Current students learn a lot when alumni share about the paths they took from their degrees to their careers, Vanderbilt Career Center Director Cindy Funk believes. Consequently she’s redesigned the Career Center to better leverage the network between alumni and current students. The center has created the Vanderbilt Intern and Professional (VIP) Network, which Funk [...]

As alumni, trustees, philanthropists and visionaries, Orrin Ingram and Rodes Hart reflect on the opportunities—and challenges—of eliminating need-based loans and increasing scholarship endowment.

Basketball’s global growth and marketing opportunities thrive under alumna Heidi Ueberroth’s leadership.

Passion has launched thousands of books, paintings, movies and songs. But a number of College of Arts and Science alumni are proof that passion ignites successful careers as well.

“Passion brings laser focus to things,” says Cindy Funk, director of Vanderbilt’s Career Center. “When you’re at a university like Vanderbilt with a strong College of Arts and Science, it provides the opportunity to explore things you’re passionate about. Those things can very well lead nicely to a career, though most people don’t think of it that way.”

Leor Halevi exercises his imagination and love of history in the study of Islam.

Dean Carolyn Dever says that when she talks to alumni of the College of Arts and Science, she’s always inspired by how many have found success by being open to opportunities and the unexpected.

The new dean has done that herself.

Molly Miller makes Earth science come alive, even in the coldest spot on the planet.

Some thought Jessica Miles was making a mistake. Why would the Louisville, Ky., student who excelled in the sciences attend the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt rather than a science or technology institute? But it made perfect sense to Miles and to Vanderbilt: Learning how to communicate scientific ideas meant she needed to study both science and the humanities.

Ken Catania is a funny guy. The associate professor of biological sciences is also soft-spoken, modest, articulate, creative and quick to laugh. In life, teaching and research, he always looks for the opportunity to do the fun thing—appropriate, since he’s a world-class practical joker.

The Robert Penn Warren Center reveals its namesake’s long-forgotten conversations with historic civil rights greats. A photograph taken of Robert Penn Warren in the early 1960s shows not the young Kentucky boy whose life changed at Vanderbilt, but a mature Warren—wiser, with life’s experiences written on his face. This is the Warren who sought out men and women in the Civil Rights Movement, interviewing them, sometimes under the cover of darkness for their protection. The Warren who preserved those interviews so they could be heard, in their own voices, once again, thanks to an inter-institutional initiative spearheaded by the center that bears his name, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities in the College of Arts and Science.

Now revered as America’s first poet laureate and the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and poetry, Warren, BA’25, enrolled at Vanderbilt as an engineering student. In the English class he took to meet basic education requirements, Warren found where his passion lay: writing. He joined a group of fellow poets and intellectuals known as the Fugitives.