Nominations for Alumni of the Year awards are sought from all members of the Alumni Association. The Alumni of the Year awards are presented at Reunion. All graduates of the College are members of the Alumni Association.
Benin, Uganda, South Africa, Zambia. To some, the list reads like the contents of the New York Times’s Sunday Travel section. For Michelle Macek, it’s a list of places she has called “home” over the past 14 years. She was teaching French on a Fulbright Scholarship in Cotonou, Benin, when she met her husband, Paul Macek, a staffer with Catholic Relief Services. After their marriage, they decided to stay in Africa to serve others. Over the years, she has been a dedicated volunteer and humanitarian. One of a group of four women who founded a private school for orphans in Kampala, she did fund-raising for the school and served as its academic director until a Ugandan staff could be found. Banunule Nursery and Primary Orphan School is still in operation today. Most recently she has facilitated therapeutic dance classes for caretakers at the Kalingalinga Catholic Hospice in Lusaka, helping them to “dance away the stress and get a little joy in their difficult lives.” Her new passion in life is Biodanza, a healing therapeutic form of expressive dance that allows people to feel life at its fullest. She completed a three-year training program in South Africa, and hopes to travel soon to dance with a group Senegal and to Haiti to dance with children there. “I feel that my time on this planet has been blessed with many opportunities for me to give back what I have so richly received in my own life,” she says.
A passionate supporter of the Accelerated Degree Program at Albertus, Jared James considers his Albertus degree “something no one can ever take away from me.” The first in his family to graduate from high school, he found the accelerated program with its night classes was the ideal way for him to complete his college studies while establishing his career in real estate. In his first year as a realtor, he won a “Rookie of the Year” award; within two years he had built one of largest and fastest-growing real estate teams in New England. In 2009, the international REALTOR Magazine named him the #1 realtor under age 30 in the United States. His first book--“Enjoy Success Today: How to Start and Build a Thriving Business…and Still Have a Life”--became a best seller within one month of publication. At the age of 28, he was inducted into the International Hall of Fame of Remax, the world’s largest real estate company. The founder and CEO of Jared James Enterprises, he writes for Personal Development Magazine, and is a speaker and coach. This entrepreneur gives more than 10 per cent of his gross income, and much of his time, to non-profit organizations. He believes that “anything that you have been blessed with was never intended for only yourself. The true purpose of any blessing or gift that you have was always that you would share it with others so that they could benefit from it as well.”