Seniors Maurice Shoemaker-Gilmore and Sean Garvey earn top 2016 IWU Football Honors. 
Garvey was elected for the third straight season as the defensive “Most Valuable Player”. Shoemaker-Gilmore was chosen as the offensive MVP for the 2016 Illinois Wesleyan Football team. Read the full story here.
Shoemaker-Gilmore was also named to the second team of the D3football.com 2016 all-North Region squad. Read the full story here.
Nana Ingram ’17 (left) uses an IR spectrophotometer to determine the identity of an organic molecule in Wendell and Loretta Hess Professor of Chemistry Ram Mohan’s “Organic Chemistry” Lab. The American Chemical Society’s Committee on Environmental Improvement announced this month that it is honoring Mohan for his efforts to incorporate green chemistry principles and sustainability into chemistry education. He’ll formally receive the award next year at the 253rd ACS National Meeting & Exposition, where he will give an invited talk on his work in green chemistry education.
(Photo by Makenna Merritt ’17)
Musical numbers in the Illinois Wesleyan Opera Theatre production of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (“The Marriage of Figaro”) featured the Illinois Wesleyan Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble similar in size and make-up to the orchestra for which Mozart composed. “Before this revolutionary work, orchestras often tagged along with singers. Here, text and music merge into an organic whole,” Nancy Steele Brokaw ’71 wrote in the production’s program notes. Performers included (from left): Kelsey Maka ’18 as Countess Almaviva, Celia Williams ’17 (Susanna), John McHugh ’17 (Figaro), and Sara Caligiuri ’18 (Marcellina).
(Photo by Crystal Muro ’19)
Approximately 70 people attended African Culture Night, where attendees dined together and were entertained by several groups. Nursing major Nubari Kanee ’17 of St. Louis performs a dance entitled “Skelewu,” a Nigerian dance made popular by the contemporary artist Davido. The annual event is sponsored by the African Students Association, a registered student organization that works to inspire campus-wide appreciation for the traditions, religions, customs, food, dance and music of various African countries.
(Photo by Phone Vilailuck ’18)
After a 2-1 win over Wheaton College, the women’s soccer team won the College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin tournament title, earning an automatic NCAA tournament bid. Playing at home in the first round of the NCAA championships, Illinois Wesleyan lost to Hanover College, ending the season with a record of 12-6-3. Four players were selected to the first team of the 2016 all-conference squads. Skyler Tomko ’17, Sarah Trach ’17, and Alison Seger ’17, along with defender Ellie Crabtree ’20, were named to the first team while Dave Barrett won his second-straight (fifth overall) CCIW “Coach of the Year” honor. Later in November Tomko was also elected to the third team of the Division III Women’s Soccer Academic All-America® Team, as selected by the College Sports Information Directors of America. It was the second straight year for the honor for Tomko, who has a 3.95 grade-point average as a nursing major. (Photo by Michael Hudson Photography)
Anthropology majors Anna Kerr-Carpenter, Lucy Bullock and Jordan Prats, all seniors, spent Thanksgiving break at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, where protests against the building of a 1,168-mile Dakota Access Pipeline have made national headlines in the past year. Tribe officials say the pipeline destroys sacred sites and threatens a river that’s a source of water for millions. The students delivered winter clothes, food and other donations at the two largest camps: Sacred Stones and Oceti Sakowin. On Thanksgiving, the three joined a sunset prayer circle at the base of a burial mound the Lakota call Turtle Island, where Kerr-Carpenter took this photo. “The camps, which have had continuously fluid and dynamic leadership since the movement started, are very well organized and fortified in constant, daily ceremony and prayer,” she said. “For now, we are all still processing our experience.”
(Photo by Anna Kerr-Carpenter ’17)
Adam Menendez ’17 (left) provides Hart Career Center Director Warren Kistner ’83 with a recap following the financial services major’s on-campus interview for a full-time position. In 2015-16, the most recent statistics available from the Career Center, 21 employers interviewed 283 students on campus. (Photo by Kim Hill)
Dromio of Ephesus (played by Kenny Tran ’17) figures out why he and his master, Antipholus, have been mistaken for another Antipholus-Dromio duo by gazing into the crystal of the Seeress (Megan Sperger ’18) in the second act of The Boys from Syracuse. The School of Theatre Arts presented the Rodgers and Hart musical farce to enthusiastic patrons.
(Photo by Marc Featherly)