Award-winning returning adult students overcome obstacles

Mary Albrecht

A future college administrator and a soon-to-be mechanical engineer have garnered this year’s Outstanding Returning Adult Student Awards, offered by the Dean of Students office, and the Adult and Student Services Center in the Division of Continuing Studies.

Marjorie Cook, a sociology and history major, and Dana Miller, a mechanical engineering student, have faced diversions and challenges on their paths of higher education.

Cook, who grew up in Peoria, Ill., was a teenage mother and had to endure the death of her prematurely born daughter. Shortly after, she was forced to quit high school so she could support her severely depressed mother. She joined the staff of a human service association and worked with people with disabilities. There she met her husband. A few years later, she lost a second newborn daughter. Eleven years ago, she gave birth to her son, Devon.

Life events have fueled Cook’s determination to complete a bachelor’s degree: Her parents’ dire financial situation and lack of education, and the birth of her son have been key motivators in her pursuit of higher education.

“When my mother was divorced, she could barely support her children on her income,” Cook explains. “I decided I never wanted to find myself in the same circumstance, so I returned to school at Madison Area Technical College when my son was 7.”

Cook always loved school, but turmoil in her family prevented her from doing well in high school. Now she is enthusiastic about studying. Next fall she will enter graduate school in educational administration and hopes to earn a doctoral degree. She wants someday to develop programs to increase access to higher education for at-risk students.

“My interest stems from my own background — teenaged mother, high-school dropout, impoverished family — and from the students that I met at MATC,” Cook says. “These people are trying to improve their lives and the lives of their children through education, and many are struggling.”

She speaks from experience. While at MATC, Cook ran for student senate and eventually became senate president of the 25,000 students who attend the three Madison MATC campuses. For the next two years, she worked 30-plus hours per week on projects such as securing a free bus pass and unlimited access to the school’s fitness center for all students.

She also initiated several diversity projects and a student art gallery. She proudly continues her involvement as an adviser to the student senate and as a member of the Academic Advising Steering Committee.

Cook has frequently made the dean’s list, won many academic awards and honors, and recently was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. “My greatest academic success, though, is my ability to improve my son’s life,” she says.

Dana Miller, a mechanical engineering student, also won the Outstanding Returning Adult Student Award. After commuting to Madison every week from Green Bay, and returning to his wife and two children on the weekends, Miller looks forward to working in the field of machine design.

“I’ve always enjoyed the technical world,” Miller says, “but I was a less-than-stellar student in high school, despite my mother’s constant reminding that I should get better grades.”

But it’s his mother’s constant encouragement that has kept him going. “She has always said, “You’re never too old to learn,’ and I’ve remembered that,” Miller notes. Neither of his parents completed college.

After high school, Miller, who grew up in Neopit on the Menominee Indian Reservation, joined the U.S. Navy and trained as an electronics technician. He served nine years and, by the end, was supervising 15 people who maintained more than 2,000 pieces of equipment. He also was a staff member at the Navy’s Electronics Technician School. Upon release, he enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserves.

“The Navy taught me discipline. It also gave me the core values of honor, courage and commitment that I still live by today. Without my time in the military, I may have never developed the discipline to accomplish what I have today,” he says.

Miller’s road to his bachelor’s degree has been a long one. While employed in Green Bay at a paper products company, he discovered that he preferred mechanical equipment to electronics. This change in interests spurred him to enroll in UW-Green Bay’s pre-engineering program as a part-time student.

“My son and daughter barely remember a day when I wasn’t a student,” Miller says. “They don’t like it that I’m not home with them most of the time.”

While at UW–Madison, Miller did more than study. He also became active in the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, eventually serving as co-president. In this role, he was involved in the Oneida Nation College Fair and has coordinated a science and engineering career event for Kimberly-Clark Corp., Menominee Indian High School and Oneida Nation High School.

Miller is also involved in increasing the percentage and the matriculation rate of American Indian and Alaskan Native students on campus. In April he helped plan the AISES Student Retreat Weekend, which provided team-building activities for next year’s prospective incoming freshmen, and opportunities to make connections with faculty and staff.

He received the Student Organization Office’s “Excellence in Student Organization Leadership” award last December and has received the Harvey Meyerhoff award for Undergraduate Excellence.

Finalists for the Returning Adult Student award included: Yarrow Babb, Richard Bathke, Diane Block, Melodneice Burt, Darcy Cochran, Judy Dunn, Ana Garrett, Dawn Gundermann, Marylou Hagen, Esther Knudson, Christine Lucey, Annette Macias-Hoag, Alex Redd, Mary White and Faye Zeman.