Alumni Awards
Doane has established numerous awards to recognize alumni and friends of the college for their professional accomplishments, outstanding achievements, community service, leadership and continued relations with the college.
Additional Information:
Maggie Sheehy, '08
2007.
Doane offers free HIV testing.
Four students show up.
2008.
The free HIV test station in Perry Campus Center is the place to be one cold February Tuesday.
Testers run out of kits and turn a couple hundred students away.
The difference? Maggie Sheehy.
O.K. Maggie Sheehy and a little bit of prize money.
Sheehy saw the devastation of AIDS in Africa firsthand while living there as part of Doane's Semester in Africa program. She also spent two summers as a counselor at Camp Kindle - a camp for children affected and infected with HIV and AIDS.
Santino Akot, '08
It's 1987 in southern Sudan.
Santino Akot is nine.
A slender boy tending cattle at the edge of his village, Marial Baai.
Until this moment, he is a middle child in a middle-class family with seven children.
The second Sudanese civil war was a part of this life. His father had died from war-related disease. Eighteen months earlier soldiers had taken his family's property and burned their home to ashes.
His mother made a hut and kept them alive.
The soldiers are back now.
Jeremy Wilhelm,'98
Defining moments.
They sound big, don't they?
Big and loud.
Moments that say: 'Life change headed your way.'
But they are quiet, and usually only seen with hindsight.
Jeremy Wilhelm is not even 35, but he's had his share.
His biggest was more like a defining 30 seconds, during a round table board meeting of a new renewable fuels company based in California.
Wilhelm was leading the meeting, when, 15 minutes in, the board member with an MBA from Harvard looked at Wilhelm and told the farm kid from Unadilla, Nebraska:
"You don't have the pedigree to lead this company."
Terri Vrtiska, '83
Terri Vrtiska fits the profile of many Doane students in the early 1980s.
She grew up in the tiny farming community of Table Rock and graduated with 20 classmates.
Her father was a dryland farmer who spent 12 years in the Nebraska Legislature.
Her mom was a teacher and homemaker to the family's three children.
They were a Cornhusker red family whose children went to Doane and Peru. College tuition - private or public - did not come without sacrifice.
Eric Cantrell, '00
The most important person Eric Cantrell met at Doane? Eric Cantrell.
The 20-something, working-his-way-into-the-entertainment-industry version. The one whose addresses have already included the Middle East country of Jordan and Hollywood, Calif. Read more...
Tom Mangelsen, '69
Renowned Nature Photographer
With his formative years spent along the banks of the Platte River hunting and fishing, Tom Mangelsen's understanding of the natural world stems from a childhood rich in outdoor adventures. Tom grew up exploring the Nebraska landscape with his brothers Bill, David, and Hal, many times at their father Harold's side. Read more...