Career Success Stories

Erin Hotchkiss

I have been fortunate to be able to participate in a number of great internships and field experiences. I spent one summer doing aquatic research at Notre Dame, worked on wetlands research in southern Illinois, and spent a summer at a field station in Costa Rica working on a stream ecology project. I just finished a summer project on St. Croix working on sea turtles, and I am about to begin a job in environmental education. And then grad school!

Oxford really helped me to prepare for upper-level undergrad and graduate courses at Emory. I felt that the personal attention and concern given by all of my science profs at Oxford made all of the difference in the world. I really don't think that I would have taken the next step to apply for summer internships or organize campus environmental events without the encouragement and assistance of my professors. My experiences in and out of the classroom as a student leader helped me decide what I wanted to do with my life (aquatic research...now I just have to narrow it down from there for grad school!).               

Katie Foshee

Hi, my name is Katie Foshee and I graduated Class of '94 from Oxford. I went on to the big campus at Emory and finished my BSN from Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing in 1996. From there, I began working at my community hospital on the Medical-Surgical Floor that specializes in Oncology. I have been working there for the last 9 years...

Oxford College was exactly the college transition that worked for me. Coming from a small private high school, college was a bit overwhelming for me, but Oxford was a great fit for me. Both at the community level and also in the approachability of the professors, Oxford was indeed a great experience for me. Now, that I am old and have nieces and nephews considering college, I always recommend Oxford especially the Science Departments as being the best learning environment with plenty of extra support to enable students to succeed. I look back on my whole Oxford experience with plenty of great memories and much knowledge procured.

Sejal Choksi

Sejal holds a B.S. in Biological Anthropology from Emory University where she graduated suma cum laude in 1998. Sejal then went on to earn a J.D. with a specialization in Environmental Law from the University of California at Berkeley, School of Law where she gained significant experience in water quality and pesticide regulation through legal internships with a number of environmental organizations and agencies, including the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council. After graduating law school in 2002, Sejal joined San Francisco Baykeeper as a staff attorney and Equal Justice Works Fellow leading the Pesticide Project for two years. During this time she successfully spearheaded a legal and grassroots policy campaign to obtain the first regulations of polluted agricultural runoff in the nation. In 2004, Sejal was appointed the San Francisco Baykeeper. As the eyes and ears of the San Francisco Bay and estuary, Sejal stops polluters, files lawsuits, advocates for changes in the law, and monitors water quality in the Bay.

Most recently, Sejal was selected by the Senate President Pro Tem to serve on California's Oil Spill Prevention & Response Advisory Committee as a representative of environmental and Bay interests.

"Oxford was my ideal freshman and sophomore college experience for a top-notch education in a uniquely personalized and charming setting. It was enormously rewarding to have small class sizes and personal contact with professors, especially for the core introductory classes, which often contain hundreds of students on larger campuses. And from the very beginning there was always an intimate sense of unity and camaraderie among the students, especially since it was very easy to get involved in clubs and extra-curricular organizations. I'm glad I spent my first two years of college life at Oxford, and I found it surprisingly effortless to transition to the main Emory campus in the third year, armed with a strong educational foundation and hundreds of good friends from Oxford."

Nick Pyenson

After graduating from Oxford ('00), I completed a bachelors' degree in biology ('02), magna cum laude, at Emory University. The science coursework I took at Oxford provided the background needed at Emory to work in a microbiology lab at the Centers for Disease Control, take epidemiology courses at the Public Health school, study forest ecology in Lullwater Park, and conduct independent projects in paleoneurology and paleoanthropology.

Many of the directions in my career as a scientist can be traced back to science classes at Oxford. The lessons that I learned in Dr. Eloise Carter's field botany class, Dr. Steve Baker's freshwater stream ecology class, and Dr. Steve Henderson's various field geology courses were invaluable and continue to affect the way I think about science. Like many other students, I think that science at Oxford succeeds because the intimate campus setting creates a unique environment for learning among a community of scholars. Students, faculty and staff are all actively engaged in the pursuit of knowledge -- and the result is a place where it's fun to learn about how to do science.

Currently I am a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley. My dissertation research integrates data from different lines of evidence (molecular phylogenies, biogeography, extant ecological data, and the fossil record) to understand evolutionary changes in the ecological role of cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) in the oceans. A lot of my daily work involves laboratory and museum research (which I enjoy), and I use skills that I learned in Pierce Hall at Oxford everyday. Part of the fun of paleontology also involves expeditionary work to find fossils in the first place. I've been fortunate to conduct field research in Africa, New Zealand, Europe, and along the Pacific coast of the US, allowing me to interact with interesting people from all over the world. Oxford taught me that science happens both inside the class and outside as well -- and it all goes back to learning my trees on the Quad and wading through streams in Newton County. To the student considering science at Oxford, I entreat you to join the fun because you never know where it may lead.

Nina Welti

My time at Oxford opened a new world of opportunities for me. Because of the courses that I chose there, I had the experience to get exciting job opportunities during and after my time in college.

After I graduated from Oxford, I took a job with South East Waters AmeriCorps as an AmeriCorps volunteer while at the Atlanta campus. South East Waters was primarily focused on stream bank restoration of impacted streams. We had job sites throughout the metro Atlanta area as well as some in the far corners of the state. It was due to my experience from my freshwater ecology course that I was accepted to this job. Because we were an AmeriCorps organization, we worked closely with government agencies such as the DNR and USGS. For the last 5 months of my job, I was a hydrology technician with the USGS, maintaining their research sites throughout Atlanta's urban streams. It was here that I discovered it is possible to have a career based on playing in streams!

Once my AmeriCorps period was over, I worked for the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeepers. I was hired because of my knowledge of Atlanta's urban streams and their relationship to the Chattahoochee River. With UCR, I went out on Hotline calls - citizens would call and report concerns with the River or its tributaries. It was my job to assess the situations and decide if and how UCR would become involved in the situation. On one occasion, this led to a long term research project about the city of East Point's problem with their sewage runoff.

Upon graduating from Emory, I realized that the jobs I was pursuing all required more than a Bachelor's Degree, so I moved to Kuopio, Finland where I am now working on my Master's in Ecology and Environmental Science, with an emphasis on ground and surface waters and wetlands. Next year I will be moving to Vienna, Austria as an exchange student, where I will hopefully be working with benthic macroinvertebrates.

It is very easy for me to directly relate my career path to my time at Oxford. My freshwater ecology and environmental science courses opened my eyes to the possibilities that are in the environmental field. I also did an independent study about wetland restoration and policy, which pointed me into the right direction of combing policy and science for effective decision making. I put on my first pair of chest waders at Oxford, and I haven't learned how to take them off yet.

Daisy Ciener

I graduated from Oxford College in May 2003 and will graduate with a B.S. in Biology from Emory College in May 2005. My training at Oxford has really made a difference in my college experience and the opportunities that I have had in pursuing my goals. The small class size, personal attention, and devoted professors allowed me to not only obtain a wonderful education, particularly in the sciences, but to grow as an individual and a leader. I am currently participating in research in the Division of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at Emory University Medical School. I will present my findings in a Biology Honors Thesis entitled "S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) ameliorates ethanol-induced oxidative damage in the Murine developing brain." I have also been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to present my research at the annual Southern Society for Pediatric Research conference in New Orleans, Louisiana and have received a Trainee Travel Award to attend the meeting. Besides being involved in research, I participated in a Comparative Health Care study abroad course in London last summer. Through this experience I was able to learn about the British National Health System, compare it with the system in the United States and shadow doctors and midwives in an internship a women's hospital. After graduation, I plan on going to medical school. Oxford College was the perfect place to begin my education.