get through this play without anybody getting hurt?

And, as Ward will tell you, the perils are especially grave in school productions, where crew members tend to come with much more enthusiasm than expertise.

“In high school, you think you’re invincible. It’s like, ‘I’ll just climb this rope and screw this in, no problem,’” she said, cringing a little at the thought. “I had no concept of what safety was in high school.”

Ward has made it her mission to do something about that. She has spent much of the past year researching the state of the art in theatre safety—from Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations to emergency planning—and she plans to share what she has learned with theater educators and their students. Ward is developing a survey of high school theatre programs that she hopes will offer clues about standard practices in high schools, and how they can be improved. How often are backstage areas cleaned? Are fire exits kept clear? Are tools inspected regularly and kept in working order? She plans to publish her findings in a trade journal for theatre professionals.

She knows that not everyone shares her passion for safety.

“It’s not the sexiest part of the business. People are sometimes a little surprised that I’m interested,” she said. “You know, safety is the kind of thing a lot of people like to ignore.”

Ward’s interest in safety grew out of a 2011 trip she made to Charlotte, North Carolina, for the annual conference of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT), a professional organization of designers, technicians and other theatre pros who work far from the spotlight. For Ward, who is interested in a career in production management (“It’s the one theatre job that lets me use my business sense”), the conference was an opportunity to network and to learn. But it was a session on emergency procedures in theatres that really sparked her curiosity.

“It got me thinking about safety, which was something I’d never thought about before,” she said. “I could see the need for someone to look at safety education for high schools.”

When she returned from the conference, she began talking with one of her professors, Rick Arnold, about expanding Elmhurst’s required safety course for theatre majors. She also applied for, and won, a $1,500 grant from the College’s Honors Program to research theater safety.

Her research has helped make her something of an authority in the field. She is happy to share her list of top 10 safety tips. (They range from investing in massive quantities of safety glasses, so there is always a pair handy when needed, to training young people in safely using power tools.) She has learned so much about safety that she is ready to move into the spotlight herself. At next year’s USITT conference, Ward will be leading the session on applying OSHA standards to theatres.

More challenges await at Elmhurst, as well. The coming attractions for the upcoming season at the College’s Mill Theatre include an adaption of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which includes a scene where an actor must scuttle up a wall like a cockroach. That promises to pose problems for actor, set designer and stage manager alike. Ward is ready.

“It’s another chance to educate people about the importance of safety,” she said.

“I’d be down here all the time if I could,” Weber said as he showed a visitor around the studio one recent morning. “I love trying different ways of capturing a performance, seeing what different microphones sound like set up at different angles. When I think about how much I’ve learned here over the last couple of years, it’s amazing.”

Weber is just one of a quarter-century’s worth of Elmhurst students who learned their first lessons in sound recording in this studio. The Gretsch Recording Studio is celebrating its 25th birthday this year. The equipment inside the studio has changed over the years, to keep up with every advance in audio technology, but the one thing that has remained constant is that students have come to the studio to twist dials, to slide faders, and to learn in the process.

“This is a teaching facility, and what we do here is experiential learning,” said John Towner, the studio’s manager. “I liken it to playing an instrument. I can show you a book, but the way you really learn is by getting your hands on the equipment and turning the knobs. That’s when it clicks.”

Towner knows. He is a graduate of Elmhurst’s music department (class of ’86), but in his student days the setup was decidedly more modest. The only recording facility was a small booth at the back of Buik Recital Hall. It held a breadbox-sized reel-to-reel tape recorder, a deeply distant ancestor to the sleek digital gear on which current students like Weber work.

“It was vastly different back then,” Towner said.

The studio—and the upgrades that have kept it stocked with the latest technology—was funded by the Sylvia and William W. Gretsch Memorial Foundation. Sylvia and William Gretsch’s son, Fred, is a 1971 Elmhurst graduate and the president of the Gretsch Company, the Georgia-based family business that has produced some of the most iconic guitars and drums in American music history. (For more on Fred Gretsch and “That Great Gretsch Sound,” check out this 2005 profile from the College’s Prospect magazine.)

When the Gretsch Recording Studio opened in 1987, it gave Elmhurst students their first opportunities to work with multi-track equipment. Today, Weber and his classmates control a state-of-the art console and work in Pro Tools, the recording software that Towner calls the industry standard.

The gear is impressive, but Towner said that studio craft involves more than just mastering the most current high-tech tools. The people in the studio can be even more confounding. Towner has seen professional studio sessions derailed by miscommunications and lost tempers.

“You’re working with performers in a high-pressure environment. It can get intense. But you have to maintain a calm, professional atmosphere. Learning to twirl the knobs is the easy part,” Towner said. “Working with people to achieve something stellar, that’s tough.”

He and Weber were applying the final edits and mixes to a recording Weber had made two weeks earlier with the Gretsch Guitar Ensemble, a student group. The recording was a kind of command performance for Fred Gretsch, a chance for him to hear the band he sponsors perform in the studio he funds. Weber and Towner were pleased with the results, but were still going over and over one guitar part, looking to coax out of it just the right sound.

“It was a real collaboration,” Weber said of the session. “You have to know what the performer wants, what they’re trying to accomplish, and what will work. ”

Then he was back to the console, to give the performance one more listen.

“Quite exemplary work you do here,” she said to the band, adopting a mock-posh accent after scatting her way through Duke Ellington’s “Cotton Tail” with their backing. “I’m most impressed.”

When Bridgewater and the band got together for the rehearsal in the band room in the basement of Irion Hall the night before the June 16 show, Bridgewater was just returned from a tour of Australia; the band had recently come home from 11 nights of performances in Serbia. But a listener might have thought that they had been working together for a while. They covered tunes like the Ella Fitzgerald vehicle “You’ll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)” and the Billie Holiday hit “Lover Man,” most of the time sounding so polished that at one point Bridgewater cracked, “Why are we even rehearsing?”

If the singer liked what she was hearing from the band, the admiration seemed to be mutual.

“This is what makes Summer Ex one of our favorites: You get to play with such great musicians. If you keep your ears open, you can learn so much,” said Andrew Ecklund, a senior trumpet player from Grayslake. “You say, ‘Oh, so that’s what it’s supposed to sound like.’”

This wasn’t the first time Elmhurst students had the opportunity to listen to and learn from Bridgewater. She had headlined the annual summer concert on the campus mall, which pairs the band with a visiting jazz luminary, four other times. Bridgewater comes from a college jazz program, having sung with the University of Illinois big band before going on to a career that has included Grammy and Tony awards and critical acclaim.

“I love working with young musicians,” she said during a break in the rehearsal. “And this is one of the best college big band situations around. What Doug does here is invaluable.”

Bridgewater seemed to enjoy the rehearsal every bit as much as the students in the band. She arrived at Irion Hall toting her four-legged traveling companion, a Maltese named Ayo, who she immediately introduced to the students. During the run-through, the dog occasionally interrupted one of the singer’s vocal flights with a bark, a signal for Bridgewater to refill his water dish or send him chasing after a chew toy. During a break, the musicians crowded around to take turns playing with Ayo.

“They’ve been asking for a band dog, now they’ve got one,” Beach said to Bridgewater.

For the 18 members of the jazz band, the chance to perform with Bridgewater was shaping up as one of the highlights of a typically busy summer. Their summer break is really no break at all. The student musicians had barely finished their final exams before taking off on their tour of Serbia, which had them playing jazz festivals in front of enthusiastic audiences. Upon their return, they squeezed in an outdoor show in Oak Brook, their rehearsal with Bridgewater and their performance at Summer Extravaganza on consecutive nights. Still ahead: Three days of studio sessions at Chicago Recording Center for one of the band’s nearly annual CD releases.

“When we get out of school, it’s time to do all our jazz band stuff,” Ecklund said. “Doug wants us to do the things professional musicians would do. And it’s fun for us when we get to show what we can do.”

Onstage at Summer Extravaganza, Bridgewater sounded every bit as impressed with the band as she had during rehearsal. She paused mid-set to turn the spotlight on the students.

“Let’s hear it,” she urged the audience gathered on the campus mall, “for this year’s Elmhurst College Jazz Band.”

The ovation that followed hit just the right note.

Bennett, an assistant professor of biology at Elmhurst, has spent much of the last decade getting to know the scorched mussel and its close relatives in the genus Brachidontes. In his research, Bennett uses molecular tools and DNA analysis to draw sharper distinctions between species of Brachidontes that appear virtually identical in form and structure. In the process, he hopes to better understand how, when and why species developed and branched off from common ancestors.

In his lab recently, Bennett held up a small vial containing a Brachidontes specimen. “I’m obsessed with these little creatures,” he acknowledged with a rueful smile. Brachidontes figures prominently in Bennett’s plans for the summer break. As his students filed in to drop off final papers or say an end-of-semester goodbye, Bennett talked about his upcoming 10-day field expedition to Florida. Bennett will be collecting specimens from two species—one found along Florida’s Atlantic Coast, one on the Gulf Coast. By harvesting and analyzing genetic material from each population, he hopes to produce new insights into how the species evolved. Did the development of distinct species, for example, coincide with falling sea levels brought on by an Ice Age?

Bennett’s research depends on the high-tech gene-sequencing tools that have become widely available to scientists only in the last decade or so. They have made operations that were once prohibitively costly and time consuming vastly more affordable and accessible. In the process, they have changed the way ecologists like Bennett work.

“Only now are we getting the tools we need to understand how genomes change over time,” Bennett said. “These tools are changing the way we see evolutionary processes.”

For all his current reliance on the new generation of high-tech approaches, Bennett said he was drawn to his field by his love of what he called “bucket-and-stick ecology,” with its emphasis on field work and specimen collection.

“Who doesn’t love field work? I mean, it’s tromping around knee-deep in tropical waters,” Bennett said. “But there are some questions you can’t answer with bucket-and-stick.”

It was nearly 10 years ago, during a research trip to the Florida Keys, that another scientist posed to Bennett just such a question: How can we be sure that two populations of Brachidontes, with all their apparent similarities, are really two different species?

Bennett has been investigating the tiny mussels ever since, looking to fill in blank spaces on their family tree. He hopes to identify previously unrecognized species of Brachidontes. And while his work now involves more data-crunching and statistical analysis than he ever imagined, there is still a need to get out in the field—or in Bennett’s case, knee-deep in seawater. Take his upcoming trip to Florida.

To harvest the genetic material he needs for his study, Bennett will have to nurture each population of mussels to create the optimum conditions for sperm production. That will mean shuttling between Florida’s Gulf and Atlantic coasts over a period of 10 days, feeding each group a specially prepared algae meal every other day.

“Basically, I’m going to be baby-sitting mollusks,” Bennett said.

Sounds like a job for an erstwhile bucket-and-stick ecologist.

But, as Tina-Marie Ranalli will tell you, there are exceptions. Ranalli, an assistant professor of French and German, has spent years poring over a little-known 700-year-old manuscript housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. What she has found there, she says, turns traditional depictions of the heroic warrior upside-down. For some classical heroes, as the title of one of Ranalli’s recent papers puts it, it paid “to be a lover, not a fighter.”

“I’m interested in how gender roles for men developed and evolved into the present day,” Ranalli said in her office last week. “We’re still fascinated by these ancient, epic stories. They are models of manhood that are still revered.”

Ranalli’s paper, which she presented at a conference on medieval studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland earlier this month, is based on her reading of a 14th-century codex known to scholars as manuscript BN fr 60. The manuscript presents medieval retellings of several classical epics. Ranalli argues that the texts in manuscript 60 veer away from the conventional glorification of the warrior as the ultimate model of manhood. The manuscript celebrates the Greek hero Aeneas, for example, not for courage in combat, but for having the good sense to avoid potentially fatal fights. Because he survives the Trojan Wars, the manuscript makes clear, Aeneas is able to father a line of future kings.

“This is a different model of manhood, the procreator model,” Ranalli said. “Instead of finding honor in putting your life on the line, now it’s honorable to preserve yourself and your progeny and fight only as a last resort. Previously, Aeneas had been seen as a coward who avoided the war. Now he is glorified.”

Ranalli said the texts in manuscript 60 likely were commissioned by a member of the French royal court of the 14th century, as an attempt to cement the court’s position of power. The stories were meant to lend legitimacy to the royal line by suggesting a link to the mythic past.

Ranalli began making annual pilgrimages to Paris to examine manuscript 60 in 2004, when she was still a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. At first allowed to view the texts only on microfilm, she had to teach herself to decode the irregular medieval French script of the monks who set the stories on paper. Only after persistent pleas from Ranalli did librarians relent and allow her access to the manuscript itself.

“It was breathtaking,” she said of her first encounter with the illustrated manuscript. “The microfilm didn’t do it justice. There’s nothing like holding the actual manuscript in your hand.”

Ranalli’s research also inspired her to create a world literatures course at Elmhurst called The Hero’s Journey, which focuses on medieval national epics, including the Song of Roland, Beowulf and the Lay of the Nibelungs. A general education course for non–language majors, the course tracks the evolution of the male hero across millennia. Students read the stories in translation and analyze present-day film renditions of epics like Troy and Kingdom of Heaven.

“Professors always struggle with how to bring their research into the classroom. How can you make your students care about this stuff?” Ranalli said. “I’ve asked my students to think critically about these stories, and I’ve been so impressed with the way they have responded. It’s thrilling to me to be able to teach my scholarship to this extent.”

It was a rare respite for the senior biology major.

Since December, Aslam has spent most of his weekends on the road, logging enough air miles to make a seasoned business traveler proud. If last week was Dallas, next week must be Atlanta. And the week after next must be New York. Or is it Flint, Michigan?

Aslam’s dizzying travel calendar comes with his role as national coordinator of Young Muslims, a nationwide network of Islamic youth groups. Since he was elected to the post last year, Aslam has been busy hustling to conferences and making visits to local chapters of the group.

“There are always conference calls to schedule and emails to be returned, and the travel takes a toll,” he admitted. “But I’m passionate about Islam and about Young Muslims. We’re reaching out to young people that everyone else has neglected.”

Aslam has been a member of Young Muslims since he was a twelve-year-old growing up in Villa Park, where his family was active in their mosque. His introduction to the group came when he was invited to attend one of the local chapter’s summer retreats for high-school students.

“I thought it was insanely awesome. I mean, I got to hang out with the older kids,” Aslam remembered. “But later I saw that there was a real need in the community to reach people who had lost touch with their faith.”
The Villa Park chapter—in Young Muslim parlance, they’re called “neighbornets”—boasts about 120 members, all males. Young women may join a related group called Young Muslim Sisters. The group’s Saturday night meetings, Aslam said, are a mix of raucous dodgeball games, group discussions and prayer, with an occasional break for community service, like cleaning up parks or shoveling snow for neighbors.

“The idea is to make it such a positive environment that once you come, you will stay,” Aslam said. “It doesn’t help that society has such a negative view of Islam. So many people see Islam as strange or foreign and that’s the only representation they get.”

Aslam’s two-year term as national coordinator has brought big changes to his life. He has postponed plans to attend medical school—he has already been accepted at Western University in California—to devote himself to the job. The six hours or so he spends on Young Muslims business each day, he said, has eaten into his study time. And even with his graduation just weeks away, Aslam can’t help worrying about his coursework.

“I’m a little concerned about my developmental biology class,” he admitted. “It’s been a struggle to keep up with the reading. There are a lot of people asking for my time now.”

Taking on his leadership role in Young Muslims, he said, has turned out to be an education itself. He is learning to navigate the inevitable annoyances of business travel. He is learning how quickly an email in-box can fill up. He is learning, rapidly, to delegate parts of his administrative to-do list.

“I like that saying, ‘Don’t let your education get in the way of learning,’” he said. “My four years here have gone by really fast and it’s great to be graduating. But now it’s, ‘What’s next?’”

Ostrin is a white-bearded 72-year-old retired physician in a T-shirt that announces: “The truly educated never graduate.”

For Ostrin, Elmhurst College’s most persistent student, these have become words to live by.

Ever since he walked away from his former life as an emergency-room physician 13 years ago, Ostrin has been taking his place in Elmhurst classrooms alongside students less than a third his age. Like them, he enrolls in literature courses and philosophy courses and religion courses. He is the proud owner of a JayPass student identification card, which he will, unprompted, pull from his wallet to proves his student bona fides.

But Ostrin is not after a degree. He has enough of those, including a medical diploma from Heidelberg University. In Elmhurst’s classrooms, Ostrin will tell you, he has found something more ineffable, more profound.

“Elmhurst has taken me by the hand,” he said, walking through the Chapel after his Friday morning Shakespeare class. “And it has rehumanized me.”

Ostrin took his first Elmhurst College class during a hiatus from his duties at Glen Oaks Medical Center in Glendale Heights. The unrelenting pressures of his years in the emergency room had worn on Ostrin. He was, he said, burned out.

“I took a break to recharge my batteries,” Ostrin said. “But there was no juice left.”

A physician seeking to heal himself, Ostrin began making stained glass as a hobby. Introduced to the College by Elmhurst neighbors, he donated some of his early artistic efforts to the College’s Wellness Center, hoping his creations would provide stressed-out students with “an oasis for the eye.”

Ostrin was soon a regular presence on campus. When he asked to audit the Christian Ethics course taught by Paul Parker, professor of religious studies, Parker told Ostrin about a college program that allows people 60 and older to register for courses on a non-credit basis for a minimal fee. It was as if a chef had opened his kitchen to a hungry man.

“I couldn’t believe I had stumbled into such good luck,” Ostrin said. He began delving deep into the College’s course catalog, returning for more each term. He has liked some classes so much he has come back for second helpings. Has he ever wondered that, if he stays at it long enough, he could run out of courses to take?

“Don’t say that!” he cautioned, in mock horror.

Ostrin was so impressed with the teachers and students he met on campus that he wanted to thank them for welcoming him into their classrooms. So he began giving away his stained glass pieces as gifts. He gave them to professors whose work he admired. He donated them to offices and organizations, too. Whenever Ostrin ran across a dreary campus space in need of a touch of color, he would offer some of his art.

About eighty of Ostrin’s pieces now hang in the windows and on the walls of campus. A dozen or so enliven the Writing Center in the student union. The religious studies department offices in Old Main are filled with Ostrin pieces. A series of four pieces, in colors ranging from a fiery red to a cold blue, hang in the windows of the nursing simulation lab in Memorial Hall. The series is called “The Thermometer.” Another set of six, each representing one of the world’s religions, hangs in the entry to the Chapel. Ostrin calls it “The Sacred Six-Pack.”

“I’ve met such remarkable people here, and this is how I say thank you,” Ostrin said. “You know, in an emergency room, you see the world’s dirty underbelly. Overdoses. Shootings. But to be around these young people, it’s been a salvation.”

Every once in a while, one of Ostrin’s classes will touch on an area of his expertise. Reading Shakespeare’s description of Falstaff’s death in “Henry V” recently for a class taught by English professor Lance Wilcox, the retired physician marveled at the concise literary depiction of the symptoms of liver failure. But he hesitates to share his hard-won insights in class.

“It irks me when old people want to flaunt their erudition,” he said after class. “I’m just a guest here. I don’t want to do anything to ruin it.”

And there are still so many more classes to take.

“Don’t tell me about any search for the Fountain of Youth,” he said. “Dude, I’ve found it.”

It would have been an alarming discovery, if the bone hadn’t been plastic and if Dingraudo didn’t have good reason to believe it had been planted there by a couple of his professors.

Dingraudo, a first-year student from Elk Grove Village, was practicing his crime-solving skills as part of a field exercise for his Forensic Science class. He was one of 18 students from the class searching for evidence of foul play in and around the science center. Their professors, Michelle Applebee, an associate professor of chemistry, and Stacey Raimondi, an assistant professor of biology, had created three ersatz crime scenes, complete with yellow caution tape, for their students to investigate. Working in teams, the students were to sketch and photograph the scenes, collect and catalog evidence, analyze the evidence, and write a report summarizing their findings for a fictional prosecuting attorney.

“Hey, I’ll need an evidence bag here,” Dingraudo called to his teammates after discovering the bone fragment. He sounded a little like he was delivering a line from this week’s episode of “CSI: Elmhurst.” One of the lessons of the class, though, is that crime-scene investigations, as depicted on television, are often less than scientifically credible.

“Evidence isn’t processed and analyzed in three and a half minutes, like on TV,” Applebee said as she watched a group of students huddle over another bit of discovered evidence. “And the person working on the scene isn’t the same person working in the lab. Students say, ‘I want to do that job,’ but there really is no such job.”

As she spoke, her students were busy with sketch pads and tape measures, carefully documenting the scene of the crime. Already they had found a shovel, some cloth fibers and a suspicious footprint. Their next task: create a plaster cast of the print. If the objective was to be as thorough as professional investigators, the professors conceded that some corners had to be cut for practical reasons.

“You don’t get much DNA from plastic bones,” Raimondi admitted.

One of the aims of the class, being offered for the first time at Elmhurst this semester, is to introduce non-science majors to the chemistry and biology at the heart of so many criminal investigations. For a generation raised watching lab-coated cops solve crimes and deploy scientific jargon on their favorite TV police dramas, the class offers instant appeal.

“I watch way too many of those shows,” said Emily Baron, a junior from Cartersville, Georgia. “But I know they’re pretty fake.”

If there is one thing Applebee and Raimondi can appreciate about the recent spate of lab-coat TV police procedurals, it’s the way they have made heroes of scientists and the scientific process.

“They help build interest in science,” Applebee said. “They show that you can do things with science that are worthwhile.”

Applebee and Raimondi hope that the same can be said of their new class. It is one of the first in a newly developed species at Elmhurst called bidisciplinary courses. Co-taught by faculty from complementary disciplines, they focus on topics that straddle traditional academic boundaries. Raimondi, the biologist, and Applebee, a chemist, each defer to the other’s expertise, but also point their students toward links between the disciplines.

“There’s a fine line between disciplines and we want students to see how they go together,” Applebee said. “Most of the research that gets funded is not in one area or the other. You have to find the links. Everyone puts the disciplines in separate silos, but they don’t belong in silos.”

By now their students were gathering the last of the evidence from outside the science center. “We need to bag and tag,” one of them announced. Their work, however, was just beginning. Still ahead was time in the lab analyzing the evidence for clues that might point to a suspect.

“This week, they’re crime-scene investigators,” Raimondi said. “Next week, they become lab techs.”

So they talk to Thompson, Elmhurst’s major scholarships coordinator. He makes it his mission to help them win one of the big-money, high-prestige scholarships—maybe a Fulbright, maybe a Gilman—that can make their plans a reality.

“So many of the students that come to me are so impressive. They have that special spark,” Thompson said in a meeting room at the Center for Professional Excellence where he often meets with students. This is where he makes his pitch for them to apply for one of the twenty or so scholarships that are considered higher education’s biggest prizes. “I tell them, ‘There’s a time to be humble, and this ain’t it.’”

Elmhurst students are winning those big awards more frequently than ever. Thompson said Elmhurst students won as many Fulbright Scholarships, the highly prized awards that fund overseas study, in the last five years as they had in the previous 30. Last year, Libby Glass, a 2010 graduate, won a Fulbright Teaching Assistant award, to teach and study at a university in Panama.

“We’re trying to change the culture here, so that students feel they can compete,” Thompson said. “Our students are better than they think they are.”

Thompson has been at Elmhurst long enough to see the culture changing before his eyes. He taught Spanish at the College for thirty years, the last seven as chair of what was then the foreign language department. (It’s now called World Languages, Literatures and Cultures.) After Thompson retired five years ago, Larry Carroll, the director of the Center for Professional Excellence, asked him to help some of Elmhurst’s brightest students navigate the scholarship application process. His help was needed. The College was enrolling some of the most academically gifted classes in its history, which meant that there were more qualified candidates than ever for the biggest national scholarships. Part of Thompson’s job is to make sure those talented students get the recognition they deserve. He works with Mary Kay Mulvaney, director of the College’s Honors Program, and Wally Lagerwey, director of International Education, to steer students toward the most promising scholarships.

“As the quality of students has improved here, we have seen that our best can compete with the best anywhere,” Thompson said. “We encourage them to think about applying for these scholarships.”

One of the first things Thompson hands students is a menu of some of the most highly prized national scholarships, with all the relevant requirements and deadlines. Interested in a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, for graduate study at England’s second-oldest university? Or a Goldwater, for students in math, science or engineering? Or a William E. Simon Fellowship, for graduating seniors with plans to “strengthen civil society?” If so, see Thompson as soon as possible. He said he likes to start working with students when they are sophomores, so they have time to build the body of work and experiences–research, community service, international study—that will improve their chances of earning a scholarship.

A compelling personal story, and the willingness to tell it, helps, too. Thompson said his students produce draft after draft of their personal statements for applications. “Oh, the drafts they do,” he laughed, leaning back in his chair. Sometimes the challenge is getting students to talk about themselves and their lives in a way that will distinguish them from their competitors. Thompson is proud of success stories like Ashley Mothershead, a recently graduated student who grew up on a cattle ranch in Montana and hoped to study French overseas. When Thompson read the initial draft of her application essay for a Gilman Scholarship, he was surprised to find no mention of her unique upbringing or the transition she’d made from rural Montana to suburban Chicago.

“I told her, ‘You’re pretty interesting, why don’t you tell them about it?’” Thompson said. “If you don’t make yourself special to the reader, you’re going to end up in a pile with a hundred others.”

Mothershead took Thompson’s advice, was awarded a Gilman and ended up spending nine months studying in France.

Thompson has big plans of his own. An Elmhurst student has never won a Truman Scholarship, for students interested in government or public service, or a Mitchell Scholarship, which funds study in Ireland. Thompson would like to see his students change that. Do they have what it takes?

“Why not?” he asked. “You’re not going to win unless you apply.”