Liberal Arts in the Game of Life

—David Raney

The Community Mobilizer

As a freshman, Gillian Locascio 09C was one of the very first students in Emory's interdisciplinary INSPIRE program. As one component of the course, she and her classmates were challenged in a class called ORDER to "choose your own adventure"—a phrase that serves as well as any to describe Gillian's next four years, as well as the path she's blazed since.

"In one semester, Gillian became the intellectual center of the entire experiment," says David Lynn, professor and chair of chemistry and co-founder of INSPIRE. "She wrote a proposal to fund a trip to northeast Alabama and Little River Canyon, home to the greatest salamander diversity in North America.  She organized searches for elusive species and habitats, planned birthday celebrations for her classmates.  She was the heart of ORDER both socially and academically."

Locascio, who graduated with a BS in environmental studies, spent much of her junior and senior years investigating the social sciences, and traveled twice to Panama to do research for an honor's thesis on international development.  Scott Lacy, then a lecturer in Emory's anthropology department, calls her "a cut above. Her honors project could have easily earned her a master's at most any U.S. anthropology program."

This past fall Locascio returned to the mountainous Rincon region of Panama, home to the indigenous Ngobe-Bugle people, where she works as a "community mobilizer" for an organization called Health Empowering Humanity (HEH). "I coordinate with a group of communities," she says, "helping them evaluate their health care and other priorities, and trying to connect them with external expertise and support."

HEH also addresses issues like education, housing and sanitation, all in one of Panama's poorest, most hard-to-reach areas.  "None of these tasks are easy," she admits, "but you have to have big dreams even as you take small steps."

If idle hands are truly the devil's workshop, Locascio won't be spending much time in that establishment. During and after her years at the College she helped found Emory's Culinary Club, led inner-city middle school kids on wilderness trips in Arizona, Georgia and Washington, and staffed a health clinic and a wetlands restoration project in post-Katrina New Orleans. In Panama she's found time to lend a hand to Engineers Without Borders, co-direct Few for Change (a scholarship fund for indigenous students founded by Emory student Tim Soo), and volunteer as an English teacher in the new middle school that opened in April. And she's raising two chickens.

"My friends tease me that I like to hold down many 'trabajitos' (small jobs) at the same time."

This isn't fueled by boredom or nervous energy, though. "Gillian has always had the ability to find connections," according to Tracy Scott, senior lecturer in sociology. "To find the essence of something and apply it to real-world problems. She's deeply interested in fairness and social justice, and she's good at finding ways to get things done."

Scott Lacy puts it even more simply: "She has the talent and determination to change the world."

The Teacher Ambassador

She arrived at Emory thinking she might major in English—she loved her English classes in high school—and that's the way it worked out. Though she's open to unexpected road signs and fresh starts, when Karen Gordon 07C decides to do something, she generally makes it happen.

As a freshman Gordon was a John Emory Scholar, an award given to incoming students who show special leadership potential as well as academic promise. John Emory certainly got that one right. While excelling in her studies, Gordon got involved in all kinds of campus activities: serving on the Scholars advisory board and as co-leader of the Scholarship and Service summer program, mentoring freshmen in the FAME program. "She seemed to make the juggling look so easy," says Maureen Sweatman, associate director of the Emory Scholars Program.

Vialla Hartfield-Mendez, Director of Engaged Learning in the Office of University-Community Partnerships, directed the Scholars Program that year and calls herself "extremely fortunate" that Gordon applied. "Being co-leader of the summer program is really almost a year-long leadership position," she says, and "I could not have navigated the whirlpools of that first summer without her. Karen was wise, inspiring, patient and insightful."

Gordon has always looked both inward—to close friends and family, to local issues—and away, with an eye on the wider world. She studied abroad her junior year at Trinity College in Ireland, and afterward served as a peer advisor for Center for International Programs Abroad. As a sophomore she taught and mentored refugee children in a program called Refugee Resettlement and Immigration Services of Atlanta, which Sweatman describes as "very challenging work."

This focus on service, and on the world beyond her own windows, has carried into Gordon's post-College life. An internship with MedShare International led to a position as marketing coordinator for that nonprofit, which distributes excess medical supplies in ninety-five countries. And then the Peace Corps came calling.

"It was a great way for me to experience an unexpected part of the world," Gordon says of the two years she spent in Kyrgyzstan, a mountainous Turkic state bordered by China to the east. She taught English to sixth-to-eleventh graders in Choptal, a village of about two thousand people, and helped teach other teachers as well.

"I think even more than teaching English," she says on a recent swing through Atlanta, "the most important job for me was just being visible in the village. For a lot of people I was the first foreigner they'd ever met, and I was a twenty-something single woman who traveled, who'd learned another language. And that was OK. It wasn't my job to tell people their ways are wrong, but I could show my female students by example that they could leave the village if they chose, they could pursue academic interests if they wanted."

Besides friends and family, what did she find herself missing in that remote land? "Indoor plumbing. The family I lived with had a telephone and a DVD player, but not a toilet. And showers . . . and chicken. There were plenty of sheep, so we ate a lot of mutton, and lots of boiled vegetables. There were dishes I grew to love, but I made my own lunches with fruit and other things to fill out my diet a little."

During her stint in Central Asia, Gordon traveled to Istanbul, Kazakhstan, China, Japan, France and Morocco, and last August she moved to Beijing. Globetrotting may be in her blood. Her father, Chuck Gordon, is athletics director at the American University in Cairo after serving in that role at Emory for twelve years. And she doesn't regret a bit of the travel.

"I'm so glad I did it. A lot of times you're traveling somewhere, maybe you're on a bus, and you look at the little towns you're going through and wonder what it would be like to go into one of those houses and see what the family's doing, what they're eating, hear what they think.

"I got to live that for two years. And not just to see what they're doing, but to get to know so many of them, and hopefully make an impact that lasts."

The Denizen of the Arts

If Ben Hutto 68C wore any more hats, he'd be in a Dr. Seuss book. His official title is director of performing arts at the St. Alban's School (for boys) and National Cathedral School (for girls) on the grounds of Washington, D.C.'s magnificent National Cathedral. But that barely hints at what his Day Planner must look like.

"There's an administrative part of the job, of course—auditions and rehearsals to plan, coordinating things so three groups don't get scheduled for the same time and space. And as choral director I have an upper school group of about 160, plus a middle school group. I'm school organist as well."

That seems like enough, but Hutto also has what he calls his "weekend job" at Episcopal Cathedral, where he's been orchestra and choir director for thirteen years. And if pressed he'll admit to more: organist and director of music at St. John's Church Lafayette Square; artistic director of the Cathedral Choral Society, the oldest choral group in Washington.

"The society sponsors a festival for high school kids from all over the city," Hutto notes, "both public and private schools. It's a great chance for talented boys and girls to get to sing at places like the Kennedy Center and on National Public Radio."

He feels lucky to work at a place like the National Cathedral, the site of any number of historic moments. Woodrow Wilson attended the official thanksgiving service here for the end of the Great War. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., preached his last Sunday sermon from its Canterbury Pulpit. George W. Bush held a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance service at the cathedral just three days after 9/11, and thousands gathered here to mourn the deaths of Presidents Eisenhower, Reagan and Ford.

"It's just a beautiful place," Hutto says. "I'd actually been accepted to Emory's graduate program in sacred music in the fall of 1999, but when this job opened up I couldn't say no."

When he talks about the kids, Hutto's excitement comes through as clearly as a high note in a hushed church. "My students are from all different backgrounds. Some come from very challenging circumstances, and there are also Washington dignitaries among our parents and grandparents. Chris Matthews's son is currently my best tenor. Madeleine Albright's grandson was a student, and we have senators' kids and so on. It's a great privilege to work with these extraordinary young people."

Terry Adamson 68C says this sounds just like his Emory classmate and friend. "Everybody loves Ben," he says. "And the kids flock to him like flies to honey." Now executive vice president of the National Geographic Society, Adamson sent his daughters to the National Cathedral School. "They aren't musicians, but he was a great influence on them, as he is on all those kids. He's done wonderful work there. He's charmed them all."

While Adamson majored in history at the College, Hutto gravitated to English after a brief flirtation with history and taught English for many years in his native Charleston. That job gradually expanded under the pressure of his restless enthusiasms to include theater, music and dance.

And now his work incorporates all these disciplines and more. "I understand that students can major today in Interdisciplinary Studies, and I'm sorry I missed out on that," Hutto says. "But I guess I majored in both 'liberal' and 'arts,' and I'm still at it."

The Financial Divining Rod

Get a pencil, add this up. Summa cum laude at Emory … Oxford … Fulbright … Fletcher School … Harvard Law. You can be excused for coming up with: "High-powered megamogul." And you'd be half right. April Rinne 96C is definitely high-powered, but she's more maven than mogul. She operates by leveraging knowledge and connections, making big things happen by starting small.

"April is truly one of our most extraordinary graduates," says Judy Raggi Moore, professor of pedagogy in French and Italian and director of the Italian Studies Program. "For all her adult life she has studied, listened, debated, discussed, and studied some more. I've only seen one other student as intellectually curious and dedicated."

Rinne is director of WaterCredit, an initiative of the non-profit Water.org co-founded by actor Matt Damon. She helps puts the tools of microfinance, in which tiny loans are targeted to needy areas and populations (the idea won Muhammad Yunus a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006), at the disposal of third world countries needing safe, clean water.

Her road has been a winding one, but you couldn't call it boring.

"I changed my major probably seven times," she laughs in a phone call from her home base of San Francisco. "I entered Emory pre-med, but that lasted only until I realized I'd have to spend decades in a lab before a 'doctors without borders' opportunity would allow me to travel." And though she earned top grades in pre-med chemistry, the kind of course infamous for revising students' career goals, she knew she didn't feel "the calling" of medicine. "I needed to start exploring elsewhere."

And that's what she's done, in spades. Rinne studied at Oxford during her junior year, double-majored in international relations and Italian (with a minor in art history), spent the year after graduation on a Fulbright in Italy, and has ever since amassed degrees, adventures and miles at a rate few can match. But more impressive than the diplomas on the wall is what she's done with it all.

"I'm one of those people who think, cliché or not, that the world is your classroom," says Rinne. In her early twenties she guided hiking and bike tours all over the world, taking time off to travel solo from, as she puts it, "the African Sahara to the Nordic tundra to the Andean cordillera." She lived with families in Poland and Laos. She was held up at gunpoint in Bolivia.

"April has always been insatiably curious about other cultures,' says Raggi Moore, a trait she attributes to her father, who inculcated a love of geography. When both parents were killed in a car wreck—she got the terrible news on her last day at Oxford—Rinne say that "in some ways, that set me on the path I've been on since. It changed my life, of course. It changed everything. But finally I just said to myself, 'Don't hide in the corner. Get up and try something.'"

On the way to becoming a lawyer and international relations specialist, and then gradually a force in microfinance, Rinne has visited forty-nine states and some eighty countries. She sits on the board of the World Wide Web Foundation among other groups, and in January she learned she had been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

"This is a world in which people can have not just three or four jobs, but five or six careers," she says. "You have to leave yourself open. I do water, law, finance, marketing—and they're not exactly parallel, but they're not contradictory either. You could think of it as a bumblebee, I guess, pollinating here and there, gathering and sharing information. I like to think of it as a conversation.

"Maybe it's another cliché," says Rinne, "but we just don't know how long we're going to be here, and I think we might as well live each day. And Emory played a role in that. I'll always be a huge fan of Emory because the people there gave me the tools to deal with the outside world, and lots of flexibility.

"The way my life has unfolded makes sense to me now, but it certainly wasn't logical or linear at the time. It only looks like a path when you look back at it."

THE GAME OF LIFE® & ©2011 Hasbro, Inc. Used with permission.