Katie Bird is a junior mathematics, economics, and Applied Critical Thought and Inquiry (ACT-In) major, the families and friends chair of Zeta Tau Alpha, a Pryor Fellow and a golfer. Bird started golfing when she was 5 years-old. Collegiate golfing was not always part of her plan, but when Bird broke her arm her senior year of high school, she realized she was not ready to give it up.

Bird walked on to the William Jewell golf team freshman year. Since then, she has given up her weekends for golf tournaments, practiced from 3:30-6 p.m. daily, gone to weights at 6 am and stayed on top of her schoolwork and other commitments. Bird works at The Children’s Place KC, as a research and development intern, and helps with social media, coordinating volunteers and aiding with fundraising. While this all seems challenging, and it may be hard to balance it all, Bird says she enjoys staying productive.

“I’ve always been busy, even when I was young,” Bird said. “I’m used to balancing. Whenever I have free time I don’t know what to do with myself. So it’s just about time management and not procrastinating.”

Bird views golf as a three hour break, outside in nature away from everything else. She finds it relaxing and a source of mental strength.

“When you have one bad shot, you can’t let it affect everything else, and I think that carries over into life in a lot of ways,” said Bird. “If you mess up once or like if one thing goes badly you have to keep going and just kind of push it from the side and recover quickly.”

After Jewell, Bird wants to go into data analysis, or do research for the Federal Reserve. She doesn’t know her exact plan yet, but she hopes to work in math and data applied to finance or economics. While difficult, Bird says that golf helps her ability to manage her commitments.

Jack Gordon, junior biology major, plays football and hopes to become a surgeon. He says that football gives him an outlet and helps him to balance his life outside of studying. Gordon spends nearly all his time in the Pryor Learning Commons – between his major and pre-med minor he has plenty to study. He also is the philanthropy chair in Kappa Alpha Order, as well as a member of Tri-Beta, the biology honors society. Gordon said his sleep schedule does suffer from his commitments, with late nights studying and weights and conditioning at 5:30 am – but his ability to manage his time has improved over his college years, and he credits that to his goal driven mentality.

“If I weren’t set on becoming a surgeon, then I don’t think I would have the same motivation or drive to maintain as good of a GPA as possible for medical school,” Gordon said.

Gordon’s first dream was to play in the NFL, but by the time he started thinking about colleges he realized he wasn’t getting many Division 1 offers and his dreams shifted. Now he uses football as a way to provide for the cost of school and save money for his future in medical school. Gordon decided to go into medicine because he’s always had an interest in the human body, he likes to work with his hands and complete tasks and he wants to make a difference and dedicate his life to a cause that helps others.

“When I was younger my dad told me, when you get older make sure you’re doing something where you’re giving back to people – otherwise you won’t get anything out of your job, you won’t be as happy,” Gordon said.

Jameson Howard, junior business administration, nonprofit leadership and ACT-In major, as well as a golfer, also shares a passion for helping others and making a difference. Howard originally wanted to become a professional golfer, work on a golf course and teach golf, but since adding on the non-profit leadership major he realized that his true dream is to run a non profit.

Howard wants to serve others and make a difference. He always had a goal to make a difference and thought he could accomplish that by teaching golf. However, as he took more non-profit classes and worked with real organizations in Kansas City and Liberty, Howard realized how rewarding working in this sector could be.

“If you enter into the nonprofit sector, it’s really fulfilling. You actually feel like your serving, putting others before yourself every day,” Howard said. “Whatever it’s for – the environment, a community, people in need. Whichever organization that is, that’s something I would love to be a part of.”

Howard is a member of Phi Gamma Delta, the Pryor Leadership Program and has participated in DECA. His busiest time is during golf season but Howard credits his coach for allowing academics and extracurriculars to come first.

Sarah Lewis, junior political science, business administration and ACT-In major, is the vice president of Student Senate, one of the vice presidents of Zeta Tau Alpha, a member of the special events team for Campus Union Activities and member of a softball team. Lewis said when she was choosing colleges, it wasn’t just about the softball team. Lewis wanted a school that would prioritize academics, which is one of the reasons she chose William Jewell. Over the last couple of years, Lewis has grown a lot in time management, leadership, and trust through playing softball amidst her other commitments.

“You have to trust your teammates to not only have your back but to also help you out whenever you’re lacking,” Lewis said. “Learning how to work in a team dynamic is important. It gives you an idea of what it’ll be like to have a job in the future, working in a group – you all have to get along and have the best interests for everybody.”

Lewis hopes to work in marketing but isn’t tied down to one field. She currently has two internships, one at Corbin Mill helping with their renovation and another with KCK Adelante Thrift, working with their social media. One of the standouts from her Jewell experiences thus far is working on Student Senate. She says her experience has been amazing so far, giving her an outlook on the school that not everyone gets to have.

“[We] work with student life, have monthly meetings with the president and Dr. Dema, meeting with trustees and different people like that, just knowing the ins and outs of how the College works and makes decisions and being the liaison between students and student life and faculty, giving the students a voice. It’s been really cool,” Lewis said.

Lewis says that time management has been a challenge. Softball is mandatory, but so is school. She balances practices and weights, sorority meetings, senate meetings, event planning, her internships and her majors. However, she sees her experience as extremely worthwhile.

“Jewell just keeps getting better and better the more I keep getting involved,” Lewis said. “I would definitely do it the same if I had the chance to do it again.”

Dr. Maggie Sherer, department head of physics and mathematics spoke with The Hilltop Monitor in the Physics Lounge on the top floor of White Science – where you can usually find her helping a student with homework. If not, she’s most likely working on astronomy research or teaching math, physics, astrobiology and a plethora of other classes.

When asked about why she came to William Jewell College, Sherer spoke on her love for small colleges, as well as her love for the students and faculty here at Jewell.

“So,  I did my undergraduate work at a small college very similar to Jewell. It’s in Virginia, but it had about 900 students and it was very small and I majored in math and physics. And then I went on to do my graduate work at the University of North Carolina, and there I got a Ph.D. in physics but my specialty was astronomy. When I graduated I knew I wanted to teach at a  small school. I really loved the education I got, and so I wanted to come to a small school so that’s what I applied to. I applied all over the country to small liberal arts colleges that were looking for physics faculty. And Jewell was one of them, and when I got there I really loved the department when I came to interview, and I really loved the students,” said Sherer.

Sherer knew she loved math, but even she hated physics in high school. She also experienced those difficulties in deciding on a career path with which college students are familiar.

“I always loved math. I started college as a math major, and my first year of college I was just a math major and I enjoyed it and for my math – well actually back up. My senior year of high school I had to take physics, and I hated my physics teacher. He was just a  terrible human being, so I thought I hated physics, but for the math major I had to take physics. So my sophomore year, I took my first physics class and I loved it. It was team taught by both physics teachers there, and it was really lab oriented and we learned by doing, and I just really loved physics with them. So somewhere after the second exam, one of the them came up to me and asked me ‘what is your major’ and I was like ‘well it’s math’ and he was like ‘well you should also be a physics major’ and I said ‘okay!’ So I decided to be a physics major, and I really loved it. I loved that it was applying math to things, but even then I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. It wasn’t until after my junior year that I decided I wanted to go to graduate school because I had really liked astronomy. I liked how that took all the areas of physics and applies it to stars, so that it takes thermodynamics and mechanics and everything and applied it to one system. Because I was so late in the game, I took a year off between undergraduate and grad school, but decided that [astronomy] is what I really wanted to do,”said Sherer.

Sherer blames her mother for her passion for mathematics.

“So my mom and I are identical human beings. My mom was also a math major in college and my mom was a math and science teacher. And so my mom and I would just always geek out – like when I would have math competitions we’d, you know, just be at home doing math for fun. The rest of my family thinks we’re nuts. They’re supportive, they just think we’re crazy. So yeah, my mom was always really supportive of that. My dad is more of a history type of person, so he thinks its nice that we know all this he just isn’t really helpful with it,” Sherer said.

From astronomy, to physics, to math, Sherer has an impressive array of interests. However, her favorite passion of all is teaching.

“I mean, yes, I love physics but more fundamentally I love teaching, which I guess is why I like teaching CTIs, in the core so much. And I do teach a lot in the core, I teach way more in the core than I teach physics classes. Right now I’m teaching a CTI math class but I also teach astrobiology and astronomy in the core, and I started teaching some of the data science classes. I taught the intro to data science class last semester. Fundamentally, I just think it’s fun to teach people new things,” said Sherer.

If you want to take a class from a professor who loves to teach more than anything, take a CTI with Sherer, or take a page from her book and choose to study physics.

By Elise Villarreal

What color am I to you?

Because when I think of you,

It’s definitely blue.

The stillness of your voice,

Is the obvious choice,

That you are my calm

My deliverance from the gone.

And when I think of him,

When our chances are slim

The color that comes to mind  is

Green

But not because it’s serene

This color definitely does not

Soothe my storm

If anything it only makes me

Feel more forlorn.

And when I think of that man

Who claims to be my “biggest

Fan”,

Only one color enters my head

And, that color, has to be red.

All he does is plead and moan

He cries and pouts that he

Can’t call me his own

I want to be pretty and I want to

Be clean

But I just get all mixed up

In this messy color scheme

Everything is racing right

Towards my heart

But this time, I won’t let myself

Fall apart.

I’ll pick up my medias, and

Design my own hue

Because honestly

I just can’t deal, with all of you.  

Elise Villarreal, junior English and theater major, spoke to the Hilltop Monitor about how, on the surface level, she wrote this poem about three colors. However, Looking deeper each color represents a person in her life at a point in time and her relationship with each person. She had difficulty explaining the depths of what the poem means to her, because writing poetry is how she explores emotion and thoughts that she cannot always express verbally.

“I can never find the words when I’m speaking – I can only write well,” Villarreal said. “I can appreciate precision of language on a page, especially for me, because I’m not very confident when it comes to conversation.”

Villarreal said writing helps her to think through her feelings. To her it makes sense for poetry to have this effect. She said that this is the job of a writer, to articulate ideas that can be cathartic but also relatable to an audience.

Villarreal realized she enjoyed writing in first grade, when a teacher provided her with a blank hard cover book and told her to fill it up. Inside, she wrote an entire story and drew pictures to go with it. In her self described “emo years” of middle school, she began writing poetry that she said was dark and horrible. She began to journal in sixth grade, writing poems whenever she thought of them, although she said she is a terrible journaler. She keeps many journals but nearly all are unfilled.

Taking Dr. Williams’ class was a turning point for Villarreal’s poetry. She said Dr. Williams is a “real life poet’’ and taught her how to be more intentional with her language – that every word needs to mean something.

“When I was writing before, it was just kind of my thoughts,” Villarreal said. “I was trying to come across as poetic, but [I] really wasn’t fulfilling that job because a poem itself, at least the way I see it, because a poem is an extreme feeling contained in a few words.”

Poetry can be fun, just playing with words according to Villarreal, but also frustrating trying to find the right words. Her next challenge is improving her performance in poetry readings, Villarreal said. Dr. Williams has asked her to read poetry at different events, and Villarreal continues to oblige despite the fact that she does not enjoy it so far. She said her voice shakes, and she cannot control it, but she believes that with persistence she will improve.

“I’m not scared of it, it’s just my performance ability hasn’t reached its full potential yet,” Villarreal said. “The fact that I don’t like it just comes from the fact that I’m not good yet, but I could be.”

Villarreal said that someone who wants to become a better writer should just write more. She said that when she got into writing poetry she just wrote constantly, and eventually she began to see it as solving a puzzle, putting words to a page, finding the right words to describe what she’s thinking.

“It starts to become fun and intriguing after you start to realize how much of it is in your control, over what works, what doesn’t, putting words together, taking them apart, making them rhyme, making them not rhyme, making an image that is interesting,” Villarreal said. “It’s just realizing the power that your voice has over all the words in language.”

While Villareal does not want to pursue poetry as a career, she said she will always value her skill in poetry. Understanding how to become intentional with word choice has made her a better writer in general, even with a text or a tweet. She said now she knows what words will make a message come across clearly, or which will pack the most punch.

“It’s all about being intentional with your words, and so being able to use that in all aspects of writing is really an important skill,” Villarreal said.

Photo courtesy of Elise Villarreal

Before 2011, Burnett was a paraprofessional and Talley was a teacher at the same elementary school. Burnett and Talley had just become moms for the first time. Amidst the friendship that developed between them over a shared bond of the exhaustion from parenthood, a dream became to form.

In 2011, Burnett and Talley created an Etsy shop – selling jewelry and accessories. When the sales began to come in, they began to consistently reach their revenue goals and decided to leave their previous jobs to become full-time business owners. Now, the two own Wild Juniper in addition to running an Etsy shop and an online blog through Shopify.

Burnett said she loves owning a business with her friend – it creates vulnerability and, in that, an opportunity to grow in friendship and as business partners. She also is excited to build relationships within Liberty and in an online community. However, owning a business is no easy feat, according to Burnett.

“Being an entrepreneur is being humble enough every single day to face something new that you have no clue how to do but being brave and consistent enough to work at figuring it out and becoming an expert at it,” Burnett said.

Darcy Sweet, junior psychological science major, has worked at Wild Juniper on the square since 2017. She loves working with Burnett and Talley and hearing about them was one of the reasons she began working there. Sweet said the store sells a lot of earrings and necklaces and recently began carrying boutique style clothing. The store has a line of headbands and hair clips for babies. In addition to loving their employment, Sweet also says she enjoys the products.

“They have a lot of cute studs, and they just have unique jewelry, and it’s on the more affordable side which is really good,” Sweet said. “Erin and Rachael are very dedicated and hardworking, and they are just awesome people.”

Burnett said she and Talley are very excited about the direction in which the store is headed, with their placement on the Square. Sweet also said the Etsy store is still doing well, and she is happy with their success.

“We have no shortage of dreams and ideas for this business,” Burnett said. “Our number one goal is to make a lasting impact and be a true voice in the communities we are in and the audience we have built.”

Photos by Harper Vincent.