Read about how our faculty, staff, and students are shaping the world and amplifying the good through their personal experiences.
Mia Mahar,
Digital Media & Communication and Psychology
When Mia Mahar is working at her summer job, tending plants in a greenhouse, she feels the same kind of absorption she experiences while painting or designing a digital graphic.
“It puts you in a state of flow,” she says. “Psychologically, it’s kind of like a meditative state. It’s not mindlessly doing things, but it’s a state of mind where you’re more relaxed.”
Ashley Schroeder, ’23
Criminal Justice 4+1 Administration
Halfway through Ashley Schroeder’s first season on the women’s basketball team at Hilbert College, her coaches named her point guard. It’s a position that involves directing plays for the rest of the team. For a first-year student, that could be more than a bit intimidating.
“Sometimes, in the heat of the game, I had to yell at a senior to get into the right position,” Schroeder says. “Afterwards, I was mortified. But I was praised for it by my coach. She said, ‘We love to see that you can take charge like that.’”
Read More About Ashley Schroeder
Spencer Sticek, ’17
Sports Industry Management Program
“Although it may sound cliche to describe Hilbert’s student population and campus as a close-knit community, that is precisely how it felt to me when I was there. Fellow Hawks look after each other.
A former Hilbert classmate of mine shared on his Instagram story that he had gotten a new job and was willing to help a potential candidate with his old job. To cut a long story short, I put him in touch with my elder brother (Hawk alum ’15), and my friend’s recommendation helped him land a pretty nice job.
Personally, Hilbert brought me friends for life, an education that I am proud of, and a multitude of professional networks. I met one of my best friends during my freshman year despite him only spending 1 year at Hilbert. Nine years later – I’m attending his wedding, his brother’s wedding, and we enjoy Buffalo Bills games together as season ticket holders! Hilbert is a special place, and I would love to be able to re-live my college years all over again!”
Adyn Migliore,
Forensic Science: Laboratory Sciences Program
It was the first session of Public Speaking, and Adyn Migliore arrived a few minutes late. Students had begun introducing themselves to the class by picking slips of paper from a table and making impromptu speeches about the topics on them.
Migliore quickly drew a paper slip and then drew a deep breath. It read, “Don’t change yourself to fit somebody else’s standards.” Migliore knew what they had to do: come out to their classmates as transgender.
Dr. Jessica Hoffman,
Assistant Professor of Sociology
When Jessica Hoffman travels overseas, her favorite activity isn’t to visit castles or museums—it’s to sit quietly and observe locals going about their daily lives. “I like going to foreign countries just to watch people,” she says. “I’m a people watcher.”
Her travel passion fits in with her academic passion: sociology. As an assistant professor of sociology in the Bachelor of Science (BS) in Liberal Studies program at Hilbert College, Hoffman is fascinated by cultural diversity and the ways in which social systems affect individuals.
Read More About Dr. Jessica Hoffman
Dr. Andrew Hill,
Assistant Professor of Biology
As a PhD student in neuroscience, Andrew Hill was fascinated by crickets. He recorded and analyzed nerve impulses in the cercal system, a specialized sense that warns of nearby predators like wasps.
His goal was to better understand the human nervous system. He learned that at synapses, where one neuron connects to another, impulses go back and forth, rather than in just one direction. The discovery could help to refine models of sensory processing.
Read More About Dr. Andrew Hill
Don Vincent,
Chair of Digital Media & Communications
When Donald Vincent was a boy in Albany, New York, two of his favorite things were music and radio. He would listen to the American Top 40 countdown, and then, with a boombox tape recorder, put together his own version.
It was his first step in a career that would take him into radio and beyond, from the analog broadcast age into the digital era.
Read More About Dr. Don Vincent
Jenelle Lukasik,
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Jenelle Lukasik remembers how she got a police officer interested in mathematics. He was taking a statistics course, and she was talking about a Z-score: a measure of how far a data point is from the average. A high Z-score, she explained, indicates that something unusual might be happening. After the class, the officer told her that he had been assigned to go through crime reports and highlight high Z-scores, without knowing what they meant. Now, he realized that they pointed to high-crime areas.
Read More About Jenelle Lukasik
Dr. Steven MacMartin,
Program Director of Cybersecurity
Since the early days of the internet, Dr. Steven MacMartin has been fighting computer crime. Over a 31-year career with U.S. Customs and the Department of Homeland Security, he examined over 1,000 computers and drives and was an expert witness at hundreds of trials.
“In 1985, when I was starting to do computer crime investigations, you might see one computer a year,” MacMartin recalled. “It was in the early 2000s that we started to see computer seizures become fairly routine.”
Today, MacMartin fights cybercrime in a different way. He shapes the next generation of cybersecurity professionals as program director for the Bachelor of Science in Cybersecurity degree program at Hilbert College.
Read More About Dr. Steven MacMartin
Colleen Kumiega,
Chair of Behavioral Sciences
When Colleen Kumiega was a student in human services doing her first internship at a hometown food pantry, she learned a lesson that shaped the rest of her career.
Serving lunch to families of teens who were displaced or homeless, she was overcome by emotion. “You could see the tears run from my eyes into the potatoes,” she recalled.
A supervisor pulled Kumiega aside, and after she regained her composure, she told her, “Colleen, they don’t want sympathy from you. They want empathy.”
