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Carol Lally '90 graduated with a degree in English.  She is now an intellectual property lawyer.

Neal Baer '78 earned his degree in political science.  He is the executive producer and writer for the hit show "ER."

Colorado U.S. Senator Ken Salazar graduated from CC in 1977. Elected to the senate in 2004, he had been the state's attorney general.

Holly Ornstein Carter '85 received her degree in political science and is now a writer and documentary filmmaker.

Karen Andersen Medville, a research scientist at Arizona State University, graduated in 1985.

Marcia McNutt, president and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, earned her degree in physics in 1974.

Jay Engeln graduated in 1974 with a degree in biology.  He is the 2000 National High School Principal of the Year.

Basketball star Verdel Baskin, an English major from the Class of 1999, is now an El Pomar Fellow.

Laura Hershey, a disability rights activist, graduated in 1983 with a degree in history.

Jazz singer Lorna Kollmeyer, a liberal arts major from the Class of 1980, owns an ornamental plasterwork company.  

Richard Koo, 1982 alumnus with a degree in math, is the co-founder of Vitria.com.

Mountain climber Jake Norton, Class of 1996, was a history-philosophy major.  

Paul Markovich graduated in 1988 with an international political economy major and is the co-founder of MyWayHealth.

J. Ralph Armijo, a business administration major, graduated in 1974 and founded Navidec, Inc. and DriveOff.com. 

Theatre artist Liz Stanton earned her degree in business and economics in 1988.

Karen Andersen Medville
Class of 1985
Biology Major
Assistant Research Scientist, Arizona State University West
Phoenix, Arizona

Thinking CC’s Olin Hall of Science was a museum, Karen Medville took her young daughter in to look around. Much to her surprise, not only was she on a college campus, but the secretary encouraged her to apply for admission. Last year, nearly 16 years later, Karen’s daughter, Shawnette, graduated from CC as well.  

A “product of the Indian Relocation Act of the late 1950s,” Karen was adopted by a Yaqui Apache mother and a Danish father when she was just four days old. A Cherokee herself, Karen grew up in a mining community in Southern Colorado and dropped out of high school after the death of her first child from SIDS. She knew she had very few choices. “I could work in a bar, I could live on welfare, or I could go back to school.” The birth of her second child, Shawnette, inspired her to return to the classroom. She registered at a local community college and enrolled in their RN program. She was soon offered a scholarship, with one condition -- she had to change her major to biology. She was just finishing her two-year degree in that subject when she took that fateful stroll into Olin Hall. 

Today, after graduate work at Colorado State University and Cornell, Karen is a research scientist at Arizona State University’s West campus in Phoenix. Her department bio will tell you her research interests are environmentally induced diseases, environmental justice issues focusing on Native American communities and reservations, assessing and communicating risk from chemical exposures, as well as environmental toxicology focusing on heavy metals, lead poisoning, and pesticides. But Karen will tell you her main interest is people. “I became interested in toxicology because my dad was a coal miner for 43 years,” she explains. “It’s an applied subject that meant something to me.”  

And while her heart is in helping Native American communities through research, she also believes in the power of teaching. When her department chairman, formerly from Cornell, took a position at ASU West and asked her to come along, she saw the opportunity for both. “I saw the value of being able to work with a lot of the different tribes in the state, going into the communities and onto the reservations and working with people to make their lives better,” she says. Her first year there, she received a $250,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency for environmental assessment, a program so successful, the university funded Karen’s position as director of the American Indian Environmental Health Science Community Outreach Program to “empower the people to do research and assessment for themselves.”  

Recently elected alumni trustee for Colorado College, Karen says she would not have succeeded without “lots of financial aid and lots of encouragement,” and she shares similar encouragement with her own students today. “I’m dealing with students who have never been told they can succeed, who have been discouraged at whatever they’ve tried,” she says. “But it’s all relative to how you grew up and where you came from, and it doesn’t mean you can’t succeed.” She’s proud to see them go on to graduate study at some of the best research schools in the country -- but she’s most proud of Shawnette, “who grew up in the classroom with me,” Karen says. And after graduating from Colorado College in just three years, Shawnette too plans to go into some area of public health. 

“I remember Shawnette sleeping in the lab,” Karen recalls, “or under the secretary’s desk” -- the same secretary who encouraged her to enroll so many years ago. “You just never know how you’re going to impact somebody’s life.”

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