Outstanding E. Iowa college graduates get their due in The Gazette

I hope you took a look at The Gazette's Sunday, May 9, page 3A for our annual installment of outstanding Eastern Iowa college graduates. If you live outside our delilvery area you can check out www.mygreengazette.com/ Know going in that it is a paid subscription site, but an inexpensive one for a month's worth of the paper in digital forum.

Or, here's a free version from GazetteOnline, a non-paid site our company offers.

Back to the matter at hand:

The Gazette has run features on outstanding college graduates for more than a dozen years. This year we will feature graduates from the University of Iowa, Mount Mercy College, Coe College and Cornell College. A report on an outstanding graduate from Kirkwood Community College is to run at the end of the week, coinciding with Kirkwood's spring graduation.

We ask each institution to send us the name of one graduating student who has done distinguished work. We're not looking, necessarily, for the class valedictorian or student body president. We're looking for people who have done something that stands out and truly can be called outstanding.

That is why, in past years, we've feature people like Sonia Gunderson. She earned a master's degree in journalism at the UI last year, to go along with her bachelor's degree in music and master's in adult education. She did not let being 62 at the time of graduation stop her.

I'm mentioning Gunderson in my Sunday Gazette column. I'll also write about Jason Zabokrtsky, a Troy Mills native and 1996 Luther College graduate, who found out he wanted to be more than a lawyer after moving through law school at the UI. The Gazette learned that in a story done by former reporter Nicole Riehl four years ago.

A check on the Internet show Zabokrtsky, who has practiced law in northern Minnesota part time, spending the rest of his time guiding dog-sledding trips.

An interview I enjoyed as a reporter writing these features was with a UI student named Rima Vesely. A Class of 1997 graduate, she struggled her freshman year, earning a 1.9 grade-point average -- barley a "C" in a system in which 4.0 is an "A". But something clicked after she went to Venezuela in the UI's study abroad program. She became more deeply interested in spiritual matters, social justice and public service and rallied to a 3.0 grade-point average by the time she graduated.

She's

Rima Vesely-Flad now and has traveled more extensively since graduating. An Internet check shows she's also earned two master's degrees, is working on a doctorate, is on the faculty at

Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., and is director of

Interfaith Coalition of Advocates for Reentry and Employment in New York City. I shot her an e-mail Friday afternoon to see how she's doing but didn't hear back. Too busy, which I expected.