When Nick Kyle was in fourth grade, one of his teachers wrote on his report card that "he draws and daydreams too much." "Some of my earliest memories are of making things," he said. "My mom was always missing her clothespins - I'd glue them into little airplanes and paint them.
After nine years at Missouri Southern, Dr. John Lewis, associate professor of international marketing, has put the classroom behind him. According to Lewis, seeing the progress in his students has been the most rewarding part of the job. "[I liked] to see students gaining a new perspective on life and to understand possibilities that were out there for them and the hard work there was ahead to achieve it," he said.
In seventh grade, Ashley Bullard's class did reports on foreign countries. She eagerly chose Ireland, knowing that her grandmother had been an Irish immigrant. "I still have the three-way poster that I made," Bullard recalls. "And now I'm going there." Beginning June 3, the junior biology major will spend 10 weeks conducting research at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
When Dr. Betsy Griffin came to Missouri Southern as an assistant professor of psychology in 1978, she didn't plan to stay long. "I thought, 'I should stay here three years so I look stable,'" she said. "So my three years stretched to 30. You know, you don't want to look like you're job hopping.
