As the hot sun begins to descend in Kedougou, Senegal, women leave their huts for a late afternoon stroll to the village well. The sound of swaying buckets and rushing water is heard as each woman waits her turn for the pump. In a sea of chatty girls, UMW alumna Maura Slocum listens carefully to their enunciations as she works to perfect the native language of Pulaar.

Slocum is living in this rural West African country as a Peace Corps volunteer. Arriving in mid-December, she’s still adjusting to the dramatic cultural shift from the familiar Fredericksburg campus where she graduated last May with a degree in environmental science.

She’s following a rich tradition of Mary Washington alumni who have been chosen to serve with the volunteer global outreach established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. In fact, UMW has been included among the top 20 of the Peace Corps’ list of top-producing small schools since 2005. In all, more than 230 UMW alumni have served the 27-month commitment around the world since the Peace Corps’ inception.

At home in her host family’s compound, Slocum spends much of her time with her young siblings, Sadie, Maimudu and Abdoulaiye, who love introducing her to new places. Ranging in ages from 3 to 9, they aren’t the youngest of the bunch. Not long after she arrived, her young host mother gave birth to twins.

“My family and neighbors were very welcoming,” Slocum said. “They even got me to dance in the drum circle at the [babies’] naming ceremonies.”

When she’s not practicing Pulaar or spending time with her host siblings, Slocum tends to her personal compost and tree nursery.

“I arrived to the village at the end of the harvest season, so there is not a lot of agriculture work right now,” Slocum said. “The main focus right now is garden preparation, since the farming season will not begin until the rains come in March or April.”

As an agroforestry volunteer, she aims to help bolster food security and sustainability by integrating trees into agriculture.

Just under a year ago, Slocum beamed with excitement over her acceptance into the Peace Corps as she stood with a UMW environmental sciences team in the polluted water of Contrary Creek in Louisa County. A senior at the time, Slocum researched soil contamination and worked to improve it, a skill that will serve her well in helping the villagers of Kedougou..

Preparation was key for Slocum in December of 2016, when she arrived in the village with a population of 250.

Melanie Szulczewski, Slocum’s advisor and former agroforestry volunteer for the Peace Corps, encouraged her to apply to the Peace Corps and offered her support.

“I talked with Maura extensively about the application process,” said Szulczewski, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences. “She could clearly outline her goals and was well prepared with abundant volunteer experience.”

Slocum has been preparing for her Peace Corps service since high school. On a mission’s trip to Guatemala she discovered her passion to serve, and when it came time to choose a university, she had her eyes on the prize.

“The University of Mary Washington was fundamental in my journey to the Peace Corps,” Slocum said. “I actually chose UMW over James Madison University because I read that UMW had such a high number of alumni who go on to serve.”

With a team of friends, family and professors to support and advise her, Slocum seamlessly transitioned from a UMW student to a Peace Corps volunteer.

“I believe Maura will truly embody the goals of the Peace Corps,” said Szulczewski. “She will be helping others while growing as a global citizen.” 

 

 

 

As the hot sun begins to descend in Kedougou, Senegal, women leave their huts for a late afternoon stroll to the village well. The sound of swaying buckets and rushing water is heard as each woman waits her turn for the pump. In a sea of chatty girls, UMW alumna Maura Slocum listens carefully to their enunciations as she works to perfect the native language of Pulaar.

Slocum is living in this rural West African country as a Peace Corps volunteer. Arriving in mid-December, she’s still adjusting to the dramatic cultural shift from the familiar Fredericksburg campus where she graduated last May with a degree in environmental science.

She’s following a rich tradition of Mary Washington alumni who have been chosen to serve with the volunteer global outreach established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. In fact, UMW has been included among the top 20 of the Peace Corps’ list of top-producing small schools since 2005. In all, more than 230 UMW alumni have served the 27-month commitment around the world since the Peace Corps’ inception.

At home in her host family’s compound, Slocum spends much of her time with her young siblings, Sadie, Maimudu and Abdoulaiye, who love introducing her to new places. Ranging in ages from 3 to 9, they aren’t the youngest of the bunch. Not long after she arrived, her young host mother gave birth to twins.

“My family and neighbors were very welcoming,” Slocum said. “They even got me to dance in the drum circle at the [babies’] naming ceremonies.”

When she’s not practicing Pulaar or spending time with her host siblings, Slocum tends to her personal compost and tree nursery.

“I arrived to the village at the end of the harvest season, so there is not a lot of agriculture work right now,” Slocum said. “The main focus right now is garden preparation, since the farming season will not begin until the rains come in March or April.”

As an agroforestry volunteer, she aims to help bolster food security and sustainability by integrating trees into agriculture.

Just under a year ago, Slocum beamed with excitement over her acceptance into the Peace Corps as she stood with a UMW environmental sciences team in the polluted water of Contrary Creek in Louisa County. A senior at the time, Slocum researched soil contamination and worked to improve it, a skill that will serve her well in helping the villagers of Kedougou..

Preparation was key for Slocum in December of 2016, when she arrived in the village with a population of 250.

Melanie Szulczewski, Slocum’s advisor and former agroforestry volunteer for the Peace Corps, encouraged her to apply to the Peace Corps and offered her support.

“I talked with Maura extensively about the application process,” said Szulczewski, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences. “She could clearly outline her goals and was well prepared with abundant volunteer experience.”

Slocum has been preparing for her Peace Corps service since high school. On a mission’s trip to Guatemala she discovered her passion to serve, and when it came time to choose a university, she had her eyes on the prize.

“The University of Mary Washington was fundamental in my journey to the Peace Corps,” Slocum said. “I actually chose UMW over James Madison University because I read that UMW had such a high number of alumni who go on to serve.”

With a team of friends, family and professors to support and advise her, Slocum seamlessly transitioned from a UMW student to a Peace Corps volunteer.

“I believe Maura will truly embody the goals of the Peace Corps,” said Szulczewski. “She will be helping others while growing as a global citizen.” 

 

 

 

Hairspray fills the dressing room beneath Klein Theatre stage. Not one but two types – flex- and firm-hold.“Hair is a character in this play,” Kevin McCluskey, associate professor of theatre and dance, said during dress rehearsals for Steel Magnolias. The UMW production runs through Feb. 26.

Set in a small-town Louisiana beauty parlor, the show claims a six-person cast … and nine wigs, all lovingly created by LeCuyer, who brought them – along with her Broadway experience – from New York. A makeup artist and hairstylist, she’s worked on one hit after another, from Aladdin to Les Misérables. But her return trip to Mary Washington, where she shared tips with students, brought her full-circle.

“The bug had already bit, but this is where it really sank in its fangs,” said LeCuyer, who found her calling during her own undergrad years.

A native of Newport News, Virginia, she followed family members, including great-grandmother Bessie Satchell Amory ’29, to Mary Washington, where LeCuyer majored in theater and classical studies. Two experiences – a master class on wig design for the 18th-ceuntry styles in She Stoops to Conquer and a stage makeup course taught by McCluskey – helped her find passion backstage.

“I saw that spark in her,” McCluskey said. “When I challenged her to push herself, she did.”

At UMW, LeCuyer designed hair and makeup for Our Town, Romeo and Juliet, and Seascape, and interned with the American Ballet Theatre. Now, with a master’s degree in wig and makeup design from North Carolina School of the Arts and a cosmetology license from Empire Beauty School in Queens, she’s pushing others.

“I’ve grown so much working with Madeline,” said biology major Claire Stanchfield, who’s on the Steel Magnolias hair crew with international affairs major Delmi Fonseca-Portillo.

The wigs LeCuyer delivered for this quick-change production sit on an overhead shelf, each worth hundreds of dollars. To make her masterpieces, she scours scripts for context clues, and researches colors and styles. Then she begins the hours-long process of ventilating, similar to latch-hook, to create natural-looking hairlines and custom foundations, one strand at a time.

In Steel Magnolias, for example, LeCuyer frosted a wig for the role of M’Lynn, to complement senior Gwen Levey’s dark hair. Extra pins keep the hairpiece in place during nightly washings and rollings onstage.

LeCuyer spins the same magic on Broadway, where she’s worked on The Book of Mormon, Cinderella, Disaster! and Phantom of the Opera. On her current show, Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, a musical adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, she handles all manner of hair pieces, accessories and braids, even a fake bun that hides a mic.

She finds time for her alma mater, too, returning to campus last summer to assist with UMW’s first-ever TV commercial, teaching a recent master class on prepping for wigs and helping Mary Washington students find their own spotlight.

“As a student,” LeCuyer said, “it’s important to know that if this is what you truly love to do, there’s a way to make a life for yourself doing it.”

For tickets to see Steel Magnolias, call the Klein Theatre Box Office at 540-654-1111 or buy them online.

Her hearing aids are turned as high as the heat in her cozy apartment, but dressed in a navy blue sweater and pearls, she looks lovely. It’s a good day for visitors.

On Valentine’s Day, Virginia Thomas Dickinson Morgan ’39 will turn 99. But in August of 1935, she was headed to college.

 

Kelly Morgan ’00 leans in close to her grandmother, thumbing through pages of old Battlefield yearbooks. One in particular stands out. Morgan points to a picture of herself – a young woman on the steps of a newly built George Washington Hall.

It’s a black-and-white photo, but with stints as a student and on the staff, Morgan’s Mary Washington memories are filled with color. And with two sisters and two grandchildren – one an orthodontist, the other an attorney – who are also alums, her story comes with its share of coincidence.

Morgan grew up on a Spotsylvania County dairy farm at a time when few women went to college. Still, one by one, she and her sisters, Orene Dickinson Todd ’37 and Norma Lee Dickinson Walker ’41, enrolled at the all-woman State Teachers College in Fredericksburg.

Morgan took typewriting, shorthand, economics, and more, and joined the Alpha Phi Sigma honor society. She served as class treasurer and worked on the then-student newspaper The Bullet and the Battlefield yearbook. A junior when the school’s name changed to Mary Washington College, she helped design the first MWC ring.

She remembers ­3-o’clock teas and formal meals in the dining hall, with assigned seats and impeccable standards upheld by notorious Dean of Women Nina Bushnell. “She had very strict rules,” Morgan said. “You didn’t disobey any.”

She and Virginia-Hall roommate, Lucy Oliver Harris ’39, became best of friends, shopping in Fredericksburg, spending time at the amphitheater and treating themselves to ice cream and Cokes at the C-Shoppe. One of their outings – a trip to visit Lucy’s cousin at the then-all-male U.Va. – would set Morgan’s Mary Washington legacy in motion.

That’s where she met James Patterson Morgan, who was “good looking,” she said. They started a courtship overseen by Bushnell, who demanded parent-approved lists of callers and smelled suitors’ breath before allowing them to pick up their dates.

“Of course we couldn’t ride in a car with a boy,” Morgan said.

When the dean couldn’t discourage the romance, national security stepped in. James was called to serve the country as an Army Air Corps navigator in World War II. With her beau away when she graduated, Morgan clung to campus, signing on as secretary to Dean of the College Edward Alvey Jr.

“He was a fine gentleman and always very professional,” Morgan said of Alvey, for whom she would work for six years. “I was very fortunate.”

But love wouldn’t wait for the war. In 1942, when James’ troop train stopped overnight in Springfield, Mass., Morgan was waiting. They tied the knot right then and there.

James returned home safely from the war, and their marriage would span 63 years, until he passed away in 2005. He had transferred from U.Va. to Duke, where he completed his bachelor’s degree, served in the Air Corps Reserves and retired as a lieutenant colonel. He had raised three sons – James Patterson Jr. and twins Jon and Gary – with Morgan, who left her Mary Washington job to be a stay-at-home-mom, and briefly taught high school in Warren County, Virginia.

It would be Gary’s children, Kelly and Michael Morgan ’05, who would follow their grandmother – and their late great-aunts – to Mary Washington.

On campus, Kelly studied chemistry and reveled in research, working to grow the dental office at Fredericksburg’s Moss Free Clinic. Amazingly, she lived in the same Virginia-Hall space her grandmother had shared with her long-ago roommate, Lucy. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Kelly established Morgan Orthodontics in Lansdowne, Virginia, where she mentors current Mary Washington students. She has a 5-year-old son.

Michael majored in computer science, studied abroad and served in the Peace Corps. Just as Mary Washington transformed from a teacher’s school to a college when Morgan was a junior, it became a university when Michael was in his own junior year. A graduate of The George Washington University Law School, he is an attorney in Calvert County, Maryland.

And there’s one other thing. At UMW, he met wife Erin Weimert Morgan ’04, with whom he would welcome a son just last month, as well as his grandmother’s namesake, Virginia, now 3.

She was there for the recent family visit to Morgan’s assisted-living apartment in Warren County, where the family pored through those Mary Washington memories. Among them was a letter hand-typed by Alvey soon after Morgan left campus – but only in body, never in spirit.

After several attempts to fill her position, he finally had found a promising fit. “I’m so glad,” Alvey wrote. “However, there will never be another Miss Dickinson!”

When UMW sophomore Yoel Kidane first arrived in the United States at the age of 14, he spoke only conversational English. Adjusting to the American culture and English language was his first hurdle.

Just three years later, he was applying to colleges, setting himself up to be the first of his siblings to attend a university in the U.S. When Kidane received his acceptance letter from UMW, it came with an invitation that made all the difference.

Diving into UMW’s Student Transition Program (STP), which begins with a five-week on-campus stint the summer before freshman year, gave the East Africa native the launching pad he needed to support his college experience. Now well into his second year at UMW, Kidane has found his niche as a political science major and member of the club soccer team.

“STP helped me discover the school,” said Kidane, who plans to major in political science and minor in yet another language – French. (He also speaks Italian, as well as his native tongue, Tigrinya.) “I was able to meet professors in different departments, ask questions and see what college classes were like.”

Through the yearlong program, designed to support first-generation and underrepresented students, Kidane joined a cohort of first-year students who lived in the residence halls, met with support staff, learned the layout of campus and even took introductory courses in their intended major. Going into his first official year of college later that summer, Kidane already had collected a peer group of friends and four credits toward his degree.

“STP helped Yoel adjust and understand what it takes to be successful as a student,” said Justin Wilkes, director of the transition program and Kidane’s advisor. “He came with a mindset to work hard but didn’t necessarily know what that looked like or how to apply it until he went through the program.”

Now nearly halfway through his UMW experience, Kidane is on a roll, both in the classroom and on the field.

Growing up in Eritrea in the Horn of Africa, when he wasn’t in school or at church, he spent much of his free time playing soccer. He pursued his passion for the sport as a student at Northern Virginia’s Herndon High School, where he played varsity, and now at UMW, where he’s building lasting relationships with his club teammates.

Most importantly, coming from a country that mandates education only through age 13, he feels like he’s done his job setting the stage for his younger siblings.

“I have to be a role model for my brothers and sister,” said Kidane, who knows that his experience could impact their own decisions about college. “I want to set an example for them.”

The dorsal fins were enough to draw in her classmates, but 6-year-old Marlee Howell found herself focused on something else. An eyeball.

“I want to touch it, but it’s so gross,” said Marlee, one of nine elementary school students to attend a recent lab hosted by UMW Associate Professor of Biology Deb O’Dell.

The tiny scientists – second- through third-grade accelerated learners from The Merit School at Stafford – came to the Jepson Science Center to dissect a shark. Talk turned to things like the tooth fairy, video games and slime at points during the lesson, but these smaller-than-usual university students learned some pretty big things.

“Experiences like these drive a lot of their career aspirations,” said Merit School teacher Amie Canter. “A lot of them already know what they want to be when they grow up.”

The future professionals, who might one day serve the Fredericksburg area as healthcare workers and scientists, donned miniature lab coats, goggles and blue latex gloves. With the help of three student aids from O’Dell’s Comparative Anatomy class, they sliced through the sandpapery skin of dogfish sharks, exploring the animal’s skeletal structures, nervous systems and more.

“It’s important for kids to know how fun and exciting science can be,” said senior biology major Brandon Fincham, who plans to go into teaching. “There’s something special about seeing kids’ eyes light up when they get excited about something like dissecting sharks.”

The group learned the difference between veins and arteries, located the sharks’ livers and colons, and discussed the functions of major internal organs.

“The heart looks amazing,” said 8-year-old Kaleb Carter.

Canter makes it her mission to get her students out of the classroom as often as possible. They’ve visited Mary Washington Healthcare, met with mayors and lawmakers, even trekked to the White House. The class’s partnership with UMW, including Associate Professor of Chemistry Leanna Giancarlo, Professor of Biological Sciences Joella Killian and Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Parrish Waters, is ongoing.

“We are truly grateful for the educational opportunities the professors at UMW have provided,” said Canter, who plans another Mary Washington visit in March.

Junior biology major Brittany Pennington, who worked with the children during last month’s lab, said a similar opportunity in elementary school might have helped push her toward a career in the lab.

“Something like this, especially at this age, is important to attract more students into the science fields,” O’Dell said, “to show them what’s new and cool … to show them some of the things they can do.”