I love the cycle of academic life—its renewability, the wide eyes of both prospective students and their parents when taking a college tour, the fresh faces that arrive each fall, even the sadness of losing seniors.
It is hard to think that we only get our students for four short years, especially when we pause to reflect on the things they dream about and accomplish. The spring issue is filled both with dreams and accomplishments. It is filled with instances where those two things met during the course of a student’s time at Rhodes.
Reading the stories from our spring print issue and here online, you will come across the name Sarah Baumann ’16 quite a bit. She is featured on the cover, in our Student Spotlight, and prominently in our cover story "The Power of Big Ideas." I joked with her that we were going to change the masthead for this issue from Rhodes to Sarah. As her spotlight explains, after Sarah walks across the stage during Commencement, she will not be going out into the world trying to find out what she wants to be. She discovered that at Rhodes.
Blog entries from Sam Reid ’16 help pace our story on the entrepreneurial spirit that is capturing Rhodes. Like Sarah, Sam will graduate in May and leave here not only knowing what he wants to do, but having a job doing it. Both of them are members of a generation not of job takers, but job creators.
The arts revolve around creating, as well, as our story "Creative Connections" makes clear. Rhodes students and alumni excel in the arts, especially in the Memphis community. In so many ways Rhodes and Memphis are deeply tied together, and our story on the arts reflects some of those ways. Our Faculty Focus column follows suit, as Dr. Natalie Person explains how our new educational studies major will help keep our graduates in Memphis. And “Beautiful Writing” tells how our students are already working in the city’s schools.
At Rhodes, we talk a lot about outcomes, particularly in this day and age when a vocational education seems on the surface to be a more direct line to employment than the liberal arts. The stories in the spring issue tell the true story of the value of a liberal arts degree and the real outcomes students can expect: a comprehensive education, self-discovery, and a means to connect with their community. In other words, the opportunity of a lifetime.
— Lynn Conlee, Editor