Jonathan Knudsen

Jonathan Knudsen was the kind of kid whose bedroom always contained a cardboard box with airholes, home to the green and slimy pet-of-the-week.

He'd pluck tree frogs off the side of a glass door; make his parents pull to the side of a North Carolina roadway to rescue a box turtle.

His first day of ecology class at Doane College, Jonathan met a professor who had helped pay his way through his own undergraduate years by raising boa constrictors and pythons; someone who once picked a college in part because it would let him bring his pet boa "Isis" along.

Ah, destiny.

"Jonathan and I are herpetologists - someone who studies both reptiles and amphibians - which is actually pretty rare," said Dr. Brad Elder, associate professor of biology.  "We both love to study snakes and reptiles. We're not the sane kids in the crew so we hit it off."

For Jonathan, who transferred his junior year from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Doane isn't just about connecting with a professor, it's about finding a college where he felt he belonged for the first time.

Jonathan's family moved to Nebraska in his elementary years. After graduating from Grand Island Senior High, Jonathan enrolled at UNL. "But there were maybe two or three profs who knew who I was and only one that I even felt comfortable talking to. I met some graduate students who came from Doane and they told me how much they liked it."

That's how Jonathan came to be sitting on a new campus in Crete, Neb., with a room full of strangers midway through college. While waiting for ecology class to begin, Professor Elder walked by, stopped, turned back, and said "You're Jonathan right? You're the herpetology guy."

"I was floored," Jonathan recalled. "He knew my name and my interests and he has helped me pursue those interests."

In one year at Doane, he said, he felt like he gained four years research experience, from studying the growth of algae for possible use as food and fuel, to a senior research project on turtles foraging in native prairie. He also had to turn his algae research into a presentation elementary students could understand and present it at a two-day summer camp.

"I'm used to working with creepy crawly things, not people, but that camp was just a riot."

Funny, he said, his brother attended a small college and loved it. So Jonathan purposely picked a big institution to be different and because he thought a large school would fit his personality.

Sometimes we don't recognize what fits until we try on something that doesn't. Those 12 strangers in his first ecology class became his friends. He found more research opportunities at Doane and more opportunities to take the lead on projects. He learned Doane academics are tough but there's support at every turn.

"Faculty really care about you as a person. They are really interested in what I'm doing. Dr. Elder helped with my resume for grad school and emails to send to potential grad advisers. And I could go to any faculty member in the department and they would help."

That's what he'll remember the most about Doane.

The days that he stopped to talk to one faculty member and two others overheard and came down to join the conversation. The way he could pull up a chair at Dr. Elder's desk and an hour would fly by, talking about subjects no one else cares about.

(Really. No one.)

Stuff like the funny things turtles do. How Dr. Elder's first boa "Betty" turned out to be a guy. That snakes are clean and turtles aren't and when it comes to cleaning up after Galapagos turtles, no one wants to be that guy.

Doane, Jonathan said, showed him the guy he does want to be.