On October 26, 2024, we’ll welcome ten new young alumni into the league of 10 Under 10 Award recipients. We’ll spend a few hours honoring them, highlighting their accomplishments, and celebrating with friends, family and members of the Hope community. And you’re invited! There will be lots of food, lots of hugs and lots of smiles. It always goes by in a flash, and I can barely process all the feel-good moments that are packed into one event. That’s how it ends. But how does it begin?
We collect nominations. And I’ll be honest, that’s probably one of the easiest parts of my job. Nominations come from faculty members who have been following the career trajectories of their former students. They come from fellow young alumni who are eager to lift up their classmates and friends. We get nominations from family members who are so proud of their sons and daughters and cousins and siblings for what they have accomplished so far in their professional journeys. Other nominations come to us from supervisors who didn’t attend Hope, but they know their employees are deserving of kudos for the work they have done and the impact they have made. We’ve even had students who have been mentored or inspired by our young alumni submit their names for consideration. We hear from staff members who stumbled upon an article or story that highlights the good work an alumnus is doing. Simply put, nominations come from everywhere, and each one of them is filled with inspiration.
As you can imagine, the process gets much harder as we work with committees of staff, faculty, students and Alumni Board members to narrow down the 100+ nominations to a cohort of 10 young alumni. This top 10 ultimately represent thousands of Hope graduates who are serving as agents of Hope by living faithfully into their callings. While the committee members are tasked with reading hundreds of pages of profiles, and then spending a solid chunk of time considering the final recipients, I am often thanked by these folks for including them in the process. Why? While it’s sometimes grueling to make such decisions, it’s also incredibly rewarding to spend time learning about the hard-working, wise, talented and innovative people who have launched from Hope so beautifully.
So, now that you know how we got here, I’m absolutely delighted to introduce you to the 2024 recipients of the Hope College 10 Under 10 Awards:
Gabrielle Barber ’19 | Assistant Appellate Defender, State Appellate Defender Office
Elisabeth Brewington ’14 | Executive Administrator, Prime Care Health
Kaleigh Doan ’16 | Instructional Designer, AuditBoard
Kyle Funk ’18 | Senior Program Specialist for Infrastructure and Transportation Solutions, National League of Cities
Julian Lugo ’20 | Director of Youth Programs and Advancement, Latin Americans United for Progress
Raquel Mendizabal Martell ’15 | Market Research Project Manager, Applied Marketing Science
Marvin Solberg ’15 | Assistant Professor, Wayne State College of Nursing
Grace Theisen ’14 | Musician, Nonprofit Co-Founder
Holly N. Thompson ’15 | Assistant Attorney, Office of the Prosecuting Attorney
Meghanne Tighe ’15 | Research Chemist, Naval Research Laboratory